Well, if dead people can vote, I suppose some of them may need security clearances as well.

I was aware that Oppenheimer shared credit for the success of the US atomic weapons program during and after WW II, but was not aware of the allegations and controversy surrounding him regarding his close ties to Communists. A wikipedia entry states he was directly contacted by a friend and colleague that offered to put him in contact with another colleague that was sympathetic to Communism and was able to transmit technical data to the Soviet Union, and while Oppenheimer reportedly rejected the request, he also failed to report this solicitation for another year and, when questioned about it, his story supposedly changed, and revolved around trying to keep both men out of trouble... but that is from a Wikipedia entry, that comes with all the uncertainty and bias it's known for.

Apparently Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were working to rehabilitate Oppenheimer's credibility.

The cynical and suspicious side to me thinks this is just the latest virtue signaling attempt by the Biden regime to desensitize Americans to the dangers of Communism and Communists, and to elevate another science-based Communist sympathizer to hero status through revisionist history...but, if anyone with more knowledge than myself has an opinion on Oppenheimer's guilt or innocence regarding the allegations of his ties to Communists, I'm open to learning and changing my mind.

FWIW, when it was announced a few days ago that his security clearance was being restored, I noticed that Oppenheimer's wikipedia page was updated with this news within 24 hours...so someone was ready and rarin' to go with this news.

Apparently there is a new movie about him, due to release this Summer:



https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bK6ldnjE3Y0

[Note: several hyperlinks found at linked website article.]

======================

J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance posthumously restored

By Patrick Hilsman
DEC. 17, 2022 / 10:56 AM


J. Robert Oppenheimer has had his security clearance restored nearly 70 years after it was revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission. File Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy/UPI

Dec. 17 (UPI) -- J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist known as "the father of the atomic bomb," has had his security clearance posthumously restored, U.S. officials announced.

The move comes nearly 70 years after Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission during the anti-communist fervor of the mid-1950s led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm issued the order Friday.

"Today, I am pleased to announce the Department of Energy has vacated the Atomic Energy Commission's 1954 decision in the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer," she said in a statement.

"As a successor agency to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Energy has been entrusted with the responsibility to correct the historical record and honor Dr. Oppenheimer's profound contributions to our national defense and the scientific enterprise at large," she added.

Oppenheimer had faced allegations of being too close to communists since the 1930s. His wife Kitty's first husband was killed fighting for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain and many of his associates fell under FBI surveillance. The FBI believed that a friend tried to make overtures to Oppenheimer during World War II on behalf of Soviet intelligence but was rebuffed.

Regardless of government suspicions, Oppenheimer was given a security clearance to work on America's atomic program in 1943.

During the post-war era, however, Oppenheimer expressed dismay with the American project to build a thermonuclear "super" bomb, or hydrogen bomb, and was accused of trying to discourage scientists from working on the project.

"If super bombs will work at all, there is no inherent limit in the destructive power that may be attained with them. Therefore a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide," Oppenheimer and other scientists wrote in a 1949 letter to the Atomic Energy Commission.

In 1953 the former head of Congress' Joint Atomic Energy Committee, William Liscum Borden, wrote a letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover alleging, without real evidence, that Oppenheimer was most likely a Soviet agent.

In December 1953 his security clearance was temporarily revoked and in May 1954 a board of the Atomic Energy Commission voted 2-1 to revoke his clearance permanently.

"In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer's security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission's own regulations," Granholm said in her statement.

"As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed," she asserted.

The Obama regime released the unredacted transcripts of the Oppenheimer security hearings in 2014.

I haven't made the time to read the transcripts.


==============

DOE releases unredacted transcripts of Oppenheimer security hearings

BY RUSSELL CONTRERAS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

PUBLISHED: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7TH, 2014 AT 7:02PM
UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8TH, 2014 AT 1:43PM

After more than half a century of intrigue and mystery, the U.S. Department of Energy has declassified documents related to a Cold War hearing for the man who directed the Manhattan Project and was later accused of having communist sympathies.

The department last week released transcripts of the 1950s hearings on the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, providing more insight into the previously secret world that surrounded development of the atomic bomb and the anti-communist hysteria that gripped the nation amid the growing power of the Soviet Union.

Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The secretive projects involved three research and production facilities at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington.

The once-celebrated physicist lost his security clearan ce following the four-week, closed-door hearing. Officials also alleged that Oppenheimer’s wife and brother had both been communists and he had contributed to communist front-organizations.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said the release of the documents finally lifts the cloud of secrecy on the Oppenheimer case that has fascinated historians and scholars for decades.

“This was a landmark case in U.S. history and Cold War history,” Aftergood said. “It represents a high point during anti-communist anxiety and tarnished the reputation of America’s leading scientist.”

The Energy Department had previously declassified portions of the transcripts but with redacted information.

Aftergood, who had only scanned the hundreds of pages of newly declassified material, said the documents provided more nuanced details about the development of the atomic bomb, debates over the hydrogen bomb a nd reflection on atomic espionage.

The documents also show how unfairly Oppenheimer was treated immediately following World War II, Aftergood said.

Most of the material would be of more interest to scholars because of the inside debates and discussions, Aftergood said.

After the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer served as director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study until he retired in 1966.

President Lyndon B. Johnson later tried to erase the embarrassment of Oppenheimer’s treatment by honoring him with the Atomic Energy Commission’s Enrico Fermi Award in 1963.

To see the transcripts, go to this link:

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/


Here is an article about the release of the transcripts by DOE historian Terry Fehner, posted on DOE’s website:

In December 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission suspended the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, perhaps the most well-known American scientist of the twentieth century. After a four-week, closed-door hearing in April and May 1954, his clearance was formally revoked.



This part of the original press release from the Atomic Energy Commission announcing the publication of the redacted Oppenheimer transcript in 1954 | Photo courtesy of the Energy Department.

In June 1954, the Commission published a redacted version of its hearing transcript under the title “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board.” Now, 60 years later, the Department of Energy has re-reviewed the original transcript and is making its full, original text available to the public.

Oppenheimer possessed exceptional abilities as a physicist, administrator and leader. He built and directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Manhattan Project effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. He was a key figure in the U.S. effort to establish international control of atomic energy after the war, and as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s principal advisory committee, he greatly influenced the agency’s course in its formative years.

At the same time, his connections to left-leaning individuals and groups in the 1930s and early 1940s raised questions about his loyalty. Oppenheimer belonged to several organizations infiltrated or dominated by communists, and his brother, wife and former fiancé had been communists.

Even after he became involved in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer continued to associate with members of the Communist Party. Nonetheless, the Army in 1942 and the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947 ruled favorably to grant Oppenheimer’s clearance. An FBI investigation in 1944 found no reason to revoke his clearance.

With the onset of the Cold War, however, Oppenheimer’s considerable influence on nuclear policy — along with heightened tensions and fears of widespread communist subversion — brought renewed scrutiny of Oppenheimer as a possible security risk.



J. Robert Oppenheimer

Operation Candor

In a February 1953 report to recently elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a State Department disarmament panel headed by Oppenheimer recommended “a policy of candor toward the American people” regarding the danger of nuclear weapons, with a straightforward statement of the facts — including quantities of weapons and rates of increase. Eisenhower was taken with the idea, which soon became known as Operation Candor — although implementing it while maintaining secrecy remained challenging.

Not everyone in government circles had as favorable a reaction to Candor as the President. Lewis Strauss, Eisenhower’s special assistant on atomic energy and soon to be chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and William Borden, executive director of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, opposed any significant release of information that might help the Soviet Union. Both men also distrusted Oppenheimer for his opposition to the development of thermonuclear weapons and the creation of a second weapons laboratory. They saw attacking his security record as a way to attack Candor.

Borden left the Joint Committee at the end of May 1953, devoting most of the last few months of his time there to the Oppenheimer case, examining and re-examining the Oppenheimer security file. Separately, Strauss confided to an FBI official that Oppenheimer may not have given up his communist sympathies, and in early June he asked the FBI to send him the bureau’s summary of the Oppenheimer file.

In early November 1953, Borden — acting as a private citizen — sent a letter to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stating that, in his opinion, “based on years of study of the available classified evidence,” Oppenheimer “more probably than not . . . is an agent of the Soviet Union.”

Borden did not back up his claim with any solid evidence, but these were serious charges and Hoover felt compelled to inform the White House. Deeply troubled by the news, Eisenhower immediately sent for Strauss and directed that “a blank wall” be placed between Oppenheimer and any classified information. Strauss decided to suspend Oppenheimer’s clearance but not to issue any instructions to the field until he could meet with Oppenheimer, who was in Europe, because of concerns that the scientist might defect to the Soviet Union.

Strauss met with Oppenheimer on December 21 and informed him of the suspension and his right to a formal hearing. Oppenheimer’s resignation was discussed as an alternative to a formal hearing, but Oppenheimer decided that to do so would sacrifice both integrity and honor while leaving the charges unchallenged.


The Oppenheimer Hearing

After weeks of preparation, the hearing convened before a three-person personnel security board headed by Gordon Gray, former assistant secretary of the Army and president of the University of North Carolina, on April 12, 1954. Sessions began at 9:30 each morning and often lasted until well after 5 P.M. Attendance was limited, with usually no more than 15 people in the room. The list of 40 witnesses included two former chairmen and three former commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission, several members of the Commission’s General Advisory Committee, Nobel laureates, academic colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, leading American scientists, and former Army security officers.

Oppenheimer freely admitted to all but three of the charges. One of the three remaining allegations could not be substantiated, but the other two were the focus of the board’s deliberations and would determine Oppenheimer’s fate.

The first involved obstruction of the development of the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer’s opposition to thermonuclear weapons in 1949 on moral and technical grounds was well known, but there was little to indicate that Oppenheimer had obstructed development after President Harry Truman had authorized it. And it proved impossible to link his lack of enthusiasm for the hydrogen bomb with suspicions of his disloyalty.

The second disputed allegation involved Oppenheimer’s apparent lack of veracity in reporting and recalling the 1942 incident in which he had been the subject of a probe by a Soviet official through a close friend, Haakon Chevalier. Oppenheimer did not report the incident until the following year when he was at Los Alamos, and when he did he was not entirely forthcoming, apparently trying to protect not only Chevalier but also fellow scientists and his brother Frank. Later in 1946, when he was interviewed by the FBI, he repudiated his earlier version as a “complicated cock-and-bull story.”

Three weeks following the conclusion of the hearing, the personnel security board recommended against restoring Oppenheimer’s security clearance in a two to one decision. The board found Oppenheimer loyal and discreet but nevertheless a security risk. On June 28, in a four to one decision, the Commission made the final decision to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance.


The Transcript

Although Atomic Energy Commission security regulations provided for closed hearings, Strauss, through FBI wiretaps, learned that Oppenheimer and his counsel were considering releasing excerpts from the transcript most favorable to his cause. In an atmosphere of mutual distrust, Strauss obtained approval from the other commissioners to release the entire unclassified version of the transcript to the public on June 16, 1954.

The transcript, covering the entire history of nuclear development since 1942, provided significant insight into the previously secret world of the atomic energy establishment. The debate over the hydrogen bomb and much other previously classified information and activities were outlined in the transcript in vivid detail. As one journalist remarked at the time, “The Oppenheimer transcript is Operation Candor.”

The transcript that the Department released this week contains the full text, including all restored deletions, in the transcript’s original format. The transcript is being made available by the Department’s Office of Classification in collaboration with the Office of History and Heritage Resources on the OpenNet site hosted by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information. Produced in 19 volumes, the transcript is arranged in such a way that pages from which information was deleted in the published version are easy to locate with the deleted information readily identifiable.

He probably should have his security clearance restored...he was basically a victim of the red scare of the times. It is true that he had some interest in communism as a student, knew quite a few GDC's, and his brother was a commie, but Oppenheimer himself proved loyal. His big crime was irritating the military/industrial complex...Oppenheimer was haunted by the bomb and the rush for more destructive weapons.

Oppenheimer: "Let's build this bomb!"

Trinity/boom/mushroom cloud

Oppenheimer: "Oh, my God, what have we done??"

philosophicalmasturbationVishnuIamBecomeDeath.

Like a guy visiting a prostitute to get laid, who gets laid and then wails "What have I done?!"

What you did, Bob, was to get the best pussy the US gov't could buy for you, and there is no way you didn't know what was going to happen when you blew your wad.

Oppenheimer is not a sympathetic character. While certainly exceptional as a scientist, when you get right down to it, ol' Bob was just your typical hypocritical commie. His "morality" kicked in only after he had his fun little party on Uncle Sam's dime.

quote:

Originally posted by Modern Day Savage:

FWIW, when it was announced a few days ago that his security clearance was being restored, I noticed that Oppenheimer's wikipedia page was updated with this news within 24 hours...so someone was ready and rarin' to go with this news.

Well, that's not unusual at all. Wikipedia typically updates pretty quickly in regards to current events.

Dr. Edmund Teller was the driving force behind removing Dr. Oppenheimer. It was due to Dr. Oppenheimer’s opposition to developing thermonuclear weapons. With Dr. Oppenheimer out of the way, Dr. Teller went full speed ahead giving us Ivy Mike and later the monumental screwup called Castle Bravo, and finally getting to deliverable multi-megaton warheads. This led to nuclear saber rattling and near catastrophes (e.g., Able Archer, Cuban Missile Crisis).

And Dr. Sakharov invented a completely different way to detonate a Soviet thermonuclear bomb, so our having them, thanks to Drs. Teller and Ulam, was a foil to the Soviets’ H-bomb.

While I’m not overly sympathetic to Oppenheimer for some of the reasons already stated, I do find some significant parallels to his experiences and the current cancel culture we are seeing now. I find today’s cancel culture to be very much an extension of the McCarthyism that took hold over our country. I find it very disconcerting that Oppenheimer’s tremendous scientific and engineering accomplishments so quickly were forgotten about by many in power at the time. While there certainly were some valid concerns about his opinions and connections, I have some concerns about the degree to which he was vilified by many. I also think that restoring the security clearance of a long since dead scientist is a pointless exercise and think this whole things to be more than just a little silly.

Although the Left likes to try to convince everyone that the “Red scare” was baseless and did nothing but oppress and tarnish the reputations of innocents, the simple fact is that there was plenty of reason to be afraid of Reds both within and without the US. Yes, there were excesses, baseless allegations, and violations of civil rights, just as happened to many others for other misdeeds and supposed misdeeds.

But there were also many sympathizers acting on behalf of the Communist Soviet Union, to include actual spies who stole and revealed some of our most critical military secrets, and not just how to build nuclear weapons. When rumors first started circulating in the scientific community about nukes, the first reaction of Soviet scientists was to dismiss them as “impossible,” and possibly a disinformation campaign to prompt the USSR into wasting effort and resources on a useless exercise. It was only after it became obvious through the reports of spies that the US and Britain were serious in their efforts to accomplish the task that the Soviets realized that it was likely to be possible and started playing catch-up. And although the basic ideas of how to create a nuclear explosion were well known long before it actually occurred, the technical details of how to make it happen were enormously difficult and were why the Manhattan Project took as long as it did at tremendous cost and through the efforts of the most brilliant minds on the planet.

Some of the Soviet spies and agents of the era were exposed, but certainly not all. Support for the Soviets at the highest levels of the US government started well before the war, and didn’t end with the descent of the Iron Curtain across eastern Europe. Heck, there are people in the West today who believe that the original “Uncle Joe” (Stalin) was a fine fellow who has been unfairly smeared by the Radical Right, and who should serve as an example of how the US and other democracies should be run today.

Did Oppenheimer deserve to lose his clearance? I can’t say and don’t have the time or ambition to make my own decision today, but there were plenty of people at the time who should never have been given one in the first place. As one author pointed out, McCarthy was right: He was a vile man who used his position and power for his own political purposes, and much of what he addressed was already revealed before he started stirring the pot, but he wasn’t wrong about the basics. There are any number of good books about all that, see below.

What I don’t have is any sympathy for Oppenheimer or anyone else—then or now—who did not or does not recognize the threat to humanity that Communism represents. It was clear then. It is clear now.

A post from 2020. ==============

A few books about the sort of people Sanders and his ilk admire and the sort of society they would like the U.S. to become:

KGB: The Secret Work Of Soviet Agents; John Barron
KGB Today: The Hidden Hand; John Barron
Special Tasks (murder and espionage by the KGB); Pavel Sudoplatov
The Haunted Wood (espionage in the US); Weinstein & Vassiliev
Spies (the rise and fall of the KGB in America); Haynes, Klehr & Vassiliev
* Mao; Chang & Halliday
* Reds (Communism and McCarthyism); Ted Morgan
* The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire; David Pryce-Jones
* The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia; Tim Tzouliadis
The Sword and the Shield; (archival history of the KGB); Andrew & Mitrokhin
The World Was Going Our Way (archival history of the KGB); Andrew & Mitrokhin
Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason; Christina Shelton
* Black April (the fall of South Vietnam); George Veith
Circle of Treason (espionage by Aldridge Ames); Grimes & Vertefeuille
* Iron Curtain (the “crushing” of Eastern Europe); Anne Applebaum
Why We Were in Vietnam; Norman Podhoretz
The Soviet Biological Weapons Program; Leitenberg & Zilinskas
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal; Ben Macintyre
A Very Expensive Poison (murder of Alexander Litvinenko); Luke Harding
* The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991; Martin Malia
Bureau of Spies; Steven Usdin
VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America; John Haynes and Harvey Klehr
Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History; Frank Close
Betrayal in Berlin; Steve Vogel
In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage; John Haynes and Harvey Klehr
The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History; David A. Vise
* Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall (life in East Germany under the control of the security service); Anna Funder
Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster [sic] (autobiography of the head of East Germany’s Foreign Intelligence Service); Markus Wolf with Anne McElvoy


* Most of the books listed are about espionage, but the ones with asterisks are more about Communist socialism in general. And although it’s a novel based on her personal experiences in the early Soviet Union, the true classic is We the Living by Ayn Rand. I read that long ago shortly after Atlas Shrugged, but when I tried rereading it a few years ago it was so depressing that I gave up after a few pages.

Some idea of the benefits the USSR got from its nuclear spies are clear from reading these two books:
The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, both by Richard Rhodes.

And dont forget Werner Von Braun, the Nazis favorite rocket man. Whom we embraced after WWII despite his technology of dropping V1s and V2s on London.

Oppenheimer was a goddamn commie. Period.

Even commies build nuclear bombs.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
And dont forget Werner Von Braun, the Nazis favorite rocket man. Whom we embraced after WWII despite his technology of dropping V1s and V2s on London.

I think it was use of slave labor that later became an issue.

However, right after WWII some (many?) high level officials realized how dangerous the USSR would become and made decisions that are now closely scrutinized.

"Operation Paper Clip" tells about bringing over German scientists, first to Fort Bliss and then to Huntsville.

https://www.amazon.com/Operati...ipbooks%2C153&sr=1-1

quote:

Originally posted by Sigmund:
I think it was use of slave labor that later became an issue.

“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Werner von Braun.” — Tom Lehrer

Operation Paperclip is an informative book, but I got tired of the author’s constantly prating about how the Nazis were bad: Okay, I got that the first dozen or so times, and I suspect that anyone who would read a book like that is probably already a bit more than familiar with that fact.

And as not too much could have been made immediately after the war about von Braun’s involvement in dropping high explosives on defenseless civilians (even though the Germans started that practice—except for the Japanese, of course), his use of slave labor became sort of a fallback issue somewhat later.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
And dont forget Werner Von Braun, the Nazis favorite rocket man. Whom we embraced after WWII despite his technology of dropping V1s and V2s on London.

I delivered Dr. von Braun’s The Washington Post newspaper in the mid-1970s. He had a very elaborate observatory in his backyard, very near a local area of darkness, the Virginia Theological Seminary. My route had me dropping his paper about 0500, but one day he was waiting on something in the morning before sunrise and spoke a few encouraging words to me, something like “Hard at work early, eh? You do a good job. Keep it up.”

It wasn’t until later I learned about the V weapons and building huge facilities by working the enslaved to death.

I get that it was in the best interest of the US to snag Von Braun after the war. But it was the hailing of him in later years as a hero is what I found objectionable.
And apologies to the OP for shifting the topic from Oppenheimer to Von Braun.

History corrects itself

Class, let’s begin with a pop quiz. I hope you have been doing your homework and reading.

What is missing in this particular government action?

Means Motive Opportunity

Choose the best answer and explain why.

Pass your quiz to the person on your LEFT to be graded.

Begin.



My quiz answer was motive. The government did not share its motive in restoring a clearance, absent the desire to correct the historical record. The number of people who even know the story is quite small. Those who know are likely split on what is correct. The truth can never be known today. Why then, what motive does the government have?

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
And dont forget Werner Von Braun, the Nazis favorite rocket man. Whom we embraced after WWII despite his technology of dropping V1s and V2s on London.

The U.S. stole and put a gun to a LOT of scientists heads from NAZI Germany. Come work for us or die.
Shipped technology/materials and scientists to Wright-Patterson AFB, many of which worked for Air Force Research Lab including Werner Von Braun. Here's a NASA link discussing his work for the U.S.

quote:

Originally posted by 4MUL8R:
Why then, what motive does the government have?

It’s a direct slap at the Right in support of the Left. Although it may not be spelled out in so many words, it’s a way of saying, “This man was treated unfairly because of the Republican-generated hysteria about a nonexistent threat from imaginary Communists, just like happened to others who were persecuted by McCarthy and his ilk.” It doesn’t matter if the average person can tell Oppenheimer from Opie Taylor, enough will remember McCarthyism and the “Red scare” and the injustices, real and imagined, to think, “Oh, yeah; all those terrible things that Republicans and others on the Right did to those poor people.”

It’s a relatively minor shot from the Left, but it serves to keep people reminded of what they don’t want forgotten, just as I expect to hear about Trump and January 6th for the rest of my life.

As for von Braun and the others that the US brought here to work on our projects, they hardly had to be forced at gunpoint. They were going to a situation that was far better than they could expect in defeated Germany, not to mention that many others had been in fact forcibly kidnapped by the Soviets: “Come with us or stay here and starve because you’ll have no job, and you might get to join your buddies in the East.” “Hm …. Let me think.”

If it hadn’t been for the obvious fact that the Soviets wanted to continue the war against the West by political means, the history of the postwar period could have been entirely different. As it was, the US disarmed to a degree that wasn’t matched by the USSR in the slightest, and paid the military price just a few years later in Korea. If the Soviets had adopted the same policies and made it clear that they had had enough of war and wanted to embrace peace and just go back to murdering their own people, there would have been no need to do anything with the German scientists and technicians except treat them as the criminals many of them were.

And yes, my summary is somewhat simplistic and distorted, but close enough to the truth for me.

I would highly recommend American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin for anyone unfamiliar with this subject. It's a long book, but fascinating and it covers this material in explicit detail.