One of the most important aspects of the Cold War was the nuclear arms race and both US and Russia and sometimes Britain used their secret intelligence agencies to obtain confidential information to gain an advantage over the other country.
Soviet Union’s most important intelligence coup, detailed information concerning the building of the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project), occurred due to well-placed KGB agents such as Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. The American traitor who revealed the American atomic bomb secret has never been caught. Getting this secret was KGB's greatest coup. Even though Russian might have eventually developed the technology on it's own. The social impact of the KGB getting this secret is important because "It ended all possibility of a free international exchange of atomic knowledge. It destroyed American innocence when it became apparent that American citizens could be ideological spies, and it ushered in the McCarthy era."
Declassified Russian and American documents indicate that the Soviet Union had placed at least five agents in the U.S. nuclear weapons program and possibly as many as 300 agents in the U.S. government by 1945.
KGB vs . OTher intelligence agenciesUnlike the CIA, the KGB conducted most of its activities domestically, on Soviet soil and against Soviet citizens. Also, the KGB's operational domain encompassed functions and powers like those exercised by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the counter-intelligence (internal security) division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency, the United States Federal Protective Service, and the Secret Service. This shows how the KGB held as much power as some of United States’ most powerful agencies combined. Decades of experience, along with a greater preparedness to employ devious tactics, also gave the Soviet Union a distinct ‘head start’ when it came to espionage. The Soviets began mobilizing agents and recruiting informers in Western countries as early as the 1930s.
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Hoover's speech in front of House Un-American Activities Committee about communism. The speech was important because after it, the fear of communism and the Soviet system propelled
U.S. policy for decades and thus had lasting repercussions.
Notably it led to U.S. intervention in Korea
(1950–1953) and Vietnam (1964–1975). The Truman
Doctrine, which initiated U.S. support of democracies all
over the world, was integral to this policy. The U.S.-Soviet
rivalry was enhanced by competition in space exploration,
which became intense when the Soviet Union
launched the first satellite. Both nations also competed
militarily by stockpiling nuclear weapons.
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"No, nothing acted on me as a catalyst. It was what I saw happening in North Korea. The relentless bombing of small Korean villages by enormous, em, American flying fortresses. People, women and children, and old people, because the young men were in the army. I saw this from my eyes, and we might have been victims ourselves. It made me feel ashamed. Made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technical superior countries fighting against what seemed to me quite defenseless people... Well, the bombing took place continually, and they happened all the time. I had seen the devastation in Germany after the war, but it was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could assure you, compared with the devastation in North Korea. That act, that feeling of shame, together with all the other things, which I have already spoken about, and the other stages of my development made me decide -- made me feel that I was fighting on the wrong side, because I wasn't a neutral person. I was engaged in intelligence work against the Communist world, against the Socialist world. I was engaged I was committed, and I felt I was committed on the wrong side. And that's what made me decide to -- to change sides. I felt that it would be better for humanity if the Communist system prevailed, that it would put an end to war, to wars. I didn't go too much into the rights and wrongs of the beginning of the Korean War. " - Interviewer of George Blake, an ex-spy for Soviet Union who was originally part of the British intelligence. The interview was helpful to research because it gave a perspective in why some men from countries like Britain and United States became KGB agents.