Unfathomably massive community notes L
Unfathomably massive community notes L
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For those of us who need a history lesson here, what's the real story?
The community notes are real. The Rosenbergs were fucking heros.
One of the ironies of the Soviet Union was that they had a extraordinary amount of sympathizers in the U.S. government, even well into the 90's. It is arguably this level of 'understanding' that lead to the dissolution of the USSR, as the high level functionaries in the KGB (including golden boy of the West, Putin) thought that they would be able to dissolve the Soviet Union, then peacefully integrate into the world economy.
Supposedly there were actual communists within the CIA that fed information to the USSR. Don’t recall specific names, though.
Aldrich Ames in CIA and Robert Hanssen in FBI, though they worked much later and neither was a communist (Hanssen might be or at least antiimperialist, but he never admitted that). Hanssen pissed the pigs so much they given him 15 life sentences.
In the Manhattan project, beside Rosenbergs there were at least three other Soviet spies:
- Georg Koval, an engineer working for GRU, most likely real communist, USA do not know till today what exactly he gave to GRU and the fact he was a spy was only really revealed in 2007 when Putin gave him the Hero of Russian Federation for that.
- Harry Gold, courier, he was a communist but apparently very shallow one. Recruited by NKVD he was only a minor asset. Didn't worked in MP directly, but was courier for Fuchs.
- Klaus Fuchs, physicist, one of the main theoretical fathers of both nuclear and hydrogen bombs, passed tons of info about US, UK and Canadian nuclear projects to Soviets over the 9 years. He was at first member of SPD, from which he was kicked out for associating with Thalmann, then he joined KPD. Later in life he lived in GDR and was a member of cnetral comitee of SED, so definitely real deal communist.
All that said, it is actually still unknown and most likely exaggerated how much all those agents improved the Soviet nuclear project, most likely the data they provided served mostly to compare with western projects because Soviet nuclear project had no real problems with theory or engineering, they were mostly restricted by the amount of enriched uranium and plutonium they could produce because in the first piles it went really slow, and USA had significant time advantage in that.
Even the wiki on the Rosenbergs backs up the idea that the spying likely didn't accelerate development that much of at all
Lavrentiy Beria, the head official of the Soviet nuclear project, used foreign intelligence only as a third-party check rather than giving it directly to the design teams, who he did not clear to know about the espionage efforts, and the development was indigenous. Considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium that it could procure, it is difficult for scholars to judge accurately how much time was saved, if any.
Like basically everywhere else, the major limiting factor was access to uranium. Not technical knowledge.
here's the quick unsourced version: the US was developing the atom bomb, and planned (sometimes for real, others as disinfo) to build enough of them to carpet-nuke (this was before long range missiles and rockets) the entire Soviet Union, a plan that if completed would have been (one of?) the greatest genocide(s) in world history. several US atomic scientists, sought out contact with the USSR (independently, many unaware of the others) so that they could give them the information necessary to prevent this planned nuclear holocaust before America could build enough bombs.
I know you said unsourced, but, carpet bomb the entirety of the Soviet Union? I mean, extrapolating from the bombings of Japan I can definitely see this potential reality. Is this something that was on the books, or just the logical conclusion of the US having nukes and no one else coming close?
i thought it was mostly just the understanding that the only thing that would restrain the US would be a rival with parity. the only 'carpet bomb with nukes' i've heard about was Macarthur's idea for 'winning' Korea by bombing the north of China
When America was.the only country with an atom bomb, they made some scary fucking plans. The cold war was by far the better option than America as the sole nuclear superpower. They were totally down to use em cause no one could retaliate at a similar scale.
well there is this plan which was apparently intentional disinformation (idk enough to say whether the 'intentional disinformation' angle is american copium or not, i read somewhere on one of these articles that 'truman was shocked at the lack of nuclear arms stocks' for some of these plans):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Totality
there is also Operation Dropshot which was considered and then abandoned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot
another article about Dropshot, that also mentions Churchill's Operation Unthinkable:
also check out this page, especially War Plan Broiler:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_plans_(1945–1950)
From Plan Totality:
However, this plan was actually a disinformation ploy. After the two atomic bombings of Japan during August of 1945, the United States government did not have any nuclear weapons ready for use.
The disinformation part is what, that they didn't have enough nukes to genocide the Soviets, or that they weren't actually going to do it? Because this all implies they were going to if only they had nukes