Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. As part of its coverage, Russian newspaper Vedemosti carried this article defending the admittedly wholesale theft of Manhattan Project data.
For Vedemosti, columnist Igor Korotcheko writes in part:
“The key to success – and this should get a special mention! – was the access Soviet intelligence had to American nuclear secrets. Kurchatov had practically complete access to Manhattan Project documents, and his unofficial consultants (NKVD intelligence, within which the ‘nuclear’ intelligence network of the GRU was incorporated) were scientists from Robert Oppenheimer’s team who collaborated with organs of the Soviet secret police.
“The first U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff war plan for the Soviet Union was developed in June of 1946 (code name ‘Pincher’). It was envisaged as a series of nuclear strikes against the 20 most industrially developed Soviet cities.
“By 1949, the United States of America already had 250 nuclear bombs and a fleet of B-29 strategic bombers. Considering the reality of the Cold War, had the Soviet Union failed to learn the secret of nuclear weapons, the alternative would have been the American nuclear bombing of our country.”
By Igor Korotcheko*
Translated By Yekaterina Blinova
August 29, 2009
Russia – Vedemosti – Original Article (Russian)
It’s been 60 years since the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. This happened on August 29, 1949 at the Semipalatinsk test site. Today it’s hard to believe that only four years after the end of the Great Patriotic War [World War II], we succeeded in achieving such a monumental scientific and technological breakthrough, having created in such a short time – in contemporary terms it was just a single presidential term – the industrial infrastructure to build and test. This is the practical meaning of the term ‘authoritarian modernization!’”
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