Yes, but how they got it is irrelevant. They got it, and that's what matters.

China can (and does) do the same for current tech today, through whatever means.

(Also, GP's comment directly said what you said; not sure what your comment adds to the discussion.)

Some people will give it to china too. We have even caught a few (in other industries).

Because of the traitors, the Soviet Union has gained a few years, but the end result would have been the same.

At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers.

Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that.

In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious.

The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing.

In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.

> Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.

American big business is pretty much doing that every day, handing over technology to increase China's manufacturing tech level.

Pretty soon China won't need it anymore. If the massive incompetence of the US government and business establishment is defeated, the the industrial espionage will start to go in the other direction. More likely is the US just declines, becoming little more than a source of raw materials and agricultural products to fuel advanced Chinese industry.