Sorry, guys, I have not checked in since I actually created my account some months ago. But the relentless historian in me has been busy! I'm not sure this is exactly the place to post this, but since I'm technically a newbie still, I will put it here, Maybe a mod will re-place it. I read -- and re and re and re-read Richard Rhodes' excellent "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and had bought his following "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" several years ago but at the time when I started reading it (it's over 2,000 pages!!) I got quite ticked off that the first 500 pages were not about the hydrogen bomb at all, but espionage and the Soviet Union. I remember that I actually posted an Amazon review excoriating the book for this very reason -- (since taken down) but now, after having read tons of stuff in the interim, including a book I believe is called "Atomic Spies" or something similar, and find out that this guy named Alan Nunn May actually lived in a building that is quite literally two minutes' walk away from where I live -- the whole street is only one block long and the buildings do date to before the war, so I know he must have been in one of them -- the book actually makes sense. I have learned a lot about the whole Manhattan Project and its ilk. For a totally amateur historian, I believe I could now teach a course in WWII studies after all the reading I've been doing! For a while there my wife was castigating me . . . "All you seem to be interested in is Hitler, Hitler, Hitler!" and while she was completely wrong -- anything to do with WWII is automatically Hitler -- she wasn't that far off! =+) So anyway, I was coming to the point: I'm reading Dark Sun with a different pair of eyes than I did before, and now I know, or am familiar with, all the players in the atomic saga. I just have one basic question that Wikipedia doesn't answer. Maybe someone here can. Why did Julius and Ethel Rosenberg get the Chair, while Klaus Fuchs, whom to me is the ultimate scumbag -- a treacherous bastard with few if no redeeming qualities -- walk after only four years in prison? I just don't get it. He basically gave the atomic bomb to the Soviet scientists -- Kurchatov, Khariton etc -- and also to that cockroach Beria -- on a gilded plate. I mean, Fuchs was everyone's nightmare wrapped in a cloak of bad news. How did he get away, to live in relative comfort in East Germany for the rest of his years, while Julius and Ethel fried? I realize this is a bit of an esoteric question, but hey, even after all this time, I'm like, WHAT? This guy was less than a scumbag, yet J & E paid with their lives. How on earth did that happen? Because they were Jewish and he wasn't? Next up: the unsung double agents of WWII and the story of how everything almost went to Hell in a handbasket because of a dog. =+)
Wasn´t Fuchs a spy who gave Nato stuff to the KGB ? He was later than the A-bomb - I mean Russia had the A-bomb already to this time, or didn´t they ? But my memory may be bad on this guy. However I saw a interesting docu about cold war spies, maybe I find it again. EDit: I confused this Fuchs guy with Günter Guillaume..... So above post not valid, sorry.
In a nutshell...The Rosenbergs were tried by the United States, and Fuchs was tried by Great Britain. Under British law, Fuchs could only be sentenced to a maximum of 14 years for espionage, because the Soviet Union was still classified by the British as an "ally." Further, under British law, long-term prisoners were allowed 1/3rd off their sentence for good behavior. Thus, Fuchs only served 9 years and 4 months, of his 14-year sentence, for his espionage conviction. Now, had Fuchs been caught and tried by the United States, he likely would have suffered the same fate as the Rosenbergs.
I'm not 100% sure just how badly Fuchs screwed the West but I know that a lot of these "atomic spies" were about as loving and loyal as a nest of vipers. The Rosenbergs were given up by her brother . . . to save his own wife . . . only Daniel Greenglass actually apologized for what he had done (or was that Harry Gold?) and said that he deserved every single year that he got. What is odd (but there must have been some reason) was that these perps were all Jewish, pretty much to a man. I'm not fingering the Jews per se (my wife is Israeli) but it's quite strange that (Fuchs excepted) they were all Jewish -- maybe it was fashionable to be a communist for the Jews back then? After all, the Communists opposed Hitler (although the spies' intentions were badly skewed -- Stalin had no love for Jews). Like a lot of people have said, and which is true, Stalin was a monster through and through, despite his jolly "Uncle Joe" persona (which he reportedly hated but tolerated). I wonder if the world will ever allow another Stalin or Hitler to come to power. Methinks not. Reading about the inner workings of ISIS gives me reason to hope that they will implode. What is that -- a "House divided against itself cannot stand," right? Well, Stalin and Hitler ruled through a cult of personality but ISIS doesn't even have a dollar-store version of Osama Been, let alone a charismatic leader. They're doomed. But Fuchs's slap on the wrist was a real insult to the Rosenbergs. He, of all of them, should have fried to a crisp in the electric chair. The judge, Kaufman -- himself a Jew -- should have had some mercy on the two little children the Rosenbergs left behind, but it's also my understanding that Ethel was pretty much the hoister of her own petard, refusing to admit to a single thing.
I have a feeling "some people" believed they were dying for a cause when truly they were sacrificed for someone to get a nice mansion and a pool boy and whores and whisky every day. I do believe there´s still quite a number people alive in the US part of the chain which might have taken action if the USSR had given the code word. How else would Stalin get so much info on the Nevada nuclear test with even samples to go ...
You're absolutely right. Why would anyone who had any position of power in the USSR have given a damn what happened to their little "spies?" Of course, anyone with any knowledge of their action would have turned the other way when it came time for the poor sops to face the music. I'll Bet Stalin and Beria both danced a jig when the Rosenbergs fried -- it was, after all, the Rosenbergs who thought they were doing something "noble." How deluded people can be -- how can anyone in their right mind spy for some enormous entity such as the Soviet Union in the 40s and 50s and think that somehow they'd get this cool dacha outside Stalingrad for their efforts? I'm sorry, if they really thought they were helping the world. If greed had something to do with it, I'm not sorry. But if they ever thought they would be anywhere except under a Russian bus for their efforts they were operating under some major hallucinatory drugs.
Stalin was months dead before the Rosenbergs were executed. Loyal communists are loyal communists. Look how many went under Stalin's bus, and they were all likely loyal until they died.
http://www.lootedart.com/N7EVN0284841 How interesting Mr Ford. I though Adolph was a good friend but Stalin as well... ------------ None other than arch-capitalist Henry Ford built a huge auto plant in Nizhni Novgorod, a "deal … worth a staggering forty million dollars … 1930s millions paid for in gold at the height of the Depression. No other firm in the United States or even in the world conducted as much business with Joseph Stalin than the Ford Motor Company between 1929 and 1936." "For the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving. And as the cutting edge of poverty sharpened their determination, the desire to join this forgotten exodus turned . . . from a trickle into a flood. In the first eight months of 1931 alone, 'Amtorg' - the Soviet trade agency based in New York - received over one hundred thousand applications for emigration to the USSR." Caught up in the Terror already sweeping the USSR when they arrived and which only worsened with the purge trials of the late 1930s, these Americans ended up in prison, often as slave laborers worked to death in the frozen wastes of the Soviet Far East, sometimes to produce gold destined for Fort Knox.
As I get into Richard Rhodes's "Dark Sun" further and further, I swear, I'm appalled. There was this insane maniac named "Curtis LeMay" -- I put his name in quotes because this bastard almost set the world ablaze all by himself -- and it becomes clearer and clearer that KAL 007 was an accident just begging to happen. This lunatic, whom we will all remember as being the perpetrator of the carpet bombing of Japan and Germany -- not, in itself enough of an indictment quite yet -- but it proves that WWII was for him just a trial run. He craved WWIII. Unbeknownst to me but now obvious in retrospect was that this prime a$$hole deliberately sent bomber crews over the USSR in the 50s, knowing that they didn't have first strike capability, thus wouldn't react the way he obviously wanted. The result was that several HUNDRED men were killed or captured and sent to the gulags -- all completely unknown to Americans at the time. In other words, he was deliberately sending multiple missions of ten or more men over Soviet territory just to provoke the hell out of them, with predictable results. Well, the predictable result was KAL 007. I can't believe that the Soviets actually held off for so long, judging by the provocative nature of our little d%%head generals. LeMay MUST be certified as a war criminal, and I'm not saying this out of hate -- I'm American -- but this guy LIVED to try to kill us all. He ate, breathed and slept Armageddon -- it was a hobby. I think we should all take a deep breath and think about how close this guy came to killing humanity -- one lunatic with his finger on thousands of triggers. Eisenhower had to slap the guy's hands a few times, but as we all know, he lived to carpet bomb Vietnam as well. Singlehandedly, Curtis LeMay almost destroyed humanity -- it's a hard fact to swallow. His remains should be roasted in a nuclear furnace and his family and descendants forced to suffer the worst possible torments -- he was worse than Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined. Damn.
I quote: "At SAC headquarters in Omaha, Sprague challenged LeMay. The General dismissed Sprague's concerns contemptuously. SAC had reconnaissance aircraft flying secret missions over the Soviet Union twenty-four hours a day, he explained. 'If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.' "Sprague was shocked. 'But General, ' he countered, 'that's not national policy.' "Sprague remembered LeMay responding, 'I don't care. It's my policy. That's what I'm going to do.'"
Whoa, whoa, whoa...Put down the crack pipe there...I think you had enough. The shootdown of KAL 007 was the predictable result of Lemay's aggressive policy towards the Soviet Union. You are talking about the same Curtis Lemay that retired in 1965, and the same KAL 007 that was shot down in 1983 - almost a quarter of a century after Lemay left the US Air Force? That's quite a leap of faith to make...and I have no faith in your conclusion, given that the Boeing 747 was not used in any military capacity by the USAF. You could possibly make a case for the shootdown of KAL902 in 1978, at least that was only 13 years after Lemay had left the building, and, at least, the Boeing 707 was in use by the US military as RC-135. But, then again, you probably never heard of KAL 902. AFAIK, the planes that were shot down by the USSR during the Cold War, were reconnaissance and patrol types - RB-29, RB-47, etc. Not actual bombers. However, there was risks to these missions, and as "spy" planes, they were legitimate targets. Still, they did very good work, and were a vital part in determining Soviet air and anti-air capabilities. Finally, you state You say that like it is a bad thing. For we have seen that the incremental bombing policies followed by the Johnson administration was an abject failure, but that it was the Linebacker II bombing campaign that brought the North Vietnamese back to the table in '72. Still, the policies pursued by the Johnson and Nixon administrations were completely different, and Nixon's was helped along when the Chinese parted company with the Soviet Union.
I strongly recommend that you read an actual biography of LeMay before calling the man a derranged lunatic.
Of course it was a "bad thing" - any bombing where masses of innocent civilians are slaughtered is "bad".
