Kurt H. Debus Director of NASA's Launch Operations Center

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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I d rather be accused of fuk**ng around with goodlooking women than some of the atrocities I’ve learned about in this thread.

I left home when I was 13 and went to work. I didn’t finish high school or go to college. So to answer your question no I didn’t know we were at war when the A bomb was made.

The only reason I knew about ‘why’ we were in Viet Nam is because of the POW bracelets my friends in the 7 and 8 grades wore to school. Later I knew quite a few Viet Nam vet’s, most are dead now. I know the hell they went through they told me. Most drank themselves to death. They couldn’t forgive themselves and felt helpless because of the draft. Then they were hated by their country. I watched several die of cancer.

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Actually, it was captured Japanese scientists who worked for America on biological warfare.

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You really should try doing some reading on these subjects before advancing completely silly and baseless conspiracy theories.

The former German rocket scientists and engineers were a tremendous help to the US space program. If they had not been helping the US, they would likely have been recruited by the Soviets. Operation Paperclip has been public knowledge for a great many years. Some of the principal scientists, like Wernher von Braun, became enthusiastic supporters of the militarization of space technology, such as building a space station capable of targeting anywhere on earth with conventional or nuclear missiles. Not that I would ever think this was a good idea, but it made a bizarre kind of sense at a time when the Soviet Union was a major global threat and a formidable superpower. The point being, these scientists and engineers were 100% dedicated to advancing US interests in space technology and defense, both of which were strategically vital at the time.

No, there were no German scientists (or at least, none of any note that I have ever heard about) working on the Manhattan Project. As already said, the Manhattan Project went on during the war, not after it. It initially started coming together in 1939, motivated by fears that Hitler was also trying to develop a nuclear weapon. The technical director was the American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and some of the principal figures around him were the likes of Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller. Ironically, Oppenheimer was very nearly expelled from Cambridge University for trying to poison his tutor – he was a strange bird. Had Cambridge expelled him, that would likely have been the end of his career, and America would have been deprived of a major talent in theoretical physics at a crucial period of the war.

And finally, none of this has anything whatsoever to do with JFK. There are of course a large number of conspiracy theories around the assassination and we’ve all heard them. I happen to think that some of them are credible, and that there were very likely organized factions behind Oswald using him as a stooge. But it had absolutely nothing to do with “Nazi scientists” or anything else that this thread is supposed to be about and bringing it up here is just ridiculous.

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Stranger

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Okay. But I have to say that’s a pretty well known fact. The United States built the world’s first atom bombs during World War II and dropped two of them on Japan in 1945.

I don’t mean this in an insulting way but I would suggest you do some reading on WWII to nail down the basic history of the war before you start forming conclusions about what happened.

If you want some recommendations:

American Heritage History of World War II by Stephen Ambrose and C. L. Sulzberger
The Second World War by Antony Beevor
Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings
The Second World War by John Keegan
Delivered from Evil: The Saga of World War II by Robert Leckie
A History of the Second World War by B. H Liddell Hart
A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II by Gerhard Weinberg

46

You said it better than I could have.

47

I was about to post something similar, but got delayed by making lunch.

Operation Paperclip was classified at first, but that doesn’t make it a conspiracy.

@shh1313 may not understand some of the context of the Cold War. After WWII ended, the U.S. began to see Communism, and the Soviet Union, as the next existential threat to American life.

Rocketry was going to be a key part of that: not only was there the belief that outer space would be the next territory which would be contested between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but the development of missiles which could deliver nuclear warheads from a continent away – or even from orbit (rather than being dropped by a bomber) would wind up being a major part of the arms race.

And, Nazi Germany had a bunch of leading scientists in that field; they had developed the V-2 rocket, which was the first successful long-range missile, and was used to devastating effect in the latter stages of WWII. The U.S. believed that Germany’s knowledge and technology were important to gain (and it was also important to keep that knowledge and technology out of the hands of the Soviet Union), and thus, the decision was made to largely overlook whether those scientists had been active members of the Nazi Party, or had participated in war crimes – the belief was that, if “we” didn’t recruit those scientists, the Soviets certainly would have. Was that the morally “right” decision to make? I don’t know; my suspicion is that, at that time, it was believed that the existential threat of the Soviet Union was a far bigger issue than giving a level of amnesty to some Nazis.

Finally, in the early days of the “space race,” the Soviets took the lead – they were the first to successfully orbit an artificial satellite (Sputnik I), and the first to successfully put a man into space. These events were viewed by many Americans (including the country’s leadership) as being extremely threatening to U.S. security, and led the U.S. to devote a huge number of resources to both rocket/missile development, as well as the space race.

48

I get that. But there’s a bunch of pics with JFK, Johnson with them. How old are you? You think I would I understand the threat of nuclear war when I was in elementary school? I had just learned about Viet Nam!

The reason I post is to learn things not be made fun of or chastised for a random thought I posted.

Below in quotes and italicized is part of my OP and what I think you and several others are referring to.

I understand they had to have those scientists because of the advantages the US would have. I think that’s why Kennedy was assassinated too.

Any old timers here remember if this was a conspiracy theory back in the day? I don’t think it was called that though.

------ the REASON I used "conspiracy theory " is because I didn’t know, and that’s why I asked . They did not use that word back then. Think about if that happened last month or so. If I came and said our government is bringing Nazi scientists here. I bet if I said that here you my point.

NEXT:

I think that’s why Kennedy was assassinated too.
I think… my random thought. It was just a tornado in the windmill of my mind.

Anything else? Also I really do appreciate the information. I’m doing my history now because I have time. I will always ask stupid misinformed questions because I don’t know everything.

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I’m your age. I did.

Please expand on this. How does the US having nazi scientists lead to JFK’s assassination? And don’t say “because he was moral.”

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Think about it, Im pretty sure Johnson didn’t like Kennedy, Nixon, and a bunch of other people. He was young, good looking, very popular, wealthy, and had good looking wife and kids. Plus he having way to much fun with Marilyn and the Brat Pack.

He would have been reelected most likely. I bet if he could talk from the grave he might have hated Nazis. Maybe Bobby had proof of crimes on a few of them and they feared their b.s being found out. Maybe one of them was gay. I’ll guess the other players didn’t want competition from him, Bobby and Jr. down the road.

I’m just guessing here.

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Then ask questions, don’t make unsubstantiated and easily refutable statements about stuff you clearly don’t know much about. Dial back the vitriol until you know enough to get properly upset.

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It isn’t about what you can guess. It’s about what you can prove.

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DMV I was born in 62 I will be 60 Jan. I never saw that cartoon. On Christmas Eve when the Vietnam vets were being brought home I watched til I was bored and asked to change the channel so I could find out where Santa Claus was. I realized it was a war. I think I purposely ignored it. I knew it was bad. After what I learned about what the Nazis did and all the grownups yelling and fighting just like now. I didn’t want to know anything. People are crazy, cruel, insane. Til this day don’t know why people do things to torture and kill people.

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Tradition, mostly.

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@shh1313, I think there are a couple of reasons why you’re getting pushback in your thread here.

You say that you’re posting things in order to ask questions and learn, which I think is fine and admirable. But, you’re sprinkling in conspiracy-theory level stuff (like supposing that the Nazi scientists are somehow linked to Kennedy’s assassination), and when you get replies debunking that, you’re saying “it was just a thought that popped into my head.”

Kennedy’s assassination has been the obsession of conspiracy theorists for close to sixty years, and there is, quite likely, no possible conspiracy theory related to it that hasn’t been repeatedly proposed and debunked.

Also, you keep using “conspiracy” to describe Operation Paperclip, which, again, wasn’t a conspiracy. It was secret for a while, but it was authorized by President Truman, and involved the knowing participation of thousands of members of the U.S. government and military. There are many secret government programs, but few (if any) of them are conspiracies – for example, the U.S.'s stealth aircraft programs in the 1970s and 1980s were secret and classified at that time, but that didn’t make those conspiracies, either.

The core of your OP, as far as I can tell, is that you’re disgusted to learn that former German scientists (at least some of whom were active in the Nazi Party, and/or were involved in, or had knowledge of, war crimes and inhumane activities) were key members of the U.S. space program, and were often lauded for their participation in it. I get that, and several of us have explained to you why it happened, and why the U.S. government apparently decided (rightly or wrongly) that the ends justified the means. But, the fact that it happened wasn’t a conspiracy, it was U.S. policy. You may be distressed to learn that that policy was in place, but that’s a different issue.

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I can help. Here’s a big dose of learning in a small package.

No conspiracy theory is true. None. Not one. Not ever. They’re all on the level of Nazis killing Kennedy. Just typing the words to debunk them slows your learning, because you could be devoting the time to real stuff.

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If you’re looking for information about John Kennedy’s assassination and the various conspiracy theories around it, I would suggest Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner. Posner makes a very convincing case that Oswald acted alone and killed Kennedy.

Posner examined all of the major conspiracy theories and looked at the evidence that supposedly supports them. He found that the evidence for these theories didn’t hold up.

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I attended a colloquium once from a physicist working with implosive supermagnets (basically, you set up a very strong magnetic field, and then you set off a bunch of explosives around it to squeeze the already-strong field into an even stronger one). They were learning some interesting things about strong magnetic fields, but that’s not why the research was funded. The research was funded because at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was falling apart, a lot of Russian nuclear scientists found themselves laid off. And a bunch of laid-off nuclear scientists is not something that anyone in the stable part of the world wants: Who knows who might offer them a job? So the US found research areas which could make use of the same sort of knowledge that could be used to make bombs, as a make-work program for these scientists so they wouldn’t get desperate and accept offers nobody wanted them to accept.

60

That only means he was IN ON IT!!1!

:wink: