When I click on “Comment on this answer.” I get directed to this link (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?s=forumid=1), which states “No Forum specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the webmaster.”
Which I did.
While it’s debatable whether the Rosenbergs/Greenglass’s supplied anything by way of real value to the Soviets regarding the A-bomb, information supplied by Julius himself to Alex Feklisov (as a Christmas present, no less- an odd gesture from an atheist of Jewish parentage to a Russian atheist) DID lead to the deaths of American soldiers many years later. Julius smuggled parts and reassembled a piece the factory he was performing QC in was assembling for airplanes and the part enabled the shoot-down of American spy planes in the early 60s. I’m currently mobile but I will provide a cite later.
Despicable as Roy Cohn, Irving Kaufman, Joe McCarthy and others may have been, I would not be so certain to say that Julius did not deserve the chair under the laws of the time. (Whether the laws were just is another debate entirely.) Ethel most certainly did not, though she definitely knew her husband was spying and some prison time would not have been unreasonable. By far my greatest venom is reserved for her brother, David Greenglass, one of the great selfish bastards of the 20th (and 21st) century who literally perjured himself to give information that not only saved his own ass but sent his sister to the chair and for his and Ethel’s mother, one of the most evil she-wolves in American history.
(Sad trivia about Ethel: she was under 5"0 tall and 100 lbs, but her little body required 3 jolts of electricity before she stopped breathing- their executions were timed so that they would be dead before the beginning of Sabbath at sundown yet the extra jolts delayed hers until a few minutes after Sabbath had begun. Her guards cried when she was electrocuted, just as they had often done when she sang Julius to sleep in the death house.)
Henry Kissinger had a more to do with that “balance of power” than almost anyone else. Having a “balance of power” sounds benign, but it was really an ugly business - involving both sides keeping each other in check through proxy wars, coups and counter coups, and essentially treating the globe like a chessboard. For every Vietnam and Chile we have to account for, the other side had its Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.
The United States is now the one imperial power mostly by default, as the Soviet system was an ecomomic, political, and environmental disaster in the end. True Communism in itself does not threaten me, but the Stalinist perversion of that system was an evil had had to be confronted. The Rosenbergs were agents of Stalinism, not social democrats. If you think American capitalist polluters are bad (which they are), try swiming in Lake Baykal or even finding the Aral Sea any more.
Western Europe states such as Germany and France could have been a buffer to American and Soviet ambitions as well, but they senslessly wasted themselves in two World Wars. - wars that we really didn’t want to be in I might add. But after two of them, we did what we could to avoid a Third one, even if it meant making a deal with the devil at times.
The “mess” we are in now is nothing compared to what an all out nuclear war.
…now back to the Rosenbergs, I thiink a lot of people have forgotten how anti-Semitic much of United States was right after World War II. A lot of historians now tell tthis narrative…‘America used to be mildly anti-Semitic, but nothing like France or Germany. But when we saw what those evil Nazis did, especially when we liberated their concentration camps, we resolved to bury our own anti-Jewish prejudices and become “Judeo-Christian” and pro-Israel in 1945’. The fact is that 1945-1955 saw a real outpouring of vicious anti-Jewish feeling in some quarters, and this really fueled the ‘Red Scare’ and McCarthyism. I am surprised the column and this thread hasn’t explored that more. Did similar spies who were not Jewish get the book thrown at them like this?
This trial was divisive in the United States, and I think it is underrated as a historical event today. I bet many Americans under 40 don’t even know who the Rosenbergs were or what they did.
Please note that the name of this forum is “Comments on Cecil’s Columns.”
That is deliberately a very defined area.
Side issues are just that, side issues, and should not be debated here but taken up in other areas of this site that are more appropriate to such subject matter.
We’ll leave this open, at least for the time being, but y’all need to hash out other topics other places.
your humble TubaDiva
Adminstrator
Appears to be fixed now.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Just as a nitpick on the column, but the Rosenbergs weren’t convicted of espionage. They were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage.
As much as I hate to perpetuate a thread that should have started off in IMHO or the pit in the first place, I think Tibet might disagree with the “one true imperial power” rhetoric.
RR
RiverRunner, you saw the post by TubaDiva saying “Back on topic” and you ignored it.
This thread is now far more suited to IMHO than to Comments on Cecil’s Columns, and so is being moved. Take it on whatever tangents you want.
Re Qur’s (I don’t know how to make the accent) use of ‘Amerika’-
Didn’t she forget two 'k’s?
Probably not. The America-first-of-all-evils school of radicalism has long used the single ‘K’ spelling as in Amerika. Of course, that might be the normal way of spelling America in Icelandic, which I assume is the OP’s native language.
And while I’m at it, **Qur Tharkasdottir***, I’ll also ask Afghani women how they liked being enslaved, imprisoned, and denied the most rudimentary of human rights under the Taliban.
Live and let live is not always the most ethical or humane thing to do.
The dignity of the individual trumps the rights of national sovereignty when a government abuses its citizens.
Which isn’t to say that America is blameless; there are many things my country has done both internationally and domestically that I disapprove of. But blaming us for the “world’s sorry state” is patently ridiculous.
*Dottir in an Icelandic surname means she’s female, though I expect most of you could suss that out for yourselves.
If so, it is kinda odd that she(?) spelled it right the first time… :dubious:
I am surprised that this one keeps scoming back. Ethel was possibly not guilty, but the trial evidence is pretty strong that she aided and abetted her husband. Did their actions result in the Russians getting the atomic bomb sooner? probably not…the head of the Russian A-bomb (and layer H-bomb) project , Dr. Kerchatov, acknowledged that the stolen info had been of some help.
But the Russians would have had the bomb, sooner or later. Moreimportantly, it was actually US secrecy that spurred Stalin on…in 1942, the US Government censored ALL US research reports (dealing with nuclear fission) from the scientific literature…Kurchatove noticed this and informed Stalin. Stalin rightly deduced that the Americans were working on an atomic bomb…and gave Kurchatov the authority to set up hisown atomic bomb project. If we had just kept things as usual, Stalin would probably NEVER had gotten interested in an atomic bomb…he probably would have paid more attention to his crackpot geneticist (Trofim Lysenko).
:eek:
Just a reminder-this is IMHO. There will be no cheap shots or belittling of other poster’s opinions, and personal insults ae not allowed. State your opinion on the topic at hand, and let others do the same.
Play ball!
In fact, it was Georgeii Flerov who noticed the absence of fission papers in American physics journals and hence deduced that there had to be a US atomic bomb project. (Which was significantly further than the Germans had got with much the same information.) Flerov had been in close contact about fission with Igor Kurchatov, but on this occasion chose to write directly to Stalin. The importance of this letter has been disputed: David Holloway plays it down in his standard Stalin and the Bomb (Yale, 1994, p78-9) on the grounds that Stalin probably never saw it and that it doesn’t appear to have had any consequences.
You are right. It is much better for them to be enslaved, imprisoned, and denied the most rudimentary of human rights under Dostum and the other criminals of the Northern Alliance.
The Us Government made great pains to keep the manhattan Project Top secret…was there ever any proof that Dr. Oppenheimer leaked any info? The late Dr. Edward Teller ,ade accusations that Oppenheimer was sympathetic to the communists.
Anyway, Harry Gold was involved with the Rosenbergs…what happened to him?
The situation in Afghanistan varies with the region, depending on who the local authorities are. Some places are ruled by extremist warlords who probably are as bad as the Taliban, but I assert that the country is better off as a whole since a reasonably moderate government exists in the capital. Apart from possible terrorist connections, the Taliban regime was so horrible and barbaric that I’m amazed that the world, including my own country, was content to let them be until we were actually attacked. The U.N. should have gotten rid of them as soon as they took over, just for the human rights issues alone. If they’d done that, we’d probably have a much more stable situation there now, and 9/11 might never have happened.
I’ll take the easier question first …
Gold was arrested by the FBI in 1950 as part of the general Anglo-American mopping-up operation that also took in Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. Fuchs identified Gold as his contact , whereupon Gold confessed. He received a 30-year sentence, testified at the Rosenbergs’ trial, was paroled in 1966, moved to Philadelphia and then died of heart disease in 1972.
This is coming at the Oppenheimer affair - which is complicated by any standards - in too extreme a fashion.
In the 1930s, Oppenheimer was openly very left-wing by many, though not all, US standards of the period. His oft-quoted admission was that he’d been a member of “every front organisation on the West Coast” and he never subsequently sought to hide this aspect of his life. But in the 1950s (and possibly in some quarters today), this sort of past was in and of itself traitorous.
By the 1940s, his politics had moderated. What is ambiguous about his period in the Manhattan Project is that on a couple of occasions he was “less than helpful” when it came to security investigations. The pattern is that he was prepared to tell white lies in order to protect friends. Haakon Chevalier is the obvious example. Chevalier had connections with Soviet intelligence and casually sounded out Oppenheimer about helping the US’s allies in Moscow by passing information. Oppenheimer refused. The problem is that he didn’t immediately refer the incident to the relevant security authorities. Given that Chevalier was a friend and that the Soviets were allies, I personally find his reluctance entirely understandable, though clearly technically wrong. Given the context of this thread, it’s possibly worth adding that none of this had anything to do with Fuchs or the Rosenbergs. Had Oppenheimer actually followed procedure, the consequences for US intelligence’s knowledge about Soviet penetration efforts would have been minimal (although nobody could have known this at the time).
Where Teller enters the issue is over his testimomy to the AEC hearing about Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954. Oppenheimer’s past political views and his actions (or rather inactions) about the likes of Chevalier during the war were central to the hearing, as was his opposition to the development of the H-bomb. The general tenor of the prosecution was undoubtedly that he was undesirably left-wing in his opinions, but nobody went so far as to suggest that he was anything so unsubtle as currently sympathetic to the Soviet Union over the US. Teller’s infamous answer to the direct question of whether the clearance should be be renewed is:
Under re-cross-examination Teller reiterated that he saw “no danger” in Oppenheimer seeing classified information. On a purely personal level, Teller’s testimony was half-hearted and difficult to justify as an action towards a friend. But it falls short of specifically accusing Oppenheimer of anything other than foolishness in his policy opinions.
Until 1994 nobody, other than the obviously ill-informed, had any reason to suppose that Oppenheimer was anything other than someone who’d rebuffed Soviet intelligence’s approach. Then the KGB’s Pavel Sudoplatov published his memoir Special Tasks (Little, Brown, 1994). Amongst several lurid allegations, Sudoplatov specifically said that Oppenheimer, along with Fermi, Szilard and Bohr, was a KGB agent. While Sudoplatov seems to have indeed been a significant figure in the KGB, all of his statements about atomic espionage were quickly ripped to shreds. (A typical informed review of the period is that by Thomas Powers in the NYRB, reprinted in his Intelligence Wars, NYRB, 2002.) Even a decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, there’s thus no good evidence that Oppenheimer leaked anything to anybody.
This answer brings us even farther away from my original post regarding the place the Rosenbergs deserve to be granted in our historical memory. This is not what I was intending, but as the issue of Afghanistan has been raised, I have no other recourse than to reply to the rather peculiar views proposed above. Being just a guest here, I am not quite sure about the procedure to move this to another thread.
According to all reports about the situation in Afghanistan I am currently aware of, crime and violence since the US occupation started have increased to a point that has never existed under the Taliban’s barbaric regime. Lack of security and countless murders have just led Médecins sans Frontières to leave the country after 24 years of activity there. As in Baghdad, the puppet government put in place has no say outside of Kabul. Only under the rule of Ismael Khan in the province of Herat does any progress seem to be happening.
Moreover, one should remember that the Taliban and other colourful types were originally sponsored by the USA in their efforts to provoque the SU into intervening and to destabilize the Moscow-friendly government in place during the very brief period of democracy, social progress and relative liberty (for women) the country ever has known. One may also add that considering the way the UN gets treated when it dares to have an opinion that doesn’t match current US interests (as seen recently up to the Iraq war), it is doubtful it could have done anything of its own volition against any of the US’s protégés.