American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

the Soviets “did not have pre-conceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist, to support the Chinese communists, or to wage war in Korea.” Stalin had no “master plan” for Germany, and wished to avoid military conflict with the United States. At the end of World War II, Stalin reduced his army from 11,356,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947—suggesting that even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had neither the capability nor the intention to launch a war of aggression. George F. Kennan later wrote that he “never believed that they [the Soviets] have seen it in their interest to overrun Western Europe militarily, or that they would have launched an attack on that region generally even if the so-called nuclear deterrent had not existed.”