SPIES, DAMN SPIES & STATISTICS

Pleasantville, N.Y.

Ellen Schrecker and Maurice Isserman ["The Right's Cold War Revision," July 24/31] state that Judge Irving Kaufman's sentencing speech blaming the Rosenbergs for causing the Korean War (by giving the Russians the A-bomb years before they would otherwise have had it) contained "a kernel of truth." At a meeting in Moscow in April 1950 with Kim Il Sung, Stalin explained that he was acquiescing in the invasion of South Korea primarily for two reasons: the recent victory of the Chinese Communists in their civil war and the new US policy of nonintervention on the Asian mainland. Possession of the A-bomb was last on Stalin's list, understandably because Russia then had only one or two bombs and no delivery system. As for David Greenglass, the Los Alamos machinist recruited for espionage by his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, Soviet archives confirm that he was strictly an also-ran on the roster of atomic spies. Kaufman's sentencing speech survives as one of the most vicious ideological documents of the domestic cold war. Does Schrecker and Isserman's "kernel" of support for it also extend to President Eisenhower's charge that "by immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world"?

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