Posted on 06/27/2003 9:05:38 AM PDT by walford
...rather than have Oppenheimer supply classified documents to agents, his Soviet spy masters might have preferred that he "appoint other Communists to key positions who would in turn hand over the information." Crouch then identified a number of scientists with Party affiliations appointed by Oppenheimer to key positions in the Manhattan Project. Nearly fifty years later, the Schecters would uncover a letter in the Soviet spy archives written by Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s chief spy and then head of his nuclear program. Beria refers to Oppenheimer as an "unlisted agent" of the CPUSA and praises Oppenheimer’s role in providing Soviet spies access to U.S. atomic secrets...
(Excerpt) Read more at aim.org ...
If this is your preference, freep-mail me and I'll send you a valid, hard e-mail address Saturday. I'm glad you asked rather than just reading me as some kind of mocking a-hole. I continue to seek out insights on that era and, if you read my profile you'll see, I'm also writing about the era. My long-hatching novel is about 3/4ths completed.
Hey, that is odd. On the other hand, everyone gets cranky, but it is in my very essence.
The helium balloons in the plywood tunnel led off of ground zero to a bank of gauges observed in turn by a bank of tv cameras. The whole thing was vaporized in milliseconds, but the emissions from the blast traveled faster through the helium, meaning that the ships standing offshore for the test could record via tv signal the precious milliseconds of signal readouts before the whole thing vaporized.
As a liberal arts major, I was FASCINATED by the entire process.
You're full of shit.
Why do you say that, liberallarry?
McCarthy said there were plenty of commies in the government. He was right. Commies, ever since, have vilified him for telling the truth and exposing them. Anything about McCarthy but the fact that there were commies all over the place is a leftist diversion, including those who seek to inject some illogical claim of a lack of logic.
yitbos
Except that fury against the failure of the Government to deal with often known security risks did not come from McCarthy, it came from the American people, and such of the non-compromised intelligencia as were paying any damn attention. As Coulter points out, McCarthy made the inaugural speech in his anti-Communist crusade (the one you deride, in which he brandished the list of 57, it was, "card-carrying communists" in the State Department) just two weeks after Dean Acheson gave a press conference defending Alger Hiss on the day of Hiss' conviction!
But then McCarthy must of engineered that whole Hiss afair, a la Ken Starr boosting Monica over the Whitehouse fence, just for the sake of the outrage it caused.
I don't mind you're being critical of McCarthy, but there are huge elements of the liberal myth you still need to purge. Again, read some of the links in this thread:
Tailgunner Joe--Where Have You Gone, Joe McCarthy?
various FR links | 06-26--03 | The Heavy Equipment Guy
And read Ann's book.
"Hitler was a mere disciple but he had all the luck: his death camps made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all."LL...Clintonesque tactic there. Change the topic from how the crimes of Bolsheviks far exceeded in duration and number of victims those of Hitler and insinuate those who point that fact out didn't want to fight Nazism.
As for my misrepresentation of the politics, tell me who among the A-bomb scientists were conservatives, besides Lawrence. Even Teller was not as right-wing as he became in the post-WW II era, when the Soviet threat became evident. Yes, they were worried about in whose hands the bomb was -- but almost always about it being in Nazi hands. Their concern about communism was always abstract and incidental. Also, academics have always been whiny and tempermental; they don't actually work for a living and despise those who do. That breeds resentment and a sense of superiority, manifested by arrogance.
I also stand by my statement that academia, especially in 1930's America and especially in disciplines with a lot of European influence (such as Physics and Economics), was mostly of leftist orientation.
It was before my time, but what little I know of it seems fine and dandy.
They asked a bunch of people if they were communists.. So what?
A bunch of people said: "No, I am not a communist"
But, a bunch of people refused to answer entirely.
I found that to be odd.
You confuse whiney and temperamental with independent. People don't subordinate themselves to others unless they have to. "Subordinate" is a well-chosen word. The attitudes come with the social position.
"Academia" is too general a characterization. Many, if not most of the great scientists and mathematicians, were not very political. They had opinions - usually - but did not participate in the political process. It's true they were left-leaning for the most part (The general feeling during the '30s was that capitalism was fatally flawed) but I think the best - people like Einstein and Szilard - were quite aware that Russian Communism was a primitive tyranny. After all, Bertrand Russell journeyed there in 1919 to see for himself and came away with that opinion. His book would have been widely read.
What the scientists were trying to do was break the cycle of violence which had culminated in two world wars which nearly destroyed Europe. They were very, very worried that the next war would be the last one. That they thought Nazism to be far worse than Communism is understandable to me. Communism was a utopian vision of a better world for everyone. The Russian version was hopeless but perhaps it's possible to construct some sort of socialist entity which will work. People do cooperate from time to time. Nazism is a base and evil vision to the core - although Hitler's dark view of humanity as genetically determined tribes fighting for lebensraum may turn out to be correct...
Lets see the documentation.
How about the Milwuakee Braves?
That's a pretty lame thing to rely on for naming excesses, don't you think?
Communism stinks, and there seems to be many of them in the democrat party today, along with our media.
President Reagan was so anti-commie, that we saw commuinism begin to fall under his watch, beginning with the Berlin Wall. The elder President Bush reaped the rewards of that great man.
I don't know if you remember the time whan Reagan was playing around at a microphone that he thought to be dead. He made a comment something like, "Communism has been found to be unconstitutional. Bombing begins in 5-minutes." Was Reagan excessive? He was raked over the coals harder than Clinton ever was for Whiteweter. I think that we can all agree that the media always loved Fidel Castro more than they did Ronald Reagan. That's what I call excessive.
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