What happens when a poor country, ravaged by war and brutalized by a totalitarian dictator, but dead-set on international greatness, tries to become a nuclear superpower? This episode – the first of three covering the Soviet nuclear program – explores how Josef Stalin, desperate to match American nuclear might after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, set his country on a path from which it would never turn back. Usha looks at the shadowy network of spies bringing atomic secrets into the Soviet Union, the rise and fall of the terrifying Stalinist henchman Lavrenty Beria, and the mysterious “atomic cities” where battle-hardened prison … Continue reading Building Stalin’s Nukes