…Meantime, Russia’s
conventional military power was undergoing a dramatic transformation in the
course of the war with Germany. In the initial four months of the enemy
advance, most of the old Soviet hardware had been turned into smoking piles of
scrap metal, to the glee of the Nazis. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, came
countless new divisions armed with new, much better tanks and artillery, and
flying new, much better planes. All of this had been the result of Stalin’s
brutal massive quality rearmament program, planned many years in advance and
delivered, under extreme duress, ahead of schedule. (On this important subject
see my entries Preparing For War, posted
on this blog on February 14th, 2011, and especially The Stalin-Hitler Pact, posted on February
18th, 2011.)
Stalin was very proud of
the new generation of Soviet conventional weapons, and believed that they would
give him a decisive military superiority in Europe not only to win the war
against Nazi Germany, but also to impose his political conditions on the
postwar world. His overall strategy was to invite the American troops to Europe
as soon as possible, to fight Hitler, but to send them home even faster the
moment the war ended. Stalin flaunted his trump card with gusto at the Allied
Conference in Tehran at the end of 1943, and there appeared to be no other way
to put him down, except by convincing him that in postwar Europe no Soviet
armor plate would be able to withstand the power of the new American wonder
weapon: the A-bomb. It was certainly not enough to send a signal by conjecture
and innuendo that such an effort was taking place.
The time was pressing.
Soviet scientists had to be shown certain products of the Manhattan Project,
giving them conclusive proof that the latter was serious business in an
advanced stage of development. Otherwise, Stalin would not have believed any
words about it, reasonably dismissing them as a bluff. But how could a
top-classified military project be leaked to an ally who was very much an
adversary, without committing an ostensible act of high treason in the process?
This delicate mission was to be successfully accomplished by the Roosevelt
Administration, through the employ of non-governmental channels some time
before the next Allied Conference in Yalta in February 1945. A number of
American scientists working on the Manhattan Project took part in this awkward,
but vital to the national interests of the United States, mission…
Stalin was eventually
convinced, but, forced to accept the unpleasant fact of an imminent American
atomic superiority, he was not, however, going to take it lying down. On the
contrary, he was determined to make the most out of Russia’s temporary
handicap. As he was told by his scientists, and later underscored by the
terrible reality of the two American atomic explosions over Japan, the shocked
world would immediately condemn these doomsday weapons of mass destruction for
years to come. So, let America get all the credit for unleashing the evil
genie. Even though Russia was going to join the atomic club herself in a few
years, this proud scientific and technological accomplishment was no longer
considered a blessing, but a curse. Ergo, let Russia appear not as an
independent producer of the A-bomb, but as an intended victim of atomic harassment,
armed only in self-defense.
The story of “stealing
the bomb” would kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, it would absolve
Russia from all culpability in the evil design, and it also would
produce the powerful impression of the existence of an efficient international
pro-Soviet Communist network, which would imply that Russia was now wielding a
much greater power than it had in actual fact, and thus enhance her image as a
truly global superpower.
A great effort was
mounted to convert this fiction into virtual reality. The Russians were not
starting from scratch either. They had dates, places, and names of actual
people, involved in the Manhattan Project, with whom they had had that delicate
communication, which I mentioned above. These events were somewhat doctored,
to appear as a series of covert transactions between Soviet spymasters and
American scientists-turned-espionage-agents. With this spin always in mind, all
pertinent information was profusely classified and expertly filed.
These “documents”
became Russia’s gold reserve for the atomic espionage hoax. Naturally, none of
these pieces of “hard evidence” were immediately produced or produced at all
without an absolutely compelling reason. (Most of them were intended for
“sustained release,” others, only for emergency backup.) Instead, a massive
campaign of rumors and innuendo was promptly launched, with the phony evidence
as their source and basis.
(This is the end of Part
II. Part III will be posted tomorrow.)
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