Oppenheimer opposed the H-bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II, but not entirely for moral reasons:
At first, he thought it was infeasible. Then, when the math proved it feasible, he dropped his resistance, admitting that it was too “technically sweet” not to develop. (The film does not quote this rather famous line of his.) Still, he remained unenthusiastic, worrying that the H-bomb would divert money from Hiroshima-type A-bombs, which he thought the Army should continue building as weapons to be used on the battlefield if the Soviets invaded Western Europe. He argued that H-bombs were too powerful for battlefield targets—they could destroy only big cities—and, if the Russians built them, as they would if we did, a war would devastate American cities, too. He did eventually come to the view, as portrayed in the film, that this mutual vulnerability might deter both sides from using the weapons or even from going to war at all. But he was not opposed to nuclear weapons in general.
[…]
His hedged attitude toward the H-bomb threatened the project’s funding. And so its leading advocates set out to destroy him.
Everyone talks about “mutual vulnerability” and “mutually assured destruction” and civilization-ending nuclear apocalypses and so on, but no one ever asks why between 1945 and 1949 the bomb gave no geopolitical advantage to the United States over the Soviet Union. It’s just one of those mysteries of history.
Jim: “why between 1945 and 1949 the bomb gave no geopolitical advantage to the United States over the Soviet Union.”
Excellent question. One answer might be that the Movers & Shakers realized that nuclear weapons delivered by long-range bombers were little more than an extra-big bang.
Sure, there would also be dangerous radioactive fallout — but people were still dying from WWI gas attacks; radiation was just another mechanism to get to the same result.
In WWII, the Allies had already demonstrated they could completely destroy a city without the use of nuclear weapons — see Dresden, Tokyo. Building a nuclear weapon was an immensely huge task compared to building the required number of conventional bombs, but then it took only one bomber to deliver it. Swings & roundabouts.
So the US ability in 1949 to drop a limited number of nuclear bombs on Soviet cities really did not change the strategic calculus. Then the Usual Suspects went all anti-nuclear, and the rest is history.
Why would USG turn on the Soviet Union when they had gone so far as to set the world on fire in order to save it?
Pseudo-Chrysostom,
Lend lease did very little to help the USSR. It was primarily a means of prolonging the war so that none of the Allies would respond to German requests for peace talks. Apologists for lend lease always talk about food aid, but Kissinger’s memo on using food aid as a means of control shows the lie in this.
The reason the U.S. turned on its ally was Stalin’s rejection of Zionism after Meier visited the USSR. Stalin had supported the Jewish identity movement and the creation of Israel, but balked at letting Soviet citizens emigrate to Palestine as, at the time, he thought the loss of its Jewish citizens would weaken the Soviet Union. This caused a falling out with the largely Jewish Bolsheviks (Stalin also had Jewish heritage, though his ancestors converted). Since the Soviet Bolsheviks and the Zionists were allies, Stalin’s opposition to emigration lost him the support of prominent U.S.-based Zionist organizations.
Of course, he then responded by expelling many Jews from the USSR which gave the Zionists what they wanted but not in the manner they had expected, thus resulting in the hatred people like Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan have for the Russian Federation.
Even as ‘enemies’ USG was remarkably consistent in tripping itself up with regards to any serious efforts to end the soviet union in particular and marxianism in general as a physical phenomenon.
The retrospective analysis is that unofficially official State Department policy was for America to surrender to the soviet union in order to usher in the immanent eschaton of a global enlightened managerial state; only problem was the communist world was so sclerotic in reality that it never became capable of accepting that surrender, and in the span of a lifetime petered out with a fart, leaving all the whigs in the occident holding their dicks and wondering how they are supposed to satisfy gnostic impulse for thanatos now.
@Pseudo-Chrysostom
No you gay nerd, it was always about U.S. empire. The USSR as it was originally fashioned was a means to this end.
“Gnostic impulse for thanatos” is comic book speak. Jesus Christ have mercy, grow up and go read a book.
@Pseudo-Chrysostom
No you gay nerd, it was always about U.S. empire. The USSR as it was originally fashioned was a means to this end.
“Gnostic impulse for thanatos” is comic book speak. Jesus Christ have mercy, grow up and go read a book.
lmao
Your purty mouth is making lots of loud noises, but none of them are saying anything to the facts of the matter.
The fact of the matter is the soviets were the biggest winners to come out of the second war of wilsonian aggression, proportionally speaking. Things could have easily gone bad for them; USG could have made sure things went bad for them; it didn’t. USG at every turn went out of its way to ensure the soviet’s strategic situation was secured; it got almost every single one of the concessions it wanted during post-war arrangements. The whole arc of the 20th century can be described as an unbroken chain of simping for communism by whigs of the world united. This is not said in terms of what they thought they were doing, this is said in terms of what they did do.
Both FDR and Stalin undoubtedly thought to themselves that they were using the other. Certainly FDR thought he was setting the world up for conquest by his empire. But what was the nature of that empire? Something remarkably isometric with his marxian fellow travelers. Thus the ultimate effects we observe.