Thursday, August 9, 2012

Kenneth Burns, PBS "The War," the Atomic Bomb, Soviet Spies

     I watched the PBS channel tonight, The War, part 8, by Kenneth Burns and Lynn Novick.  This concerned WWII, from April 1945 through the end of the war that summer.  This included the the death of American President Franklin Roosevelt, the fall of Berlin to the Soviets, the suicide of Hitler, the capitulation of the Nazis, the meeting of allied leaders at Potsdam, the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, the the surrender of Japan.
     Because I was also on the internet, I was not paying full attention.  However, I was stuck by one episode.  Upon the death of the American President, Roosevelt, his successor is told for the first time about the development of the A-bomb.  The narrator tells the audience that the atomic bomb was such a secret that the information had been withheld from Vice President Harry Truman, until he became President.  The next scene shows Potsdam, with the chief participants, the new American President Truman, the newly elected British Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, and Soviet Marshall Stalin.  I laughed.  Truman had not been told of the American A bomb, but Stalin had!  Stalin knew of the secret weapon because of the many spies in the American project.  Stalin knew more about it than the new American President Truman.  But this goes unmentioned in the PBS program.  Liberals do not want to hear that there were Soviet spies telling important information to the Soviets.  The liberal view is that there were no spies; and fear of espionage led to McCarthyism and false charges against good liberals.
     But earlier this year Soviet leader Vladimir Putin praised the American atomic spies who supplied the Soviets with the basis of their own atomic bomb.  Suitcases full of secrets, Putin boasted.  But liberals in America promote the myth that McCarthy was paranoid and suspicion of Communism is a psychosis.
Under Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, not only did America develop the atomic bomb, American spies for the Soviets helped to develop the Soviet atomic bomb.
     But to the liberals, McCarthy was crazy and a drunk.  His aide Roy Cohn was evil and deserved to die of AIDS.  And there were no important Soviet spies in the US.
     Liberal Burns, like most liberals, assures the American public that the atomic bomb was such a secret that not even America's Vice President Truman was aware of its existence.  But we know now that Stalin knew of the American bomb, before Truman did.  Thanks to the spies.  

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