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. Strauss believed in a fundamental premise of the Cold War, that the Soviet Union was determined on a course of world domination; as such he believed in having a more powerful nuclear force than the Soviets and in maintaining secrecy about U.S. nuclear activities. This extended to allies: among the commissioners, he was the most skeptical about the value of the Modus Vivendi that was agreed to in January 1948, that provided for limited sharing of technical information between the United States, Britain, and Canada (and that was already a stricter set of guidelines than those established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Quebec Agreement of the Manhattan Project era). During the United States presidential election, 1948, Strauss tried to convince Republican Party nominee Thomas E. Dewey about the dangers of sharing atomic information with Britain, and after Dewey lost, Strauss tried to convince Truman on the same. Following the revelations about the British physicist Klaus Fuchs's espionage for the Soviet Union, and the appointment of the former Marxist John Strachey as Secretary of State for War in the British Cabinet, Strauss argued that the Modus Vivendi should be suspended completely, but no other commissioners wanted to go to that extreme. Strauss was known for his psychological rigidity; one of his fellow commissioners reportedly said, "If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you're just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor." Strauss was increasingly unhappy in his position, but President Truman indicated satisfaction with Strauss's work and the minority stances he was taking on the commission. The first