The fact that we paid a huge price for the first atomic weapons is basically meaningless. After we knew they worked we could have built a large number in a short time. I know because I personally heard Dr. Edward Teller say so.
The reason Stalin knew he could behave the way he did was because he knew he had such influence in our government and we wouldn't stop him.
"We basically could have told Uncle Joe to get out of town by midnight."
Had that been possible, it would have been done, would it not? And the entire Cold War would have been avoided, complete with the misery of Korea, Vietnam, the killing fields of South East Asia, Angola and Afghanistan? If it were that "easy" to have kicked the Russians from Eastern Europe in 1945, someone would have done it. The fact of the matter is, the Russians had material and panpower superiority to stand against a Western alliance that simply ran out of troops and whose home populations had been at war too long and wanted their men home.
The Western alliance was made up of democratic nations, whose populations were listened to, and not a totalitarian regime like the Russians. The civilians in the West could make their governments to stop fighting, the Russian government didn't have to worry about that little detail.
"The fact that we paid a huge price for the first atomic weapons is basically meaningless. After we knew they worked we could have built a large number in a short time. I know because I personally heard Dr. Edward Teller say so."
I don't care if you were Doctor Teller's proctologist, the fact is that after Hiroshina and Nagasaki there were no more bombs, and would not have been any for several months and perhaps a year. Only then would the "mass production" of enough enriched uranium and plutonium been avaialbe for the large-scale (one or two a month) bombing the "yeah, but we had the bomb" crowd thinks would have turned the trick against the Russians.
Russia was NOT Japan. Russia would have shrugged off a few atomic weapons and thrown a massive army at the Western allies that would have swept them all the way back to the Normandy coast.
"The reason Stalin knew he could behave the way he did was because he knew he had such influence in our government and we wouldn't stop him."
No, the reason was simple mathematics and political accumen. The British, after fighting since 1939, were exhausted and would have fallen had it not been for the Empire. The British had no more soldiers.
France did not exist. It had been a defeated nation in 1940, and was, in effect, defeated again when the Allies ran across France on their way to Germany. The French had no soldiers, no government and no economy to speak of. The French were not going to fight, and had no reason to, given the treatment DeGaulle had received at the hands of the Allies.
That left the United States. And the United States,too, had run out of soldiers, and was operating at the extreme end of a 4,000 mile supply line.
Simple math: no soldiers + no reliable allies+ unsustainable supply lines = Russian victory in Europe.
Seems to me we're lucky Uncle Joe decided to stop when he did.