I nominate Nikita Krushchev to be the most important figure in the cold war, literally playing 3d chess with a bloodthirsty imperialistic regime and preventing nuclear war.
Commenting on Kennedy’s government giving the OK to launch the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba:
“ If you did this as the first step towards the unleashing of war, well then, it is evident that nothing else is left to us but to accept this challenge of yours. If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.”
-the man himself
I thought Molotov was entrusted to oversee the R&D of the Soviet Nuclear project, or at least I remember reading that in his memoir or something along those lines
The list of people who comprised Special Committee No. 1 (Atomic Weapons) formed on 20 August 1945:
Together with Special Committee No. 2 (Reactive Technologies) and No. 3 (Radar Council) were the three Special Committees formed under Stalin immediately after the war to achieve fundamental breakthrough in new weapon technologies.
I'll have to reexamine where I heard my stuff, I may have just confused Molotov with Malenkov.