Oleg Penkovsky last week, Klaus Fuchs yesterday. Docu-drama, interspersing archive clips with acted pieces. It’s a real challenge to occupy an hour with valid facts, say something novel, and hold the interested outsider. Well done. 3 more to come.
The prog. took 2 points as fact: 1. US Army wanted to drop on Japan to overawe USSR, and 2. Fuchs’ treachery accelerated Joe One Test by 2+ years. Much academic work has addressed these; I have ploughed through some, inc. biased and agenda-serving. On point 2, US published the Smith Report to tell taxpayers what they had got for their $2Bn. UK had asked that it not be unclassified, believing AN Other would be able to save money and effort by starting from there. Fuchs probably helped UK more than Kurchatev to copy Fat Man. Point 1 is now a tick-in-the-box for UK GCSE Modern History. It’s plain wrong. Until the July,1945 Test many expected a dud – and the prog had Oppenheimer and Fuchs ready for it to ignite the atmosphere, kill all those observing (and thus not be a deployable weapon). We needed the Red Army to deal with Japan’s China Army, then to invade from Sakhalin/Korea, to spread the pain on the beach.
By: ATFS_Crash - 26th January 2007 at 15:17
It sounds like it might be an interesting show, but if you’re post is representative of the program, then it sounds like pseudoscience and pseudo history, and its entertainment would be comical. I get the idea you are misinterpreting the docudrama or the show is garbage.
If the bomb would’ve ignited the atmosphere, it would’ve not just killed the observers, mankind would have perished. So to imply that their intent was to give some sort of advantage to an enemy by igniting the atmosphere doesn’t make sense.
The spies motives seem to have been; that they didn’t think it was safe to have so much power just with one nation. I somewhat agree that it is unwise for just one nation to have so much power; however that still does not excuse their act of criminality. Their reason to leak the plans was improper, the Soviets and other nations would have obtained fission bombs anyway, it would have just took them longer, and that doesn’t seem like it would have been a bad thing in my opinion. The spies did level the playing field, but at a cost of inflaming and accelerating the Cold War.
By: Nicolas10 - 26th January 2007 at 01:16
Offtopic, flamewar material, and BS.
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January 23, 2007 at 1:35 pm