On Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 6:17 PM Lawrence Crowell < [email protected]> wrote:
> *Even in the 1950s the fear over an "international communist conspiracy" > was overblown.* Even in the 1950s people should've known that Communism could not win in the long term because that sort of economic system is inherently far less efficient than Capitalism, but given that nuclear weapons had just been discovered it wasn't entirely clear to a lot of people that there would even be a long term. And we now know that Joe-1, the USSR's first nuclear bomb test in 1949, was not just similar to America's Trinity bomb test in 1945 it was identical right down to the placement of screw holes; Soviet scientists wanted to improve the design but the head of the project, Stalin's secret policeman Lavrentiy Beria, refused to let them change a thing because he knew for a fact that this design would work (thanks to Klaus Fuchs) and if the bomb test turned out to be a dud Stalin would've had everybody involved, including Beria himself, shot. So America's fear of spies in the 1950s was not entirely unfounded. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1eqHraXT2se-2TQZhj_ytbX94ATa9Ft1fi2GgwBFX-TQ%40mail.gmail.com.
