One of Strauss's first actions on the AEC was to urge his fellow commissioners to set up the capability to monitor foreign atomic activity via atmospheric testing. In particular, he saw that WB-29 Superfortress aircraft equipped with radiological tests could run regular "sniffer" flights to monitor the upper atmosphere to detect any atomic tests by the Soviet Union. Other people in government and science, including physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, argued that the radiological approach would not work, but Strauss and the newly formed United States Air Force continued on regardless. Several days after the first atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union in August 1949, a WB-29 flight did in fact find evidence of the test. While Strauss was not the only person who had been urging long-range detection capabilities, it was largely due to his efforts that the United States was able to discover that the Soviet Union had become a nuclear power.