Missile Envy
by Mickey Z.
Dissident Voice
February 12, 2003
“Every government is run by liars and
nothing they say should be believed.”
--I.F. Stone
Two leads from
February 12, 2003:
"International missile experts found that an Iraqi
missile exceeded the maximum 93-mile range allowed under U.N. resolutions, U.S.
Ambassador John Negroponte said Wednesday." (Guardian Unlimited)
"North
Korea has an untested ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States,
top U.S. intelligence officials said Wednesday." (www.cnn.com)
All this missile
envy (plus Colin Powell's imaginary evidence) got me thinking about the first
WMD myth: the purported life-and-death race with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi
scientists he had working on an atomic program of their own. "Working at
Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer,"
writes historian Kenneth C. Davis, "atomic scientists, many of them
refugees from Hitler's Europe, thought they were racing against Germans
developing a 'Nazi bomb.'"
Surely, if it
were possible for the epitome of evil to produce such a weapon, it would be the
responsibility of the good guys to beat der Führer to the plutonium punch.
While such a desperate race makes for excellent melodrama, it bears more
resemblance to the never-ending supply of arms "gaps" produced by
Cold War propagandists than to reality.
In short, the
German bomb effort fell far short of success.
Thanks to the
declassification of key documents, we now have access to "unassailable
proof that the race with the Nazis was a fiction," says Stewart Udall, who
cites the work of McGeorge Bundy and Thomas Powers before adding,
"According to the official history of the British Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS), those agents maintained 'contacts with scientists in neutral
countries.'" These contacts, by mid-1943, provided enough evidence to
convince the SIS that the German bomb program simply did not exist.
Despite such
findings, U.S. General Leslie Groves, military commander of the Manhattan
Project, got permission in the fall of 1943 to begin a secret espionage mission
known as "Alsos" (a name chosen by Groves: Greek for "grove").
The mission saw Groves' men following the Allies' armies throughout Europe with
the goal of capturing German scientists involved in the manufacture of atomic
weapons.
While the data
uncovered by "Alsos" only served to reinforce prior reports that the
Third Reich was not pursuing a nuclear program, Groves (with the help of
Secretary of War Henry Stimson) was able to maintain enough of a cover-up to
keep his costly pet project alive. The criminal concealment of the truth about
the Nazis and their lack of atomic research kept the momentum going in the New
Mexico desert and, according to Udall, "swept it, following Germany's
defeat, onto a path that led to Hiroshima and to the creation of misinformation
that has obscured essential truths concerning the Manhattan Project and the
epoch it initiated."
Where does our
current path lead?
Mickey Z. is the author of The Murdering of My Years: Artists and
Activists Making Ends Meet (www.murderingofmyyears.com)
and an editor at Wide Angle (www.wideangleny.com). He can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net.