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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNuclear Blackmail: How Trump and Putin are Conspiring to Hold the World Hostage
https://washingtonspectator.org/wide-angle-nuclear-blackmail/
A little-remembered magazine interview from 1987 may hold clues about what Trump and Putin are ultimately up to. What was on Trumps mind back then besides dispensing unsolicited foreign policy advice in full page newspaper ads? Nothing less than making a deal with the Soviets to jointly seize the worlds nuclear weapons and thus bring about world peace. He told writer Ron Rosenbaum in an interview for the magazine Manhattan, inc., We approach [the USSR] on this basis: We both recognize the nonproliferation treatys not working, that half a dozen countries are on the brink of getting a bomb. Which can only cause trouble for the two of us. The deterrence of mutual assured destruction that prevents the United States and the USSR from nuking each other wont work on the level of an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange. Or a madman dictator with a briefcase-bomb team. The only answer is for the Big Two to make a deal now to step in and prevent the next generation of nations about to go nuclear from doing so. By whatever means necessary. Ive come to believe this interview, largely forgotten (save for being republished with a new foreword by Slate in 2016) is a missing fossil in the record that explains much of what we are observing today. Let me elaborate further.
Nuclear Scientists and the USSR
After the first nuclear weapons were deployed in Japan in 1945, many of the scientists who helped develop them were shocked and felt deep moral outrage that the United States had killed civilians. In particular, and primarily so that Hitler would not get there first, the Jewish scientists Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein had proposed the bomb project to President Roosevelt. They formed the kernel of a network of like minded scientists who came together under the umbrella of the Federation of American Scientists. In 1946, they published an influential tract titled One World or None, which argued that nuclear weapons must be brought under the control of a global authority; otherwise they felt that proliferation would become inevitable, and as proliferation continued, a fatal deployment or escalation would become inevitable. They argued that the planet must come together as one, or we would risk losing it (none.) Bernard Baruch, a Manhattan financier, drafted a proposal (known as the Baruch Plan) that would have the United States decommission all of its nuclear weapons on the condition that other countries would do the same.
Contributors to One World or None, 1946. (FAS)
The Soviets, fearing it would excessively curtail their sovereignty, strongly opposed Baruchs plan. Instead, the Soviets aligned themselves with a wide array of groups that attracted prominent American scientists like Harlow Shapley from the Harvard Observatory, and organizations like the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. These groups reflected alignment with the KGB and the Communist Party USA in that they sought to undermine American nuclear capacity while also arguing for technology transfer to the Soviets in a bid, they maintained, to level the playing field and minimize risk of conflict. Their efforts led to the nomination of Henry Agard Wallace (Franklin Roosevelts agriculture secretary) to run for president in 1948 under the banner of the Progressive Party. Wallaces platform? Putting an end to what he argued was rampant American expansionism, and promoting rapprochement with Russia both in the name of global peace.
The Influence of Uncle John
John G. Trump in 1979.
In the Rosenbaum interview, Trump emphasizes that it was through his many discussions about nuclear with his uncle, MIT scientist John G. Trump, that he formed his opinions about global nuclear disarmament. Quoting the interview: [Uncle John] told me something a few years ago. He told me, You dont realize how simple nuclear technology is becoming. Thats scary. He said it used to be that only a few brains in the world understood it and now you have a situation where thousands and thousands of brains can easily understand it, and its becoming easier, and someday itll be like making a bomb in the basement of your house. And thats a very frightening statement coming from a man whos totally versed in it. Such a claim, which is not unreasonable, would have fit right into One World or None. John Trump also had direct ties to Soviet activities in America. Nikola Tesla, the famed electrical engineer who died broke in the New Yorker Hotel in 1943, had allegedly developed an electrical death ray super-weapon. The Soviets were keenly interested in this rumored technology, and arranged to purchase Teslas personal papers through an organization called AMTORG, a KGB front operating in New York originally formed by Russian-American industrialist Armand Hammer.
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Nuclear Blackmail: How Trump and Putin are Conspiring to Hold the World Hostage (Original Post)
Celerity
May 2
OP
LastDemocratInSC
(3,658 posts)1. Perhaps the unknown, undocumented discussion in Helsinki
was about having two czars, one for Europe and Asia (Putin) and the other for the western hemisphere (you know who).
Kid Berwyn
(15,185 posts)2. No wonder KGB got their mitts on Traitorump.
They had a future pee-resident who would disarm the United States and take Moscows word they would disarm, too.
The treasonous shadow cast by Putins puppy every day gets thicker, darker and sicker.