Victor Davis Hanson on the White House leaks. This is the biggest breach of national security since the Rosenbergs gave Stalin the bomb. And it was done deliberately for no reason other than to burnish a president’s reputation in an election year. It should have exactly the opposite effect, except the media remains complicit in it.
Speaking of which, did David Plouffe lie yesterday when Chris Wallace almost had to water board him to get a “yes or no” answer as to whether the president declassified this material so it could be fed to the press?
His answers on the administration’s handling of leaks of national security information were so rehearsed, clumsy and full of forced distractions and faux frustration that if this interview at the Fox studio had been conducted by law enforcement instead of Chris Wallace, Plouffe would have been told he was going for a ride downtown to the police station for further questioning. The administration has something to hide. Plouffe could not have been more parsed, poorly prepared or unconvincing.
So maybe some of the media will cover this properly.
Rand, All, the Rosenbergs did not give that criminal Stalin The Bomb. Back in the 1930s and 1940s lots of people were talking about The Bomb. I do remember one day when I was wandering through the Rutgers library (I’m Rutgers 1967 with a degree in physics) picking up a copy of a science magazine with a report on the first laboratory nuclear chain reaction. At the end of the article there was a paragraph or so about some people thinking some sort of weapon would be possible based upon that research. The article dismissed that possibility. O chuckled to myself with a minor bit of amusement. Sorry, I don’t remember the magazine or the article beyond that.
I can point people to Robert Silverberg’s two part article in Asimov’s titled Reflections: The Cleve Cartmill Affair:One (follow the link at the end of part one) for a much better documented security “leak” in 1944 that shows quite a few people in several countries were interested in The Bomb — and knew something about the possibilities.
Keeping science and technology secret is extremely difficult — even from monsters like Stalin — or at least his scientifically and technologically minded — followers.
Speaking of Stalin, it’s interesting to note that he, too, spent lots of time going over lists of names of people and deciding which ones would die. In fact, he and the Bee-Hoe are probably the only two national leaders in history to do so. Just one more thing they have in common…
Rand, you really ought to change the second sentence; it’s demonstrably false. Read Richard Rhodes’ Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb for the details, but short summary: Klaus Fuchs’ treason was both necessary and sufficient for the Soviets to obtain the fission bomb. Aiding and abetting David Greenglass’ treason (he was Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, and an enlisted tech at Los Alamos) was what Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of. The primary worth to the Soviets of David Greenglass’ materials was some limited corroboration of what Fuchs provided; this helped convince Beria (who was in charge of the Soviet effort, and in fact cut out pretty much all of the rest of the Politburo in the key decisions) that Fuchs’ material was genuine.
I’m in no way, shape, or form defending the Rosenbergs (Julius at least was guilty as hell), but they had nothing to do with Fuchs’ treason, and almost nothing to do with the Soviets developing a nuclear bomb. Rhodes’ book makes this abundantly clear. It is worth noting that Rhodes had access to never-before-seen Soviet archives in the early ’90s after the fall of the Soviet Union.
And just to complete the subject, the Soviets managed to build a staged thermonuclear weapon without significant espionage; Sakharov independently came up with the Teller-Ulam configuration. Knowing that the US had achieved a breakthrough (via our Mike test in late 1952) certainly contributed, though.
“Plouffe could not have been more parsed, poorly prepared or unconvincing.”
Or any more typical of everything this Administration does. It’s all smoke, mirrors and Chinese Money, bound up with lies and half truths. The very fat that they’d intentionally leak secret data, WITH the Presidents OK shows yet another treasonous action on his / their part(s).
I agree with VDH that as soon as Congress starts investigating the leak of the “freely available” information supplied to reporters, every bit of related information is going to be classified top secret and the entire administration will stonewall.
If President Obama did declassify the material, then that is documented – the record keeping associated with TS codeword material not trivial. Although I wouldn’t put it past the President to classify the declassification; plus it would be entirely in keeping with the usually incomprehensible actions of the government behemoth. But it will get out anyway.
And then the President will have to explain why he declassified it, and why he pretended not to.
A new leak today about how Flame used bluetooth to get info off computers and how Israel went rogue and attacked Iran’s oil infrastructure.
That is some excellent foreign policy Mr President.