Then and now: FDR's critical Manhattan Project and China's army of engineers
Thursday, November 6, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972.
On October 28, 2008, I received this e-mail from “Dr. Christian Chan” in “Asia”:
Well, as an example of my “obsession,” let me recall that had Hitler begun his war with Stalin a couple of years later and continued to finance the German atomic project as generously as before, he would have possessed the nuclear weapons before the USA would have had them and hence would have possibly possessed the world.
Also, President Roosevelt (a Democrat) could have been similarly called by Chan a Dutch Nationalist Marxist at the head of “millions of leftist traitors and Americans who are consumed by greed.”
But actually, even before Roosevelt took office in 1933, he had endorsed the Hoover administration’s refusal to recognize Japanese conquests in Manchuria. Roosevelt’s firmness led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—and to the unconditional surrender of Japan after the USA dropped two atom bombs on its cities.
Nor should Roosevelt’s role in the liquidation of the Great Depression be forgotten. Roosevelt was inaugurated to his first term in 1933, that is, in the year when Hitler’s Reichstag party received a heavy majority of votes, and he became der Fuhrer. Roosevelt and Hitler died in the same year, 1945 (18 days apart!).
How on earth could Hitler conquer the USA without being first to have atom bombs? He could not land his ground troops even in Great Britain because the latter had a large navy, created for the defense of the British Empire. Hitler’s Germany did not produce a single new weapon (while Stalin’s Russia, considered by the West hopelessly backward, terrified the German troops very early in the war with Katyusha rocket launchers).
Roosevelt supplied England with whatever she needed to fight the war against Germany, which therefore declared war on the USA and thus unwittingly boosted the U.S. Manhattan Project, whose “atom bombs” would have finished off Germany had she not collapsed and had Hitler not committed suicide before the US atomic bombs were ready.
Yes, Roosevelt also supplied Stalin’s Russia with what she needed for the war against Hitler’s Germany. If Stalin had attacked Germany, Roosevelt would have possibly helped Germany. It was vital to prevent the merging of the two countries into a single totalitarian giant. Hitler had told Mussolini that he did not trust Stalin, feared his surprise attack, and hence decided to attack him first.
Let us now turn from the Germany of 1933 to 1945 to the China of 2001 to 2010. The “5-year plan” was a Soviet phrase. The Soviet industry was planned and built as a single military machine. Now, since 1999, the number of undergraduate and graduate students in China has been growing at approximately 30 percent per year, and the number of graduates at all levels of higher education in China has approximately quadrupled in the last six years.
In 2010 (the last year of the current “5-year plan”), there will be substantially more Ph.D. engineers and scientists in China than in the USA.
Let us recall that the population of China (1.3 billion) exceeds more than 4 times that of the USA, expected to be 300 million in 2010. Hence the above figures for China can be multiplied by four.
Also, the number of scientists and engineers in the USA largely depends on the customers’ demand for goods and services. In China the number depends on the maximum growth of the war machine projected by the dictators for the current five years.
Besides, scientists and engineers in non-military fields constitute in China a tiny percentage, compared with those engaged in military fields.
In other words, not only will the Chinese war machine vastly surpass the relevant USA fields quantitatively. The USA may be tragically behind in the development of new weapons. But in contrast to the times of Roosevelt, the Presidents, Vice Presidents, and most members of the Congress in the past decade could not care less.
Hitler never said (no more than did Napoleon) that the world should and would belong to him. Hitler called his teaching National Socialism, where the word “national” stresses its anti-Semitic orientation rather than its global scale.
Marxism-Leninism, socialism, communism were spread by Soviet Russia as a global teaching. But today a quarter of French voters and a third of Italian voters do not vote communist—as they did between the end of World War II and the death of Stalin, followed by the debunking of him. Therefore, Marxism-Leninism is being preached in China domestically only. But surely it sounds more global than National Socialism. Neither Marx nor Lenin was Chinese, nor did they quote any Chinese as being the founder of their teaching or their leader. The word “liberation” in the name “People’s Liberation Army” stresses the goal of Marxism-Leninism to “liberate” the world. Indeed, Russia was “liberated” by Lenin, that is, conquered as a whole, though it consisted of many different nations, conquered in different wars at different historical times, by different tsars.
New weapons? In 1986, Eric Drexler published his book about nanotechnology, introduced the word itself, and founded The Foresight Institute for the research.
In China, the book appeared on the Internet in English with Chinese extrapolations of especially difficult places. Let the young Chinese read become interested, and finally be Ph.D. scientists and engineers in the new field of weapons, superior according to Drexler, to nuclear weapons. My readers ask me how I know that the USA is not ahead of China in the development of nano weapons?
No, I was not in China to watch their development. But I was in the United States. For the first 14 years since the publication of Drexler’s book, many regarded it as just an eccentricity. Then the Congress was to give Drexler’s Foresight Institute allocations for research. By that time, Drexler’s word “nanotechnology” was generally known because nanotechnology had become useful in the production and use of many peaceful goods and services. Some of their commercial producers succeeded in assuring the Congress that nanotechnology is worth congressional allocations only for civilian needs. Eric Drexler is no longer with the Foresight Institute, which he and his wife created in 1986.
As for the old-fashioned war in Iraq, started by President George W. Bush, a 100% pure American, and a staunch Republican at the head of millions of unselfish Right-wing Americans, the war creates the impression that Iraq is not a “Third-World country” of 26 million people, only 32 percent to 37 percent of whom are Sunni, hostile to the invaders, but a giant, fighting the USA and its allies for five years, with the US troops still there, waiting to be withdrawn.