Again we have the following from Tom Baugh’s book, “Starving the Monkeys: An Entrepreneurial Horror” (continuing from the quote in my 01/21/2010 entry):
Each side in this war had their own stable of native nuclear physicists, such as the Americans Lawrence, Serber, Seaborg, and Oppenheimer. Likewise, the Soviets had Kurchatov and numerous names we will never know, who spent much of their energy studying stolen plans from the Manhattan Project. Alone, neither the Americans not the Soviets had the political will to pursue nuclear weapons without Hitler as a threat to both. Their mutual salvation came as a result of Hitler’s own racist policies.
The practice-war Germans had enjoyed the services of men such as Fritz Haber, the son of Lebanese Jews and the father of modern chemical warfare. Haber is also famous as the inventor of the Haber process, in which ammonia is created literally from thin air. Ammonia from any source can be used as a fertilizer directly. But, more typically Haber’s ammonia is converted into and combined with nitric acid from the German Ostwald process to make ammonium nitrate, the most important agricultural fertilizer of the modern world. The chemists of the early 1900s begat the physicists of the mid-1900s. While Germany enjoyed the former in the practice war, it would deny itself the latter in the main event. From across Europe, brilliant Jews fled Hitler, the vast majority heading west to Britain and America. This flight best documented by Richard Rhodes [in his book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”].
In this scholarly book, Rhodes details the history of the atomic bomb. Unwittingly, he also demonstrates the power of individual minds to starve an enemy of its produce. As researched by Rhodes, Hungary alone traded seven players to the Manhattan Project and related endeavors. Theodor von Karman became famous for his work with fluid dynamics. George de Hevesy invented new methods in radio-biochemistry. Michael Polanyi found correlations between knowledge, science, economics, and the subconscious mind. Hmmm.
Their fellow Hungarian Leo Szilard invented many concepts surrounding the use of fission for weapons and energy. Szilard’s patents would later become absorbed by the government as they were too important to allow mere profit. Eugene Wigner developed important theories of nuclear reactions. John von Neumann contributed a mathematical insight to the propagation of shock waves both inside and outside of atomic bombs. To implement the required calculations for these theories, he is credited with a great deal of the early work in computer science. The last of these seven Hungarians, Edward Teller, is widely known, along with the Polish Jew Stanislaw Ulam, as the father of the thermonuclear bomb.
Mussolini contributed Enrico Fermi, the scientist that would oversee construction of the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago, whose wife was a Jew. Germany would contribute Hans Bethe among others too numerous to list here.
Austria effectively discovered fission in absentia in Kungalv, Sweden, when Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, both Austrian Jews fleeing the Nazis, went for a Christmas walk in 1938. During this walk, Lise interpreted the experimental results of her former German chemist partner, Otto Hahn, who missed identifying fission by the barest of margins. Had he not been stripped of Lise’s help, Otto Hahn would have given the Nazis the first key to the atomic bomb. Had Germany not been stripped of the best minds of Europe, the rest might have contributed to making a more peaceful Hitler-free Germany the world’s first nuclear power.
The most famous of all of Hitler’s refugees was of course Albert Einstein. Despite his popularity in common understanding, his sole contribution to the atomic bomb was his famous letter to President Roosevelt. In that letter Einstein urged the President to fund a nuclear program before the Germans got there first. That letter, a copy of which is on display at the Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, would be contribution enough.
The development of the atomic bomb in America was then a direct effect of the racist policies of the Nazis. This development is also the clearest historical example of how a small group of people denied their enemy the produce of their minds. Had Hitler successfully placated the Jews, he could have used their talents to conquer or pacify the world under a single government.
As it turned out, for a time America was the sole nuclear superpower. This status had been handed to it in part by Hitler’s refugees and in part by a steamer-trunk-full of nuclear secrets brought by British scientists sent to America to protect them from the Nazis. Had this hole card been played correctly, the Cold War would have never happened.
Patton, and others, advised attacking the Soviets directly, and thus forcing them back into their own borders after the war. With the nuclear hole card, the threat of such an attack would have been sufficient. Limited to their own borders, the Soviets would have been forced to survive on their own meager resources rather than having the rich resources, intellectual and physical, of Eastern Europe to plunder. So weakened, the Soviets would have collapsed within a decade. And in their collapse, they would have spawned a more peaceful and prosperous Russian to continue the progress started by Peter the Great before being interrupted by the cancer of Communism.
However, the forces of nice, the monkey collective, needs conflict to feed it. And so, this collective chose to allow the Soviets to occupy half of Europe, damning generations of innocent Europeans, and Soviet citizens themselves, to their rule. The Soviet collectives, after all, more closely resembled the progressives in power in America at that time and at all times since. Progressives who were, and remain, supported by the American electorate.
More brutal than the Germans, the Soviets would eventually murder many times more people that the Nazis, most of them their own citizens. But at least Biff and Muffy would have a worthy adversary to frighten Americans into compliance and service. To help the Soviets, and to prevent their premature collapse, the Americans would continue the wartime policy of shipping grain to the Soviet Union throughout most of the Cold War. And thus ensuring that their enemy wouldn’t starve while enslaving their population to make all those bombs and missiles. And Hitler’s Panther and Tiger became the models for the Soviet tanks of the Cold War and the American M1 Abrahms [sic] of today. And his V-1 became the Tomahawk, and his V-2 became the Apollo and the Trident and the Minuteman.
By letting the Soviet sore fester, the collective fanned it to strength so that it might form a credible threat. For decades, as strategic experts warned of this threat and continued to warn of its growing menace, the collective stayed their hand. General Curtis LeMay, the Patton of strategic air forces, developed the means to win that war, and promoted the industrial base to fulfill his vision. Hyman Rickover, the driving force of the navel nuclear program, followed suit.
But the collective would fight them each step of the way. Even so, as late as 1960 the Soviets were still far enough behind that a first strike still seemed practical, as documented in the famous book by Herman Kahn [entitled “On Thermonuclear War”].
Kahn was a renowned military strategist and theorist employed by the RAND Corporation think-tank. The first third of this scholarly book is available as a teaser on the web, and clearly describes the tradeoffs that were still available in the early 1960s. As late as then, it still was not too late to destroy the threat that faced us, although the cost would be high. But not so high as the cost we now face from radical terrorists as we implicitly arm them, having groomed them from birth for the task.
Interestingly, Kahn placed his hopes for survival and recovery from nuclear war on the individual skill and spirit of the survivors. He drew a clear distinction between the collectivists of what he called A Country and the individualists of what he called the B Country.
In Kahn’s model, A Country consists of the urbanized areas, including the suburban areas that serve the cities. Meanwhile, B Country consists of the rural areas that remain. Today, we would refer to B Country as the “flyover.”
In Kahn’s day, roughly half of the productive capacity, human and material, resided in each of these areas. Both of these halves of the nation cooperated to mutual benefit like gigantic renditions of Og and Pok [Read earlier in Tom’s book to understand the context.]. In this trade, the rural areas supplied raw materials, such as food and ore and transportation while the urban areas supplied designs and finished goods. A Country ate the food supplied by B Country and smelted steel from the ore. Conversely, B Country used the tractors and mining equipment provided by A Country. Both benefitted.
Kahn also presented evidence of a doubling of the economic output of the nation roughly every ten years. He also ominously pointed out that, in a crisis, B Country could survive without A Country. But A Country could not survive without B Country. In other words, remove designs and the ideas and the newest models of tractor, and B Country can still limp along. Remove the food, and A Country dies. Unconditionally.
Now consider that a thermonuclear war, at the worst case envisioned by experts of the time, would completely destroy A Country in the form of damaged buildings and leveled factories. But, the only real effect on B Country would be the short-term poisoning of the land by short-lived fission products. And even these effects could be mitigated by simple prophylactic measures that blocked their effects on people. The implication of all of these assertions, backed by scientific fact, was clear.
A 1960 thermonuclear war, even if considered as a worst-case surprise attack on the United States by a fully effective Soviet Union, could be survived.
If the people of A Country had been evacuated first to B Country, all of their intellectual ability would survive intact, making recovery much more simple. And the decade-doubling of the economy would restore the nation to its pre-war status within ten years.
In the meantime, the half-destroyed United States of 1960 would still have been the most powerful economy on the planet. And with most of its population intact.
I'll finish the rest of this quote in tomorrow's entry in this blog.
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