It's a stretch to say the Soviets stole the atomic bomb plans, if what they got was a rough blueprint of one of the original designs which was not used to produ

It's a stretch to say the Soviets stole the atomic bomb plans, if what they got was a rough blueprint of one of the original designs which was not used to produce the size of bomb needed to be useful. The spys may have accelerated the development by a few years at most. Also I believe a lot of the intelligence came a lot from Russia's spy network in the UK, but semantics. It's generally assumed, by Oppenheimer very vocally, that once an atomic bomb would eventually be produced, the physics weren't that complicated, this is coming from him, not me. This was accelerated by the U.S. showing that it could be done, but would not have prevented the development of a bomb. The U.S. couldn't keep researches from publishing fully, eventually the dots would be connected. You state that this is what escalated the Cold war and almost brought us WWIII, well, the cold war was scary and developed lots of proxy wars, but it led to a 60 year time period where two of the largest powers never engaged in direct conflict. It's argued routinely that the only reason for this is both sides have nuclear weapons and the mutual assured destruction idea. If neither side had developed nuclear weapons then there would have certainly been another war between U.S. and Russia.