I saw this when it was new. At the time I was exposed to a project that of all in the world then and since would be closest to this. Not very, not very at all but as close as reality ever got.(Emphasis added.) This info might force us to take a new look at the intelligence scandals of yesteryear -- especially if we presume that similar "help" went to China and other nuclear powers.
We all laughed at the improbabilities. The first of course was that the Soviets could ever have built something as sophisticated as the Americans. Among Soviet deficiencies was the abject impossibility for clever hardware guys to exist, and fundamental software to be created. We were so worried about Soviet bad computers the US arranged for the Soviets to "steal" enough modern computers and decision support software to ensure that their missiles weren't launched by buggy machines.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Backin' the USSR...
In a fit of nostalgia, I flipped through the IMDB comments for an early-'70s paranoia-fest called Colossus: The Forbin Project. That's the one where NORAD's artificially-intelligent supercomputer joins forces with its Soviet counterpart to take over the world. One commenter, "tedg," offered a fascinating insight:
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4 comments:
A company that may have been involved is Apple. I remember Cocom being a bit of a joke in that department, where both hardware and software was concerned.
Makes you wonder about Maxwell and Promis too. Or on the larger scientific scale, Pergamon, going back to the 1940s.
The real history of the technological and commercial side of the relationship between elites of east and west is nothing like the received story.
For instance, there was large-scale western involvement in the Soviet chemical industry, based on company towns using convict labour. It wasn't prison labour, but it was still convict labour. Being sent to work 'na khimii' was one of the punishments a person could get meted out to them by the courts. You'd get sent thousands of miles a way to a chemical town, where you'd be bussed in from a dormitory suburb. You wouldn't be in captivity, but if you were late for work a few times, you could get the non-custodial sentence turned into a custodial one.
Don't forget that the USSR was a member of the largely US-focused IAEA. Grep on 'Tokamak' for the $$$ side. They joined in 1964.
...which date says a lot. And leads to the bigger point: have you noticed how 'received' opinion states that the 'cold war' (US/USSR) continued up until the end of the 1980s? Or even, according to the dominant ones at Wikipedia, the early 1990s. This is complete nonsense.
It used to be the accepted view throughout western sovietology - and regardless of disagreements between 'totalitarians' and 'liberals' and 'revisionists' over who actually started it - that it ended in the 1960s. See Martin McCauley for example, on this. The leeway for argument was whether you chose to say it ended in late 1962 (Cuba), or to say that it continued (although much more subdued) up until the time in 1968 when the invasion of Czechoslovakia wasn't allowed to interfere with the SALT negotiations. "The early-mid 1960s" was a non-controversial way of saying when the 'cold war' ended.
Interestingly, 1964 was the year that Khrushchev fell. Standard accounts make little of the fact that David Rockefeller was in Moscow the day before he resigned.
Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia. They have always been at war with Eastasia. The bullshit about the cold war continuing right through from the 1940s to 1990 is now the accepted view. The détente of the early 1970s (the trajectory of which was basically scuppered by the Israelis) doesn't even get a look-in nowadays! The accepted view is what, during the 1970s, was the 'view' of the rabid far right. That despite the friendly appearance of those wicked Soviets...
Who knows, maybe in 10 years time it will be the mainstream view that the Sino-Soviet split was all a pretense?
Like me, you're old enough to remember the Apollo-Soyuz link-up and so on.
Did you follow Bobby Fischer's recent battle against imprisonment in Japan and US efforts to have him deported for playing chess in Yugoslavia? (They couldn't actually extradite him, because playing chess in Yugoslavia isn't a crime in Japan; they just wanted to deport him to a US jail. Having renewed his passport, they revoked it without telling him, and had him arrested on re-entry into Japan. This was, of course, after his comments about 911 and after he'd gone on the radio to say the US authorities hadn't got the guts to pursue him). Anyway, most of the western media described the 1972 Reykjavik match as having taken place during the 'cold war'.
Duh!!! In actual fact it took place in 1972, at the height of détente. It was even billed at the time, throughout the world media, as symbolic of said détente.
b
PS Why don't you reply to my email?
PPS Got any views on the latest Berezovsky stuff? Clearly some UK-based faction is well pissed-off with him. The Guardian are even publishing audio files of extracts from the interview with him. Very rare, that. Meanwhile Bloombergs are twisting the knife even further and revealing that he admitted that what he is preparing will involve violence.
Gotta say, my money's on the Kremlin.
I wondered recently whether the sacking of UK foreign secretary Jack Straw had anything to do with Berezovsky. Probably not, it was more likely to do with the US embassy and Iran, but it's possible.
Unlike, when we're talking of 'tycoons', the story with Anna Lindh and Robin Cook, one-time foreign ministers of Sweden and the UK respectively. Lindh laid into Berlusconi. Unwise. Bang bang, she was dead.
Cook also, after resigning, said he thought it was curious how Blair, elected on a programme of being tough on crime, had such a close relationship with Berlusconi. He soon met his end too, having gone mountain-walking in Scotland supposedly without realising he had a dicky heart. Oops...
b
This Berezovsky business is particularly fascinating for the context it may provide for Litvinenko's death. Was that an early, covert battle in what is now about to become open warfare?
And how does it fit in with the Independent suggesting today that we may be heading into Cold War Two?
If the original Cold War was generally recognized to have ended in the 60's, that certainly explains why the Great War on Terror had to be invented in the late 70's -- though for a good while, they kept pretending that it was just the old Cold War in a new form. (Thus the theory beloved of Michael Ledeen's clique at the time that the Soviets were secretly behind all terrorism, world-wide, of whatever stripe.)
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the people who arrange these things have been trying their darnedest to come up with a new uber-enemy -- since admitting that we're at war with a ragtag assemblage of tiny groups who aren't necessarily even on speaking terms with one another wouldn't really cut it as far as maintaining the bloated parasitic mass of the military-industrial complex.
But the effort hasn't gone altogether smoothly. In the early 90's, Iran was all the rage as a candidate for the major state sponsor of terrorism. Then, with the happy discovery of Osama bin Laden, all the attention shifted over to al Qaeda and its sinister headquarters in the caves of Afghanistan. Now, with neither of those quite living up to advance billing, the attempt seems to be to blame both simultaneously -- which only works for people who still haven't figured out the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites.
No wonder if it looks a lot easier to just go back to the original Cold War and start blaming Russia again. It might even give Condi Rice something useful to do.
sofla said...
The list of US nuclear technologies the Chinese said they had, which a 'walk-in' 'defector' provided, was one of the trigger points that activated dark claims against the Clinton administration, that they were the ones who transferred all these technologies.
However, the DATE on the memorandum was about 1989, implying, and this seems to be the fact, that as part of the Reaganite 'full court press' against the Soviets, the China card was re-played. That is, in order to put maximum pressure against the Soviets from all quarters, WE provided the Chinese with advanced technologies, so as to make China a far more significant threat to the Soviets. And by 'we,' of course, I mean Reagan/Bush.
Same analysis applies to the mini-nuke, suitable for MIRVed applications. The Chinese single test of such a mini-nuke was in '92, when Clinton was still the wunderkind governor of Arkansas.
Same analysis applies to the alleged 'transfer' of 'missile technology' from launches contracted in China by Loral Systems and Hughes Aerospace. Those waivers for those launches were granted by GHW Bush, following the same policy Reagan implemented. (Bush had waived about 5 such launches, a couple of which occured after he left office).
The lying Cox report laid all responsibility for such transfers to Clinton, and implausibly, a couple to CARTER, and entirely ignored the fact that most or all of this occured as part of Reagan's reheating of the Cold War, and leaning toward China.
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