When I was a kid my favorite Saturday morning cartoon was Rocky and Bullwinkle. The characters Boris and Natashia were Russian-like and they were always up to mischief. The Russians since the time of the 19th century Tsars did this sort of thing, and they were sort of good at it. Even today indictments against Russian agents who engaged in cyber-attacks were brought forth.
Klaus Fuchs was an interesting character, and his motivations for giving the atomic bomb secrets to the USSR were complicated. He was to a degree motivated by a worry that if one nation in the world possessed this weapon the temptation to use it to further expansion would be too much. The conditions of the world were very different then. The United States stood in an unassailable position, economically, politically and militarily. The USSR was powerful, but largely in shear mass and numbers. The red army was huge and battered its way into the eastern part of the Nazi empire in 1945. Russia suffered enormous casualties and material destruction and they ended up occupying the weaker and damaged eastern European regions. The old news reels showing a red tide moving across eastern Europe were in some ways not that surprising; E. Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc were weak, damaged and in the few post war years the within the US/UK there was not a lot of political interest in these regions. The USSR really saw their situation as very secondary to the US and getting the bomb was at a premium. Fuchs saw the potential asymmetry of a nuclear US unipolar power as dangerous. So A + B = C happened. After the Korean war, which in a way cemented in the world order of post WWII, things more or less stabilized as far as communist take overs. There were some things going on in SE Asia, and the US of course way over reacted which got us into the Vietnam War. However, communism largely slowed its progression in the world as people saw the problems with it. The attractiveness of communism began to wane. LC On Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 5:44:27 AM UTC-5 johnk...@gmail.com wrote: > On Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 6:17 PM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> > 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/10e5d915-d062-4f66-88cb-4d38697b7113n%40googlegroups.com.
