"What if Roosevelt and Churchill had accepted the proposals from Bohr, Szilard, and others to internationalize the project? Would an with Russia still have resulted? The answer is probably yes. Bohr's idealistic concept was essentially a free exchange of information internationally. All nations would pool scientific knowledge, rather than keep it secret. An international body consisting mainly of scientists would oversee its exploitation. These ideas harked back to the free flow of information about physics in the fifty years before the Second World War, a period Bohr regarded as a golden age. However, not only times but nuclear physics had changed. Nuclear physics was by then perceived as having not only massive military potential but real commercial value for power generation. But these factors conferred great diplomatic, economic, and political power. For Stalin, possession of nuclear capability had immense importance, both symbolically and practically. Generation of electricity from nuclear power had the potential to achieve his long stated aim to "catch up and overtake" the West in terms of industrialization. Nuclear weapons would give him the ability to rule over his increasing empire in Eastern Europe, while allowing him to appear as, and to act as, the equal or the best of the West elsewhere. Western lack of trust in a totalitarian regime made a race inevitable."