Nowhere in my posts did I argue that Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss did not work for the USSR. In the case of Julius Rosenberg, I believe he was in a position to pass only minor classified information to the USSR, hence my judgment that his act was "a small service to humanity," not a tremendous service.
>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.
You ought to understand the USA for what it was and is. Are you ready to admit that the following facts are true? Or are you going to continue to live by the official discourse of denial?
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 20:58:51 -0500 To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Subject: RE: Grumpy lefties and VENONA
Jacob Segal wrote:
>>>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 12/07/99 02:51PM >>>
>>John K. Tabor wrote:
>>>Mike, I thought you made a good comment before that lefties should
>>>not defend the indefensible. Based on the VENONA decrypts there isn't
>>>a doubt in my mind that Julius Rosenberg illegally helped to pass
>>>atomic secrets to the Soviets.
>>
>>Why should that be "indefensible"? One might consider Julius Rosenberg's
>>act a small service to humanity, for which he _and his wife_ were made out
>>to be enemies of the people and murdered by the state. While I believe
>>Soviet scientists would have developed atomic bombs on their own anyhow,
>>why should trying to help them to expedite the process be considered
>>"indefensible" by _leftists_?
>>
>>I just showed _The Atomic Cafe_ to my students. You can see, in this
>>documentary, American politicians arguing for the first strike. Without
>>the speedy Soviet development of atomic bombs, the USA might have dropped
>>them on more places than just Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
>
>It is nonsense to think that the US would have started dropping nuclear
>bombs here and there after WWII. The atom bombing of Japan was a great
>crime, of course, but there is no basis or reason to think the US would
>have used nuclear weapons again if the Soviet has not developed the same
>weapons.
You have no evidence to support your denial. First, check out this book:
***** Michio Kaku, _To Win a Nuclear War_ (1987) South End Press
_To Win a Nuclear War: the Pentagon's Secret War Plans_ (with Dan Axelrod) was the first book to delve into the Pentagon's recently declassified, top-secret, War Plans, made available via the Freedom of Information Act and the declassification program of the National Archives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Contrary to popular myth, these highly sensitive documents, written by top officials of the Pentagon and National Security Council, show that the U.S. had prepared detailed war plans to use nuclear weapons during the Berlin Crisis, the Korean War, the Quemoy-Matsu crisis, various Vietnam crises, and in the Middle East. These were not simply contingency plans; voices at the highest levels of government actively lobbied the President to execute many of these plans. The book also explains why, often at the last minute, many of these plans were stopped just short of execution, with some surprising conclusions.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Forward by Ramsey Clark Summary Chart of Pentagon War Plans
I. Occupying the Soviet Union II. BROILER: Atomic Bombs over Berlin III. Atomic Bombs over Manchuria IV. Preventive War: A-Day V. Escalation Dominance VI. Planning a First Strike VII. Atomic Bombs over Vietnam and the Middle East VIII. Agonizing about Counterforce IX. SIOP-5: Decapitating the Soviet Union X. First Strike: Myth or Reality? XI. Pre-War Situation? XII. Star Wars: Missing Link to a First Strike XIII. SIOP-6: Protracted Nuclear War XIV. What About the Russians? XV. Point of No Return?
Back to Home page Send mail to Dr. Kaku at mkaku at aol.com
<http://www.wbaifree.org/explorations/mk-nwar.html> *****
Now, even after the Cold War, nuclear hawks were (and probably are) still feeling an itch for the "first strike." The following case is merely two year old.
***** Bunker-Busting Bomb Prompts U.S. Discord: Upgraded Nuclear Capability May Prompt Russian Concern
Defense News -- February 24-March 2, 1997
<http://www.brook.edu/fp/projects/nucwcost/bunker.htm>
By Jeff Erlich -- Defense News Staff Writer
WASHINGTON -- The United States is ready to deploy a bunker-busting nuclear weapon that arms control watchdogs say is the first new bomb developed by the Department of Energy since the end of the Cold War.
The bomb, call the B61-11, is designed to strike command bunkers buried hundreds of meters below the ground and other deeply buried targets.
U.S. officials maintain the device simply is an existing B61 nuclear bomb is a new carrying case. "All we've done is put the components into a case-hardened steel shell that has the capability of burrowing quite a ways underground, through frozen tundra, though significant layers of concrete," Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, said in a Jan. 28 interview at his Offut Air Force Base, Neb., headquarters.
The conversion involved a new tail kit and nose cone for the bomb, an official with the Energy Department, which oversees nuclear weapons, said Feb. 18. "This is not new, in any way, shape or form," the Energy official said.
The bomb is needed, U.S. officials said, to replace the B53 bomb, which nuclear war planners use to target deeply buried Russian command and control facilities.
But independent arms control advocates said the B61-11 provided something new, or else why deploy it?" asks the Los Alamos (N.M.) Study Group, in a Feb. 10 paper, "B61-11 Concerns and Background."
New or not, Bill Arkin, an arms control consultant based in Pomfret, Vt., said developing a bomb to destroy buried Russian command and control facilities could be destabilizing. "What that signals to the Russians is far more detrimental than any gains it makes to deterrence," Arkin said Feb. 18.
By achieving what Habinger calls a "shock-coupling effect," the bomb directs the bulk of its energy downward, destroying everything buried beneath it to a depth of several hundred meters. Prior to its development, which was completed in December, the best earth-penetrating nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal was the B53, with a force equal to 9 million tons of TNT, which penetrates the earth by creating a massive crater, rather than the more precise blow the B61-11 is meant to deliver.
But the B53 cannot be carried by the B-2 bomber, and offers less assurance that it will destroy its target than does the B61-11, Arkin said.
The B61-11, which can be carried by a B-2, can produce explosions ranging from 300 tons of TNT to more than 300,000 tons, and therefore could be more appropriate for use against targets like Tarhunah, Libya, according to Bruce Hall of the international environmental group Greenpeace. According to U.S. officials, Tarhunah was the site of an underground Libyan chemical weapon plant under construction until late last year.
Bolstering the view that B61-11 was developed for non-nuclear targets are documents obtained from the Department of Energy under the Freedom of Information Act, Hall said Feb. 14 from his office here. These include a Dec. 18, 1995, letter from Thomas Seitz, acting deputy assistant secretary of energy for military application and stockpile support, to Harold Smith, then assistant to the defense secretary for atomic energy.
In this letter, Seitz said Energy Department officials were accelerating production of the B61-11 conversion kits to provide them "as soon as possible." Hall said the call for an accelerated schedule points to the U.S. officials considering its use against Tarhunah.
In the spring of 1996, Pentagon officials first said they were weighing the option of destroying Tarhunah with a nuclear blast, then later retracted this statement. *****
Yoshie