Nuclear espionage
The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. There is disagreement over whether this spying helped the Soviet Union make an atomic bomb faster. While some of the information given, such as information given by Klaus Fuchs, could probably have been very helpful, the way the people in charge of the Soviet bomb project actually used the information has led later scholars to think it did not actually speed up the Soviet Union's process of making bombs much. According to this account, the information was mostly used as a "check" against the Soviet Union's own scientists' work, and little of it was actually shared with the Soviet scientists because neither their scientists nor spies were trusted much. Later scholarship has also shown that the biggest problem with the Soviets' early development was not problems designing the weapons, but rather problems getting the materials.