Anne Applebaum Quotes
Back from 2001 to 2003, I wrote multiple editorials for The Washington Post about biological warfare and pandemic preparedness - issues that were at the top of everyone's agenda in the wake of 9/11 and the brief anthrax scare. At the time, some very big investments were made into precisely those issues, especially into scientific research.
Applebaum, Anne. "The Coronavirus Called America's Bluff." The Atlantic, 15 Mar. 2020.
The bipartisan Presidential Commission had unanimously made 41 recommendations to prevent future terrorist attacks. While the Bush Administration and Congress implemented a few many of the more critical ones were left unaddressed. The commission on its final day issued a report card giving failing grades to both the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress.
Dr. Fauci was the Department’s Chief Bioterrorism Officer. This was part of his Congressional Testimony on the same date.
The Japanese had developed and tested a very sophisticated set of biologial weapons on the Chinses mirdering many However, there was great disagreement within the Japaanese Sureme War Counci as to whether or not to use the biologica weapons against the US and the allies. There were two fears. One that the U. S, also had biologica weapons and with their control over the skies of the densley populated Japan could easily retaliate and do much ore damage to Japn. The second was that letting pathogns lose might not be controllable and deadly disease could spread around the entire world as with the Back Plgue. Umezu opposed the use. This may have saved his life when he was convicted of other war crimes, he was not executed and received a life sentence.
The $2 Billion was enormous at that time—the equivalent of $26 Billion in 2010 dollars. This was the first time that all but a handful of Americans knew of the huge sums that had been invested in the Manhattan Project. What made the quotation even more memorable is how President Truman, who himself had only learned about the Manhattan Project with the death of President Roosevelt, framed the event—as a contest between us and Germany as to who would build an atomic bomb first. Actually, although almost no one in the US government realized it then, the Germans had NO PROGRAM of nuclear weapons development at all. Hitler did not trust the Theoretical Physics and Theory of Relativity because Einstein and other Jewish scientists had been instrumental in its development. He derogatorily referred to it as “Jewish Science”. Germany bet its scientific efforts on the V2 Rockets and the Jet Airplane, both of which they were successful with but too late to have any material effect on the war. Ironically, even after most of the great German physicists were run out of Germany, there were still two of the greatest who may well have been capable of nuclear weapons development. But neither Werner Heisenberg or Otto Hahn were inclined to engage in that kind of research, and neither of them were even asked whether or not they thought it was possible. The anti-Semitic Nazis just assumed that it could not be. Truman and his associates did not find out for another year or more that there was no laboratory race. There was one OSS spy, Moe Berg, who had actually talked to Heisenberg in the midst of the war, and concluded that he not only was not working on an atomic bomb, but was not up on the latest pre-war critical research needed to develop a bomb. Hahn knew and had created the first chain reaction for which he later won the Nobel prize but he was a chemist and didn’t really understand the Physics and mathematics involved in making a weapon and was a confirmed pacifist. Ironically, his colleague, Lise Meitner who had done the physics and mathematics on that experiment was Jewish and had to flee Germany. In Denmark she gave the results to Niels Bohr, who shared then with Leo Slizard and Einstein when Bohr came to the United State and that initiated the famous letter that was sent to FDR which triggered the Manhattan Project. The German first nuclear reaction was used by the Americans because the politicians listened to the scientists, while in Germany, the politicians gave no credence to their scientists and their experiments in nuclear fission.
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about Marxism–Leninism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
