> And was giving Stalin nuclear secrets such a great idea? Isn't that part
> of the problem, that US communists, despite their progressive work, did not
> understand Stalin's Russia for what it was.
(Ahem). Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of how an atomic bomb works (e.g. myself, a litcritter who wouldn't know a joule from a googol) will tell you that there never was an "atomic secret". Over 100,000 people labored, directly and indirectly, on the Manhattan project; the science and technology of getting enough fissionable material and packaging it into a bomb were available from tens of thousands of people.
It gets worse. Rosenberg himself forked over, it seems, diagrams of explosive lenses -- the scaffolding of conventional explosive which compresses the uranium really quickly, in order to start a chain reaction. At the time, this was not even close to being a leading-edge technology. More importantly, this was done not in the Fifties but in the early 1940s, during WW II when Rosenberg was working at Alamo labs, and at a time when the US Government was providing tons and ton and tons of diagrams, blueprints, chemical and machinery technology to the Soviet Union as part of its Lendlease program (people in the know jokingly called this operation "Super-Lendlease"). The Soviets were our friends, celebrated in our press and media, and were single-handedly staving off the Wehrmacht; Rosenberg no doubt felt that he was doing his bit to save the world from Fascism (which, of course, he was).
In short, the execution of the Rosenbergs was a vicious, foul crime against humanity, committed by bureaucratic scum who themselves approved of countless planeloads of technological secrets to the Soviets, and sacrificed Julius to cover their own asses and to smash what was left of the postwar Left.
-- Dennis