Old stuff about the bomb

I just finished reading a true spy story, "Intrepid's last case", about the Russian, Canadian, English and US spy networks.

(INTREPED'S LAST CASE by WILLIAN STEVENSON, BALLANTINE BOOKS, 1983)

It is pretty shocking the things that happened, especially, right after WW11. The allies (US, England, Canada) were bending over backwords to make sure Russia would come into the united nations. Especially the Canadian prime minister, Mckinly Kingsly, who was liberal and very compliant to Russian concerns. Of course, England and US were trying to stay on good terms with the Soviets from the beginning of the war to keep them fighting the Germans rather than surrender or sign a peace treaty in which case they would have a much harder time of it. To contrast this there was a Russian spy Gouzenka who worked in the Russian embassy in Canada who decided to defect and bring all his secrets and infomation about the Russian spy network with him. Kingsly didn't want any part of this and threatened to turn him over to the Russians. Luckily a Britan, Bill Stephenson, otherwise known as Intrepid, who had worked with Bill Donavan during the war as a go between Mi6 and the US, oss, learned about the defection and was able to work with Gouzenko and forestall the action and keep him secluded away.

It turns out there were so many Russian moles in the allied governments that they were able to try to cover up Gouzenko's info and shed doubt about his veracity. It was shocking to read that so many and so powerful Russian spies were enbedded in high places.

The book talks about the Mccarthy era and even though he heightened awareness of the potential threat it worked against trying to uncover the problems as the government agencies were pushed to beleive that Mccarthy was not sincere and truthful and was indicting people who were really inocent of any activity other than maybe having sympathized with comminism in the past. So when the FBI worked to uncover these spies many media sources opined that innocent people were being harrased. Undoubedly there were a lot of innocent people who just had a brief encounter with a communist affileated group and were black balled from their career.

Intrepid works with and has good things to say about J, Edgar HOover. The FBI and Canadian mounted police were diligent in helping the allies cause.

It is astounding what is brought out about the atom bomb secrets or lack there of. During the war there was much traffic of bomb information going to Russia. Many of The scientists working on the project were very liberal and had feelings of sympathy for socailism/communism, and that England and Canada did significant work in nuclear development. Anyway, many of them openly thought that Russia should be given all the information so that it was an even playing field. It was also suggested that by doing this it would elimiate spying. Many of the scientists banded together and formed a group which openly sought this. Of course Russia agreed but nobody pointed out that while we should be open with Russia, Russia certainly was not open with the England, US or Canada. NO way were we able to know anything about what went on in Russia or in the eastern European countries which were being controlled by Russia. It is hard to beleive how naive we were in dealings with Russia. Stalin has to have been the premier cunning tyranical, machiavelian of all time; surpassing Hitler in evil.

The years 1940 thru 1952 saw all essential nuclear bomb info go to Russia. They were able to create thier own weapon shortly after the war. And they were able, actually, to one up the US in the race for the thermo nuke. They had a deliverable hyrogen bomb before we did.