This cartoon was published in the New York Sun newspaper on July 22, 1947, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1948. The cartoon captures the precarious position of world peace in the late 1940s in light of the development of atomic weaponry and the increasingly hostile Cold War that was emerging between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its satellite states. The United States had been the first nation to develop and use atomic weapons; the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945 finally brought an end to World War II. In the wake of the war, however, it was apparent to American intelligence agencies and war planners that the Soviet Union had its own atomic weapons development project underway. In this context, the cartoon suggests the anxiety Americans felt about the possibility that the Soviets could break the American monopoly on atomic weapons, and a nuclear exchange could take place.