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Chapter 2
The Truman & Eisenhower Presidencies
New President, New Advisors, New Foreign Policy,
Henry
Wallace had powerful political enemies in the Democratic Party, Party bosses
such as Jesse Jones, Party Treasurer and oil millionaire Edwin Pauley, just to
name two, who had caused his defeat as Roosevelt’s running mate. And Truman’s future ‘Assistant Presidential
Advisor’ James “Jimmy” Byrnes was one of them, Byrnes, the Senator from South
Carolina who had been Truman’s mentor in his early years in the Senate. Byrnes’ training from South Carolina was in
the environment of White Supremacy and Segregation. He was responsible for blocking a Federal
Anti-Lynching bill in 1938. He was a
powerful U.S. Senator, and it was said of him, “If you want anything done on
the Hill, see Jimmy Byrnes.” He was
staunchly anti-communist, and thus anti-Soviet Union, which made sense, since
Jimmy Byrnes had been known for breaking up labor unions, and thus was
connected to and the friend of big business on the corporate side. He was not a man for the common man, as
Wallace and Roosevelt had been, nor did he stand for
social justice. Upon Roosevelt’s death,
Truman, admitting his utter ignorance in foreign affairs asked Byrnes, his
former mentor, to fill him in about just about everything, which Byrnes gladly
did. Truman inherited Roosevelt’s
recently appointed Secretary of State, who interestingly, had loyalties toward
big business and thus he too had an anti-communist, anti-Soviet bias. This was Secretary of State Edward Stettinius
(1944-1945), former U.S. Steel Chairman of the Board, who “painted a picture of
Soviet deception and perfidy” to the new President, reinforcing everything
Winston Churchill was now fervently feeding Truman about how Stalin and the
Soviets couldn’t be trusted. Next comes
the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averill Harriman, recently returned from
Moscow, who now “warned that the U.S. was facing a barbarian invasion of Europe
and urged Truman to stand firm” against poor Soviet Foreign Minister
Molotov. Backing up these ‘advisors’ to
Truman was a cabal of “vociferous critics of the Soviet Union,” all
anti-socialist. Ambassador Harriman was
the son of a railroad tycoon. Included
in this cabal were international bankers, Wall Street and Washington lawyers,
corporate executives, including Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, John
Foster Dulles and his brother (future head of the C.I.A.) Allen
Dulles, Nelson Rockefeller, Paul Nitze “and General Motors President Charles
Wilson, who as head of the War Production Board had said “The United States needs a
permanent war-economy.” The start of the Military
Industrial Complex anyone? All these men had served under Roosevelt, but FDR was a
strong enough leader not to let others like this infect his
judgment---truly a great leader, along with Henry Wallace. But Roosevelt was dead, and Wallace was out
of the political picture. All these men who
were now advising and influencing Truman shared a deep hatred of socialism
(naturally, because socialism and communism fostered trade and labor
unions). As seen by Truman’s speech in
1941 on the Senate floor, whereby he called for the U.S. to support either Nazi
Germany or the Russians, depending on who was winning or loosing, so they could
kill each other off, reflected the crass and shallow understanding Truman had
of world affairs and what the people of the Soviet Union had been through, as
well as what the people within the British and French colonies had been
through. Whereas Roosevelt’s and
Wallace’s foreign policy reflected a peace-fostering empathy for these peoples
and nations, Truman’s future foreign policy which was shaping up under these ‘advisors’
was pointing the United States straight toward that of becoming a belligerent,
bullying American Empire, just as we were about to become the strongest
economic and military superpower in the world.
Truman Learns Of The Atomic Bomb
As
Vice President no one, not even Roosevelt, had ever thought to inform Harry
Truman about the Manhattan Project, where the United States was designing and
building the most powerful and devastating “explosive” known to man, the atomic
bomb. Jimmy Byrnes now briefed Truman
about the progress we were making toward building and testing the first atomic
bomb. He also informed President Truman
that being the only nation on earth to possess such weapons would put the
United States in a position “to dictate our own terms at the end of the
war.” Which, by the way, neither
Roosevelt nor Wallace would ever have done, using atomic and later hydrogen
bombs to dictate and bully our own terms against the Soviets and
Stalin---Roosevelt and Wallace knew better than to pursue such brinkmanship.
Truman Meets Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov
On
the 23rd of April, 1945 Truman met with Soviet Foreign Minister
Molotov and verbally blasted the poor Soviet foreign minister for their
supposed breach of the Yalta agreements over Poland, as Molotov tried in vain
to explain Stalin’s and the Soviet position with regards to Poland being a
serious security concern. Molotov
remarked to Truman “I’ve never been
talked to like that in my life.” Whereby Truman snapped back at him, “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.” Molotov
stormed out of the room. Admiral William
Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief military advisor had remarked to FDR that the Yalta
agreement about Poland, due to its wording, would be nearly impossible for the Soviets
to break. As stated before, a
Soviet-friendly government in Poland was essential to their security
concerns. President Truman had just
belligerently trampled all over that. The seeds of mistrust between Washington and Moscow were being sown right
from the start of the Truman Presidency. Most of our top military officers, generals, including Army Chief of
Staff George Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimpson were against Truman’s
antagonistic view and actions toward the Soviets. But Truman wasn’t listening to the voice of
reason. But then, for a brief period of
time, a historic moment in time, Truman (due to Stalin’s response to the
Molotov affair) realized his tough-guy tactics weren’t working. Truman had several meetings with former Soviet
Ambassador Joseph Davies, and “Davies noted how fundamentally the
relationship had changed in the last six weeks with the British [Churchill,
primarily] acting as instigators, and [he] warned that if the Russians decide
that the U.S. and Britain are ganging up on them, they’ll respond by
out-toughing the West…But he assured Truman that when approached with
generosity and friendliness, the Soviets respond with even greater generosity.” A close friend, now deceased, an
ex-Radio Liberty Russian language translator in charge of interviewing Soviet
Russian émigré’s [escaped from the Soviet Union] had told me, “The
Russians are a very warm-hearted people, but they are very security
conscious.” As the war drew
to a close, Truman, unlike Roosevelt and Wallace, had no empathy for what the
Soviet people had been through. Roosevelt had suffered with polio all his life. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had also suffered constantly from his severe back injuries when PT-109 was
blown out from under him in the Pacific during the war, as well as suffering
from Addison’s disease. Kennedy had
developed this empathy for the Soviets shortly before his assassination. At the Commencement Address at the American
University, June 10, 1963 (after the Cuban Missile Crisis) he said this, “No
nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the
2nd World War, at least 20 million lost their lives, countless
millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including
two-thirds of its industrial base was turned into a wasteland, a loss
equivalent of this country east of Chicago.” In this speech by JFK, it showed where
obviously he intended to warm up relations with the Soviets and Nikita
Khrushchev, with the purpose of the two leaders ending the Cold War. This fact is backed up in Roy A. Medvedev and
Zhores A. Medvedev’s book “KHRUSHCHEV: THE YEARS IN
POWER”, p.
102. We’ll get into this a little bit
later.
The War Ends In Europe
Germany
officially surrendered on May 7th, 1945, which meant that the
Soviets, per their agreement with Roosevelt at Yalta, would declare war against
and enter into the war against the Empire of Japan around August 8th,
1945. The most important Conference
between the Allies was coming up, to be held in a
suburb of bombed-out Berlin, Potsdam, in July of 1945. Both Truman and Byrnes were waiting for news
of our first a-bomb detonation in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Truman had arranged for the summit to take
place two weeks later than originally planned, hoping “the bomb” would be
successfully detonated before negotiations with Stalin began. Robert Oppenheimer said, “We were under incredible pressure to get it done before the Potsdam
meeting.” Obviously, Oppenheimer
knew by now this was a political/foreign policy thing, to be used against the
Soviets. This was just the beginning of
Truman’s nuclear brinkmanship aimed at the Soviets. On the 16th of July, 1945, as
Truman was touring bombed-out Berlin, our scientists at Los Alamos detonated
the first atomic bomb.
The Atomic Bombing Of Japan
Curtis “Demon” LeMay’s terribly effective
and destructive fire-bombing of over 100 Japanese cities, reducing them to
charred rubble, was seen by some very key scientists, such as Leo Szilard,
Harold Urey and astronomer Walter Bartky, they saw the atomic bomb as a very
terrifying and frightening next step to what LeMay had done with his B-29
bombers, and the implications terrified them. And so those three sought to have a meeting with
Truman. They knew as all our top
generals and admirals knew by then, including MacArthur, LeMay, Nimitz,
Eisenhower, Admiral King, and George Marshall, that Japan was finished and
ready to surrender, the Japanese only wanted a guarantee for Emperor Hirohito’s
safety. These and quite a few other
scientists from the Manhattan Project didn’t want to see us let the Atomic
Genie out
of the bottle, just to merely bomb an already defeated enemy that was already
putting out serious peace overtures to us through the Soviets. But these three scientists, in their attempts
to see Truman, got shunted off to South Carolina to see Jimmy Byrnes. To quote Leo Szilard, “Mr. Byrnes knew at that time, as
the rest of the government knew, that Japan was essentially defeated. He [Byrnes] was much concerned about the
spreading of Russian influence in Europe, and of our demonstrating and
possessing the bomb would make Russia more manageable.” There’s
the bottom line right there, out of Jimmy Byrnes’ own mouth, that the Truman
administration wanted to drop atomic bombs on Japan as a pretext for ending the
war, but really the real reason was to cower the Soviets, make them more
“manageable.” Another group of
scientists in Chicago drafted a report warning that a nuclear attack [on
Japan]…would institute a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. This report also pointed out that the U.S.
would not be able to maintain a monopoly on nuclear bomb technology and
manufacture. Their warning was
prophetic, but fell on deaf ears, and was squashed from the top by General
Groves. We dropped the first atomic bomb
on Hiroshima with devastating results. But Japan didn’t surrender as Truman had hoped. Japan didn’t even give a hint of
surrendering. We dropped a second atomic
bomb, a plutonium implosion bomb, on Nagasaki on August 9th,
1945. Up to this point we had been
fire-bombing Japanese cities to charred rubble anyway. The Japanese, in reality, didn’t see much
difference between one bomber dropping one bomb and one city destroyed, or 250 bombers destroying one city. But on August 9th, 1945, Stalin,
true to his word to Roosevelt to invade Japan three months after the end of the
war in Europe, attacked the Japanese Kwantung army on three fronts that very
same day, August 9th. An
estimated 700,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, wounded and captured, as
Stalin’s 1.5 million-man Red Army overran Japanese held Manchuria, Korea, the
Kurile Islands and Sakhalin Island. General Masakzu Kawabe, Japanese Army Deputy Chief of Staff said, “It
was only in a gradual manner that the horrible wreckage that had been made of
Hiroshima became known. In comparison,
the Soviet entry into the war was a great shock, because we had been in
constant fear of it, with a vivid imagination that the vast Red Army forces in
Europe were now being turned against us.” Prime Minister Kantaro
Suzuki gives us the real reason Japan surrendered, when he said, “Japan
must surrender immediately or the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria,
Korea, Karafuto [southern half of Sakhalin Island, all of which the Red Army
did take very rapidly], but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of
Japan. We must end the War when we can
deal with the U.S.” On August 14th, with the
Japanese still desperately fighting the Red Army, Emperor Hirohito publicly
called for all Japanese forces to surrender. Looking now a little more accurately, how the Red Army was chewing it’s
way toward the Japanese mainland, their home islands, is it any wonder why the
Japanese so graciously welcomed the U.S. military onto their home islands
without a shot being fired, their sacred homeland? The real reason we dropped those two atomic
bombs on Japan was two-fold. First
reason, to bluster and cower the Soviet Union into doing what we wanted them to
in Europe and Asia, what Stalin called “blackmail” which he said the Soviets
wouldn’t submit to. The second reason
was that Truman was attempting to get Japan to surrender before the Soviet Red
Army invaded Japanese territory. Truman
was trying to worm his way out of the territorial and economic concessions
promised by Roosevelt for Soviet entry into the Pacific war against Japan. Harry Truman was leading the United States
down a potentially suicidal nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. The detonation of those two atomic bombs, to
quote the future Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko’s son Anatoly, who
recalled his father telling him that, “Hiroshima
set the heads of the Soviet military spinning.” Mistrust of Washington in Moscow grew in
leaps and bounds from then on. Nikita
Khrushchev says in his memoirs, “Stalin
had formed good relations with Eisenhower and even better ones with
Roosevelt. He had bad relations with
Churchill and even worse ones with Montgomery….I think Stalin was more
sympathetic to Roosevelt than Churchill because Roosevelt seemed to have
considerable understanding for our problems.” [KHRUASHCHEV REMEMBERS, pp. 220,
222] Roosevelt had empathy for the
Russians and what they were going through. There you have it, right out of Nikita Khrushchev’s mouth.
In
December 1945 Henry Wallace tried to get President Truman to take control of
America’s atomic weapons away from General Leslie Groves who still had
unilateral control over them. It was
Groves who had advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike against any other nation
trying to develop nuclear weapons. Wallace’s concern was aptly portrayed in the classic movie “Dr. Strangelove” by General Ripper (aka
Groves), who launched S.A.C. B-52 bombers at the Soviet Union in a pre-emptive
nuclear strike. In the movie scenario,
after some tense moments, all the B-52 bombers were successfully recalled,
except for one (whose radio was out), which proceeded on to its target inside
the Soviet Union. On the other hand,
back to the present in 1945, the war-torn and devastated Soviets were hoping to
maintain the Alliance, holding all their other Communist allies in check,
hoping in vain for the war-reparation payments Roosevelt had promised. Truman had given the British a whopping 4
billion dollar loan, and the Soviet Union next to nothing, reneging on
Roosevelt’s promise. The Soviet Union
was in tatters, their people in abject poverty, while the U.S., having only
lost 405,000 dead compared to the Soviet Union’s 27,000,000 dead, held
two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves and three-quarters of its invested
capital.
1946
In
March 1946 Winston Churchill, like an old lion coming out of its lair to stir
things up and make trouble, traveled to Truman’s home town to give a
devastatingly incendiary speech accusing the Soviet Union of dropping an “iron
curtain” across eastern Europe. Stalin
responded by accusing Churchill of “being in bed with the war-mongers who
followed the racial theory that only English-speakers could decide the fate of
the whole world.” Wallace, a
month later, attempted to defuse all this incendiary rhetoric and said in a
speech, “The only way to defeat Communism in the world is to do a better and
smoother job of production and distribution. Let’s make it a clean race, but above all a peaceful race in the service
of humanity. The source of all our
mistakes is fear. Russia fears
Anglo-Saxon encirclement [as evidenced by Stalin’s response to Churchill’s
speech], we fear Communist penetration. Out of fear great nations have been acting like cornered beasts, begging
only of survival. The common people of
the world will not tolerate imperialism, even under enlightened Anglo-Saxon
atomic bomb auspices. The destiny of the
English speaking people is to serve the world, not dominate it.” I’s say we’ve been
guilty of the latter over the past 80 years since 1945, dominating it, while
pretending to serve it. But only two
months after Wallace’s speech Truman decided to proceed with two nuclear tests
in the Marshall Islands, “Shot-Able” 20 kilotons, B-29 dropped, and
“Shot-Baker,” an underwater detonation, on 25 July 1946, 21 kilotons, that
destroyed an entire fleet of warships anchored there for the test. Two months later, Henry Wallace in September
1946 at New York’s Madison Square Garden, in a vain attempt to stop the
madness, said this, “The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get. We can get cooperation once Russia
understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British Empire nor
purchasing oil in the Near East with American soldiers. Under friendly peaceful competition the
Russian world and the American world will gradually become more alike. The Russians will be forced to grab more and
more of the personal freedoms, [which by the way Khrushchev was attempting to
give Soviet citizens during the 1950s], and we shall become more and more
absorbed with the problems of social-economic justice…”
1947
Birth Of The Truman
Doctrine
Through
the period of late 1946 through 1947 the British army had been busy fighting
and then successfully overthrowing the popular leftist National Liberation
Front in Greece, and restored the monarchy under a right-wing dictatorship
(which by the way was made up of wealthy businessmen and others who had been
Nazi-collaborators during World War II in Greece, while the communist-partisans
had been fighting the Nazis). This set
off a communist-led uprising which grew into a civil war. The British, being severely strapped for cash,
asked the United States to step in and take over. Harry Truman, not missing a beat, lay out
America’s new vision as the world’s policeman, giving a speech which was to
become the foundation of the Truman Doctrine, which essentially expanded the
Monroe Doctrine (no European or outside influence in the Western Hemisphere) to
encompass the whole world. It linked the
fate of the people and nations of the whole world to the security concerns of
the United States. He used the U.S.
intervention in Greece as a stepping-stone to establishing the Truman Doctrine
as official U.S. foreign policy. We’ll
soon see the apparatus Truman created for enforcing the Truman Doctrine on the
peoples and nations of the world, both during times of peace and war. He said in his speech, “The very existence of the Greek State is today threatened by the terrorist
activities of several thousand armed men led by Communists. At the present moment in world history nearly
every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. I believe that it must be the policy of the
United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation
by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” We have an example of Cause & Effect here. Two months later, Stalin reacts, sponsoring a
Communist coup (May 1947) overthrowing the democratically elected government of
Hungary. The New York Times called this
one correctly when it wrote, “The coup in Hungary is Russia’s answer to
our action in Greece and Turkey. And it
clearly contributed to the Soviet decision [which General George Marshall had previously predicted] to impose a stricter order across eastern Europe.” As seen previously, this was not the original intention of Stalin nor the Soviet Union. Our belligerence had brought the Soviets to these actions.
Birth of the C.I.A.
Now
for “Truman’s Apparatus” for enforcing his Truman Doctrine, which, by the way,
I’ll let Oliver Stone describe for us, as he does a better job. “In July of ’47 Truman pushed through the
National Security Act, which created a vast new bureaucracy headed by the
anti-Soviet hardliner James Forrestal, as this country’s first Secretary of
Defense. The Act also created the
Central Intelligence Agency, which was given four functions, three of them
dealing with the collection of, analysis and dissemination of
intelligence. It was the fourth function
that would prove the most dangerous, a vaguely worded passage that would
allow the C.I.A. to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence
affecting national security as the President saw fit.” The C.I.A. would use that vague wording to
conduct hundreds of covert operations around the world, including more than 80
during Truman’s second term. It’s earliest success was to subvert Italy’s 1948 election
to ensure victory over the Communist Party…democracy was apparently a virtue when it
served U.S. interests. Sometimes
referred to as
Capitalism’s
Invisible
Army
the C.I.A. was truly the beginning
of a new America, but based upon a secret State that would grow exponentially
over the following decades…” [quote from “Oliver
Stone’s Untold History Of The United States.”] To show just how Truman was to use this new “apparatus” we’ll use one
more Oliver Stone quote, considering current events in the Ukraine this one is
a corker, there’s two sides to every story, and Vladimir Putin certainly has his side being reflected
here. “In the summer of ’48, following
the Czechoslovakian coup, Truman approved the dramatic escalation of global
covert action to include guerilla operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe. One project went to creating
a guerilla army code named “Nightingale” in Ukraine, which originally had been
set up by the Nazis in 1941, made up of ultra-nationalist Ukrainians. These groups [in 1948] now wreaked havoc in
the famine-wracked region where Soviet control was loose, carrying out the
murder of thousands of Jews, Soviets and Poles who opposed a separate Ukrainian
state. Beginning in 1949, for five
years the C.I.A. parachuted Ukrainian infiltrators back into the region [i.e.
this occurring between 1949 and 1953!]. To the Soviet mind, it was as if they had infiltrated guerillas into the
Canadian or Mexican borders of the United States, and signaled the lengths to
which the U.S. was willing to go to dislodge Soviet control in their own border
areas and sphere of interests.” [ibid.
THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES]
1949
In
Henry Wallace’s final election bid, which sadly he lost, he said in a speech, “The
people of the world must see that there is another America than the Truman-led,
Wall Street dominated, military-backed group that is blackening the name of
democracy all over the world.” In 1948 Robert Oppenheimer (leading scientist in the Manhattan Project
that developed the first atomic bomb) said, “Our
[nuclear] monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun.” Henry Wallace had previously warned in 1945, “Truman and his group were terribly wrong to
assume that the U.S. would have a monopoly on the bomb.” In September 1949 the Soviet Union
detonated their first atomic bomb.
1950: Cold War Goes Hot, The Korean War
Considering
everything the U.S. was doing, numerous nuclear test detonations (over 300 by
1950), C.I.A. operations (Nightingale anyone?) within the Soviet Union and
around the world, is it any wonder that Joe Stalin wouldn’t desire to push back,
pay-back time, in a serious manner? And
that is exactly what he did. Both the
Soviet-installed dictator in North Korea (Kim Il-Sung) and the U.S. backed
dictator in South Korea (Syngman Rhee) had been itching to unite all of Korea
by force. Stalin gave Kim Il-Sung the
opportunity to strike first. Stalin’s
motives were plain by what he told Kim Il-Sung when he said to him, “The
war was a way to get back at the arrogant behavior of the United States in
Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and especially its decision to form
N.A.TO.” Our “arrogance” under
Truman cost dearly in American lives during a war which never needed to start,
except that we had really riled Josef Stalin, a man not to be trifled
with. We lost 36,516 American lives
during the Korean War, not to mention millions of Koreans and Chinese, both
soldiers and civilians who lost their lives. In this case, Truman took the bait, applying his Truman Doctrine, and
brought the United States into this “Police Action.” Harry Truman was, with his atomic bombs, like
a little boy who had gotten his hands on a .45 caliber six-shooter, and took it
into town to scare all the folks.
By
1947 the U.S. had detonated 13 atomic bombs, and 50 atomic bombs by 1948
(before the Soviets had detonated their first), and 300 atomic bombs by
1950. We were the new American Empire,
the most powerful military and economic superpower in the world. That brings us to Dwight David Eisenhower, after
we look at a few nuclear detonation statistics from the Truman-Eisenhower
Presidencies.
Some of the Nuclear Tests Since 1945
Under Presidents Harry Truman And Dwight Eisenhower
Germany
surrendered 8 May 1945. Intelligence
sources under General Groves concluded Germany didn’t develop an atomic
bomb. However, the War continued in the
Pacific.
“Little
Boy” (uranium bomb) 15
kilotons
dropped on Hiroshima, 8:15am, 6 August
1945
“Fat
Man” (plutonium implosion bomb) 20
kilotons
dropped on Nagasaki, 11:02am, 9 August
1945
With
a yield similar to Trinity, this weapon (“Fat Man”) would be considered a
nominal atomic bomb and provide a blueprint for all nuclear weapons.
11
months later…
“Operation Crossroads”
Carried
out at Bikini Atoll to test the effects of atomic weapons on an unmanned fleet
of WWII ships, from battleships, aircraft carriers to landing craft and
submarines all floating, anchored on the surface around the atoll, total number
of ships, 185, German, Japanese, American.
“Shot Able”
B-29 dropped 20
kilotons
“Shot Baker”
underwater detonation, 25 July 1946 21
kilotons
far greater
damage done
“Operation Sandstone”
purpose: to test new weapons designs. 3 devices using same amount
of plutonium as “Fat Boy”, but “boosted” kilotonage by some means. Two years after Crossroads, authority was
given by President Truman to proceed with Operation Sandstone. This new technology doubled the force of the
bomb using same amount of plutonium as used on Nagasaki. It increased our ability to stockpile nuclear
weapons.
X-Ray 37
kilotons
15 April 1948, 6:17am
Yoke 49
kilotons
1 May 1948
results of Sandstone affected design
of future weapons.
Los
Alamos National Laboratory 2-Division, Sandia Base, located at Albuquerque New
Mexico at Kirkland AFB. Sandia’s primary
purpose was to engineer and manufacture deliverable nuclear weapons. The Sandia Corporation built weapons designed
by Los Alamos. Sandia brought
assembly-line technology and mass-production to nuclear weapons manufacture, to
build the nation’s tactical and strategic bombs.
September 24,
1949 Los
Angeles Times “Truman Says RUSS Have A-Bomb” (coming 5 years earlier than anyone
had predicted) The first Soviet atomic
bomb was set off on 29 August 1949. [considering what
we were doing, can you blame them?]
“Operation Ranger”
January 1951, Nevada Test Site, 5 new
nuclear weapons air-dropped at this new test site.
“Ranger-Able” 1 kiloton
27 January 1951, 5:45am,
air-dropped,
first detonation in U.S. since Trinity.
“Shot-Easy” 47 kilotons
20 April 1951,
structural test survivability
“Item” test 45
kilotons
first use of
tritium “boosting”, kicking yield up from 20-kt, doubling
it to 45-kt
The Hydrogen Bombs
“George Event” large
225 kiloton
weapon used to burn a deuterium capsule,
first of our thermo-nuclear experiments.
January
21, 1950, The Times, “Truman Deciders To OK H-Bomb”
“Mike Shot” Eniwetok
atoll
“wet bomb” using liquid hydrogen
isotopes, physical weight
62 tons.
“Ivy Mike” 10
Megatons
first fullscale H-bomb
The Big One
“Castle Bravo 15
Megatons
28 February 1951, largest U.S. thermo-nuclear device
Fallout scares take place, Bravo crater 1.2 miles diameter
“Upshot Knothole”
Spring
1953, 11
Nuclear Weapons Tests in Nevada test site, code named “Upshot Knothole”
“Encore” 27
kilotons
“Grabble” 27
kilotons
Nuclear canon used, 15
kiloton
25 May 1958, atomic canon
1955, Russian explodes their first
H-bomb. (LA Times)
[source material: “TRINITY
& BYOND: THE ATOMIC BOMB MOVIE” ]
What The World Might Have
Been
In
1948, after a final failed attempt to run for President, Henry Wallace retired
from politics, and went to quietly live on his farm in upstate New York where
he died in 1965. Oliver Stone in his
fine series “The Untold History Of The United States” said, “In an irony that only in American
capitalism could embrace, the hybrid corn company which Wallace founded in 1926
was sold in the late 1990s to Dupont Corporation for more than 9 billion
dollars, a bittersweet reminder to those who repeatedly denigrated “Mr. Smith
Goes To Washington” as naïve and Communist. He remains one of the unsung heroes of the
Second World War, showing the world a kinder vision of America…What might have this country become had
Wallace succeeded Roosevelt in April of ’45 instead of Truman? Would no atomic bombs have been used in World
War II? Could we have avoided the
nuclear arms race and the Cold War [including both the Korean and Vietnam
Wars]? Would Civil Rights and Women’s
Rights have triumphed in the immediate post-war years? Might colonialism have ended decades earlier,
and the fruits of science and industry been spread more equitably around the
globe? We’ll never know. “Some have spoken of the American Century, I
say that the century on which we are entering, the century which will come out
of this war, can be and must be the Century of the Common Man. If we really believe we are fighting for a
people’s peace, all the rest becomes easy.” [direct quote from Henry A. Wallace’s “Common Man” speech as quoted by Oliver Stone] Far from being a Communist as his detractors,
Truman and his cabal of thugs liked to libel him, Henry A. Wallace was a
capitalist, of the gentlest and most loving kind, the kind that looks after the
poor and needy. Very interestingly,
Jesus Christ at his 2nd coming will usher in Henry Wallace’s vision,
but it will become the Millennium of the Common Man. But, very sadly, before that event can occur
mankind has to face and go through the Armageddon Harry S. Truman has aimed us
toward. To read several Biblical
articles about those two events, see:
To read a prophetic article about one
of our enemy-turned-allies,
see,
http://www.unityinchrist.com/prophecies/2ndcoming_4.htm
To read about the coming Millennium of the Common
Man, see,
http://www.unityinchrist.com/kingdomofgod/mkg1.htm
President Dwight David Eisenhower
In
September 1957 the Soviets launched their huge 6-ton Sputnik-2. I remember, I was
11-years old. It carried that dog Liaka
into orbit around the world. But,
unknown to most at the time Nikita Khrushchev reached out to Eisenhower, where
he called for “a peaceful space competition and an end to the Cold War.” But Ike, obviously under huge hidden
political pressure from within the military-industrial complex, which was big
business, Eisenhower instead spoke publicly about America’s huge military superiority. He said, “We
are well ahead of the Soviets, both in quality and quantity.” He ought to know. The huge military-industrial complex which,
founded by Harry Truman’s efforts, virtually mushroomed under Eisenhower’s
8-years in office (1952-1960). By 1961
the Russians had only 15 respectable ICBMs to the United States’ over 400
land-based ICBMs, included in the total number of nuclear weapons the U.S. had,
which was around 22,000 by the end of Eisenhower’s watch. This included multiple thousands of Strategic
Air Command B-52 bombers, and the world’s first nuclear powered Polaris
missile-firing submarine, the U.S.S. George Washington (carrying 16 Polaris
nuclear-tipped missiles which could be launched while submerged). But Eisenhower sounded a chilling warning to
the American people and their next President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, about
the Military-Industrial-Complex he had helped feed and build up. (On Ike’s watch our nuclear arsenal had gone
from just over 1,000 to over 22,000 nuclear weapons!) He said this on a national television
broadcast just before leaving office, “We have been compelled to create a
permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Three and a half million men and women are
directly engaged in the defense establishment. The influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every
city, every State House, every office of the Federal government. In the councils of government we must
guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex. We must never let the weight of this
combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” All of Eisenhower’s successors in the White
House, just as Truman before him, who set the leading example by threatening
America’s enemies, real and imagined, threatened the Soviet Union with nuclear
destruction if they don’t bow to our demands. This list of Presidents includes Kennedy (to some degree, although he
totally reversed himself in that regards), Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter,
Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, no one’s left off the list of shame since,
and including Truman the Big Daddy of them all. One very scary thing Eisenhower did, is that he
delegated to theater commanders and to lower level commanders the authority to
launch a nuclear strike if they believed circumstances mandated it and they
were out of direct contact with the White House. The movie “Dr.
Strangelove” highlighted this
idiotic and frightening delegation of authority over nuclear launch authority,
and its potential ramifications. The following lines taken from the movie Dr. Strangelove demonstrate this pretty clearly, which the whole
movie does, “General Turgidson, I find
this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that
I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.” [spoken by the
President---General Turgidson answers next] “Ah, that’s right, Sir, you are the only one authorized to do so, and
although I hate to judge before all the facts are in it’s beginning to look
like General Ripper exceeded his authority.” [President speaks] “It certainly does, far beyond the point I would have
imagined possible.” [General Turgidson speaks
again] “Well perhaps you’re forgetting the provisions of ‘Plan-R’ Sir.” [President speaks again] “Plan-R?” [General Turgidson] “Plan-R is an emergency war-plan in which a lower-echelon
commander may order nuclear retaliation after a sneak attack, if the normal chain-of-command has been
disrupted. You approved it Sir, you must
remember.” [Next scene, Slim Pickin’s
riding “the bomb” down to the Russian target waving his cowboy hat wildly,
yelling a Texas war-hoop, and then the detonation, World War III has begun.]
At The End Of His
Presidency It Was Eisenhower’s Desire, Along With Khrushchev, To End The Cold
War—What Happened?
U2 Crash, 1 May 1960
“In
May 1960, President Eisenhower had planned to culminate his dream of a “Crusade
for Peace” with the ultimate summit conference with Nikita Khrushchev in
Paris. On May 1, 1960, a CIA spy plane,
a high-flying U-2 with Capt. Francis Gary Powers at the controls, overflew the
Soviet Union from Pakistan and made a crash-landing at Sverdlovsk in the heart
of Russia and by so doing wrecked the hopes of the summit conference and the
dreams of Eisenhower and Khrushchev, two old warriors who understood each
other.
As a footnote to that important event,
it was Allen Dulles himself, giving testimony before a closed-door session of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who said positively that, despite
Soviet claims, the Powers U-2 had not been shot down but had descended because
of engine trouble. This important
statement by Dulles has been little noted by the press, and little thought has
been given to exactly why that aircraft had “trouble” at such a critical
time. Later, Eisenhower confirmed that
the spy plane had not been shot down by the Soviets and had indeed lost engine
power and crashed-landed in Russia. Its
unauthorized flight was another part of the Cold War game designed to deny
President Eisenhower his Crusade for Peace.” [“JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the
Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy” p.100, par. 2-3]
Capt.
Francis Gary Powers, pilot of the U-2, landed alive and well and in possession
of a number of most remarkable identification items, survival kit materials,
and other things spies are never allowed to carry. Did he know he had them in his parachute
pack, or did someone who knew the U-2 had been prepared to fail put them there
to create his “CIA spy” identity?”…The CIA’s U-2 spy plane [flown by Francis
Gary Powers]… suffered engine failure that may have been induced by a
pre-planned shortage of auxiliary hydrogen fuel.” [ibid. text next to photos of
Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 spy plane opposite page 60.] “Eisenhower had had high hopes for his
Crusade for Peace, based upon a successful summit conference in Paris during
May 1960, and a postsummit invitation to Moscow for a grand visit with
Khrushchev. The visit to the Soviet
Union was to cap his many triumphant tours to other countries, where the
ever-popular Ike had drawn crowds of more than one million.
In preparation for the summit and its
theme of worldwide peace and harmony, the White House had directed all aerial
surveillance activity (“overflights”) of Communist territory to cease until
further notice and had ordered that no U.S. military personnel were to become
involved in any combat activities, covert or otherwise, during that period.” [ibid. p. 124, par. 4-5, sel. parts]
In
spite of this huge nuclear armed military war machine that had been built up
during the Truman and then Eisenhower Presidencies, Ike had finally heeded
Nikita Khrushchev’s call for world peace. Both Ike and Nikita Khrushchev wanted to back down militarily and foster
world peace. The CIA and those in
control of it behind the scenes didn’t want that to occur, they had other plans
they had been working on, in Southeast Asia since the end of 1945. The apparently planned flameout of Gary
Power’s U-2 spy plane derailed Ike’s and Nikita’s plans to end the Cold War,
and put the CIA’s plans for a major war in Southeast Asia right back on track,
or so it would appear.
Nuclear Tests Since 1952
Under President Dwight Eisenhower
“Operation Wigwam”
500
miles off the coast of San Diego, California Operation Wigwam, a 30 kiloton
device was suspended 2,000 feet underwater on a cable from a barge (first real
nuclear depth-charge, for all you subsailors).
7
months prior to Redwing the Soviet Union demonstrated their ability to deliver
thermonuclear weapons by strategic bombers [Tu-95 Bear bombers] tipping the
balance of power in their favour. [Really? That’s what
the U.S. military and government wanted us to believe. We in S.A.C. had way more B-52s than the
Soviets had of Tu-95 Bears, multiple thousands more.]
“Operation Redwing”
Operation
Redwing Pacific Proving Grounds, 17 nuclear tests to test high-yield
thermonuclear devices (H-Bombs).
“Cherokee Event” 3.8
Megatons
very first
H-bomb dropped by U.S. aircraft (B-36), 21 May 1956
“Tewa Event” 5 Megatons
20 July 1956
“Operation Plumbob”
1957,
24 Nuclear Tests in the Nevada Test Site (desert)
“Hood Event” 74 kilotons
device suspended 1,500 feet above desert floor [totally nuts, testing
with U.S.
soldiers near it.]
“Rainier Event” 3 kilotons
first fully
underground weapons test by U.S. 790 feet below Mount
Rainier, Nevada Test
Site.
“Operation Hardtack”
1958:
Pacific Proving Ground, 35 nuclear tests (as many as had been fired in all
previous Pacific tests)—(if that didn’t make the Soviet nervous, nothing
would). By now, nuclear weapons tests
were perceived as Saber Rattling [which it had been
since Truman set off the first two nuclear weapons over Japan, btw], increasing
the international tensions that could lead to all-out nuclear war. [Nikita S. Khrushchev was Premier over the
Soviet Union at this point in time, struggling to get Soviet food production
and consumer goods going domestically, and struggling to get a degree of
democratic reforms into Russia, unseen since during the Stalin years, having
just de-Stalinized the Soviet Union, freeing 13 million innocent Russians from
the Gulags and shutting them down, and desiring peaceful co-existence between
the Communist system in the Soviet Union and American democratic
capitalism.] Against mounting pressure the U.S
still believed that these weapons were vital, and were the only counter-weight
to offset superior Soviet manpower [the massive Red Army]. The Soviets having just completed an
elaborate series of atmospheric tests, were now likely
to make a move to renounce testing, knowing full-well that the U.S. was
involved in a massive operation, Operation Hardtack.
“Cactus Event” 18 kilotons
first two
missile-borne high altitude detonations
“Teak” 3.8
Megatons
“Orange”
using von
Braun’s Redstone rocket
“Argus
experiment”, three 1 kiloton tests in the South Atlantic, detonating them 300
miles above the earth.
Nikita
S. Khrushchev comes to full political power four days later [1958], and the
Soviet Union announces it is suspending further nuclear tests. The U.S. branded it a propaganda move, but in
reality, studying Soviet history of the 1950s, it was a sincere move on Khrushchev’s
part. Eisenhower agrees to put a hold on
testing on the part of the U.S. of atomic and hydrogen weapons for 1-year. A two-year moratorium on weapons testing
existed.
Under President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Then,
in 1961 secretly, the Soviets began designing weapons of mass destruction, with
the 57 megaton bomb, aircraft deliverable (via Tu-95 Bear bombers). [They were probably aware of the fact that
the U.S. was mass-producing nuclear bombs and warheads at Sandia Corporation in
Albuquerque, New Mexico.] On 30 October 1961, the Soviet Union, on Novaya
Zymlya tested a monster hydrogen bomb, at 57 Megatons.
“Operation Dominic”
Pacific
Ocean, 360 nuclear tests, testing our Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine launch
systems and submarines, with the new Polaris submerged launched missiles
carrying nuclear payloads.
Subroc
and ASROC submerged launched nuclear-tipped cruise missile/torpedoes, as well
as the development of the Mk 45 nuclear torpedo of 11 kiloton yield.
Christmas
Island B-52 dropped tests
Johnston
Island tests using Thor missiles testing high altitude detonations again.
“Tightrope” was the last atmospheric test
conducted by the U.S.. Between 1945 and
1962 the U.S. conducted 331 atmospheric nuclear tests.
1961-1962
“…Cuba
and the missile gap when Kennedy was elected, he was told that there was no
missile gap [i.e. that there was parity with the number of our ICBM’s and the
U.S.S.R.’s ICBM’s].” (Dino Briggioni, former C.I.A. photographic interpreter) “Well there was a radical change in our
information on Soviet strategic forces right in that period, 1961, ’62” as a
result of our using earth satellites for intelligence collection. Through the satellite system we could
precisely count the number of Soviet Intercontinental Missile systems and at
that particular time there was 15. The
United States had over 400 ICBM’s. The
missile gap was rapidly becoming a missile gap in our favor.” (Raymond Gartthoff, Brookings Institute) Next a telling quote from
Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev’s son, now a history professor living in
Rhode Island, teaching I believe at Browne University. “And because it was fear, my father’s fear
that if America will know how weak we are, it can provoke them to start the
War.” (Sergei Khrushchev) [Probably
referring to why his father, Nikita Khrushchev, set off that 57-megaton
H-bomb.]
1963
President
John Fitzgerald Kennedy signs the historic Atomic Test Ban Treaty with Nikita
S. Khrushchev (at the time of the Moscow-Peking split due to his de-Stalinization
of the Soviet Union) [one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis] Source material: “TRINITY & BYOND: THE
ATOMIC BOMB MOVIE”
Eisenhower was not allowed to take advantage of the Olive Branch Premier Nikita Khrushchev was holding out to him, for peace and cooperation in space exploration, and for an end to the Cold War. The Eisenhower years would be remembered by most at that time as peaceful and prosperous. It was the age of Rock’n Roll. But I also remember it was also the age of “the Bomb”, and I remember trying to dig bomb shelters in the ground with a neighbor kid. Khrushchev would yet again hold this Olive Branch out to the next President. Let’s see what happens next.
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