Radosh, the Rosenbergs and DSA

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema crdbronx at erols.com
Sat Jul 14 12:03:05 PDT 2001


Maybe a more fundamental question -- why, exactly, do we care about this kind of thing? I can imagine various reasons but let's be clear. I remember my first attempt to have an opnion was about 1968, when I bought a copy of Chambers' WITNESS at a junk shop here in the Bronx, read it, found him fairly bizarre, but could see he was accusing Hiss tendentiously. Then I read a bit about the Rosenberg case, and the Schneir book, and decided that if they weren't passkng military data to the USSR then probably they should have been, and that I didn't care?

Reasons to care anyway --

1. Unjust conviction is a bad thing inherently, and if the Rosenbergs were

innnocent then that's judicial murder.

1. The left was unjustly accused more genedrally, and this was bad too.

1. Other reasons.

Even so, isn't the greater point that the USSR was an ally, and that supporting it was the proprer stance for all democratically-minded people? Hence too, Radosh's pre-occupation with this issue is a sign of his turn away from any democratic ideals.

1. Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

Justin Schwartz wrote:


> Wheh he was on the left he wrote a pretty good book on the unions and US
> foreign policy.
>
> The post on the Rosenbergs put here is flaed in various respects. I don't
> know enough about the ins and outs of the R case, although I read his book
> and the Schneier's. I was persuaded by the latter at the time that the FBI
> framed the Rs. That is consistent with Julius and/or Ethel being spies. The
> frameup might have been to conceal the real sources of their information. A
> few years ago in the Nation the Schneiers said that they thought that the
> Verona material showed that Julius was a spy.
>
> However, Radosh says that Julius provided the Soviets with lots of
> high-grade nuclear intelligence. This is simply false, and demonstrably so.
> I do know a fair amount about the history of the US and Soviet nuclear
> weapons programs. If Julius did what he was accused of, he gave the Soviets,
> at best, the information that the design of the "Fat Man," the implosion
> bomb. used TNT "lenses" to implode the uranium core. This information was,
> if not worthless, not worth much. Unless you have the exact specs on the
> lens design, you can't build a working bomb. Moreover, as is well, known,
> the Soviets had really good, technically informed spy data mainly from Klaus
> Fuchs, a top-grade physicist--which did not, however, include the specs on
> the lens design. He didn't have access to that.
>
> We know, according to David Holloway, the pre-eminent historian of the
> Soviet bomb project, that the Soviet a-bomb team had decided on a lens
> design before they had any decent spy material from Fuchs or any other US
> spies, and basically did their own work. If they got anything from the R's,
> Holloway doesn't think it is worth remarking on. So Radosh's claim is hot
> air. Which isn'tsurprising: the Rs supposed source was David Greenglass, a
> low-level technician without real scientific training or the ability to
> understand what was at the frontiers of applied physics in its time.
>
> --jks
>
> >
> >Does Ron Radosh have any redeeming characteristics, or is he just a
> >low apologist for U.S. imperialism?
> >
> >Doug
>
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