Late in the 1920s, Stalin began to ban private enterprise, and ordered: "Steel!" In 1986 when Gorbachev took over, Russia produced 161 million tons of steel as against 75 million produced by the United States, 38 by the FRG, and 15 by Great Britain.

Up to 1945, when Japan surrendered after the United States had dropped two "atom bombs" on the aggressor (Pearl Harbor!), ground war had been tanks and artillery, that is, steel, plus the machines producing them (as well as battleships and aircraft)-also steel.

Goebbels unriddled Stalin's "industrialization" and showed as much in his propaganda movies about Stalin's "industrialization"-and Stalin's "liquidation" of prosperous farmers, the largest section of the Russian middle class, engaged in private enterprise. With his "steel," Stalin would occupy Western Europe, and he would "liquidate" its middle class.

No wonder Hitler's party in Reichstag elections in the early 1930s received a plurality of votes, and Hitler became the Reich Chancellor of Germany, a "democratic stepping-stone" to his dictatorship.

The fact is that under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was defenseless, and Hitler abolished it when he came to power-as he had promised to the electorate. His surprise attack on Russia could have been victorious owing to its superior tactical skill and despite all of Stalin's steel, but he loitered for about two months near Moscow and was routed by the Russian Far Eastern and Siberian troops (with a lot of steel in their new tanks and artillery) and a severe Russian winter.

In 1945, the war of steel was over. Nuclear weapons were on. But nuclear powers (including the United States since 1945, Stalin's Russia since 1949, and China since 1964) have been living in peace due to Mutual Assured Destruction. Each nuclear power had secret means of retaliation (such as deeply submerged submarines with nuclear missiles aboard), which nuclear weapons cannot destroy and which would have annihilated an attacker by way of retaliation.

Only superweapons, such as molecular nano weapons, could destroy enemy secret means of retaliation, circumvent thereby Mutual Assured Destruction, and thus annihilate the enemy with impunity.

When war was the war of steel, no spy penetrated Stalin's military secrets of steel. But it was clear to every person of common sense that it was for the production of weapons and of the machines producing them that Stalin wanted so much steel in his country where the output of passenger cars, for example, was infinitesimal, even three decades after Stalin's death in 1953, as compared with Henry Ford's production of them in the United States at the beginning of the century.

Similarly, no spy has penetrated China's labs, developing superweapons. A reader of mine (who asked me not to divulge his name) sent me on July 11, 2004, his three-page e-mail about his attempts, when living in China, to learn something-anything-about China's labs developing superweapons. He works at NASA Glenn Research Center and was excellently received in China. Here is, out of his three-page e-mail to me, the most "penetrating" paragraph:

I talked with a guy who had worked in the military in another city. He said that most secret military projects are carried out in remote areas under the mountains. Essentially, there are huge underground facilities where manufacturing and research is conducted. He said that China's main concern was in hiding the level of technology that they had achieved, thus giving them an advantage militarily.

Of course! In those good old days of the war of steel, tanks or artillery functioned whether or not their production was familiar to the enemy. The secret of today's superweapons is everything. They are to suddenly stun (shashou jian) the enemy who is to surrender unconditionally or are to be annihilated. Hence the secrecy of today's superweapons is protected in Hu Jintao's China more zealously than was the secrecy of steel weapons in Stalin's Russia.

We should infer China's development of today's superweapons rather than expect the stealing espionage/intelligence data from China's labs.

The scale of "nanotechnologization" in China can be gauged from China's media just as the scope of Stalin's "industrialization" was clear from Stalin's media.

"So what?" said Stalin's Western "fellow-travelers." "Industrialization! Do you want Russia to remain a big village?"

A similar reaction comes from Hu Jintao's Western "fellow-travelers":

"What's wrong with nanotechnology?" they ask. "Modernization! Do you want China to stay in the 19th century?"

The trouble was that the scale of the Soviet "industrialization" did not correspond to the needs of the country, producing few passenger cars, for example. A lion's share of it was "steel for war." A lion's share of nanotechnology in China is in the "nano shashou jian" of the West: its annihilation or unconditional surrender.

In 2000 few Westerners have heard of nano weapons. Even in 2004, BBC News (of March 15) reported that 71% of the British had never yet heard of nanotechnology in general, despite its numberless "commercial fields" that have nothing to do with any military applications.

As of 2006, the possibility of molecular nano weapons, described by Drexler (the founder of nanotechnology) in 1986, is officially denied in the United States, and neither Drexler, nor the Foresight Institute he co-founded in 1986, has received a cent from U.S. Congress for nano research.

About five and a half years ago, on Nov. 13, 2000, a Chinese tabloid "Beijing Evening" carried for its mass readers a report whose very title depicted molecular nano weapons: "Tiny Nano Devils Catch the Huge Evil Spirit."

The "Beijing Evening" report enthused over the development of molecular nano weapons in China as Stalin's media enthused in the early 1930s over the gigantic growth of production of tanks and artillery.

Nor was the "Beijing Evening" report intended for pure entertainment. The number of higher school students in China has reached in 2005 that in the United States, and since the population of China exceeds that of the United States four times it can well be expected to be at least four times as large. But what is important? How many students study the development of molecular nano weapons! And here the ratio between China and the United States may easily be millions to zero. The needed resources have been coming in China from Hu Jintao, while the interest, stimulation, enthusiasm of potential and actual students were fostered by "Beijing Evening" way back in 2000.

The Western admiration of Einstein (outside Nazi Germany) was one of the causes of U.S. development of nuclear weapons ahead of Germany and Japan. The U.S. official definition of molecular nano weapons as Drexler's (charlatanic) fantasy is likely to lead to the annihilation of the West or its unconditional surrender.

Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.