John Sununu Quotes
When we're talking about technology that involves weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, there has to be an element of preemption.
Sununu, John E. Remarks on National Security and Preemption. Congressional Record, Government Printing Office, 2002.
This statement told the world that the United States might preemptively attack Iraq because the Iraqis were developing nuclear weapons. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq and there it turned out that was no nuclear program of any type in Iraq. There has been a debate ever since as to whether Bush and his key advisors lied knowingly to justify a war they wanted, wanted the war and pressured the intelligence agencies to warn of a clear nuclear development program, or were duped by incompetent intelligence agencies. While American troops were bogged down in Iraq, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon and Iran announced an enrichment program for weapons grade.
Note the variant of the “weapons of mass destruction” phrase.
Germany had some world class physicists. Our scientists, military intelligence people, and political leadership assumed that the Germans were also seeking to develop the Atomic Bomb. Ironically, it turned out that they were not, and what Truman reported in this quotation was untrue (although that was not fully known at the time.) Einstein and several of the scientists who were early pioneers in modern physics were Jewish, and Hitler referred to the study of nuclear fission and fusion as “Jewish Science.” As a result, the German government did not commit the resources to the development of an atomic bomb. Instead, they were betting on the development of the Jet Airplane which they succeeded in deploying against the Allies at the end of the war. But they did not have enough or enough pilots left alive to fly them, and Germany was overrun by the Allied Troops. Prior to Truman’s erroneous report about the German development of an atomic bomb, there had only been one piece of evidence that the Germans were not developing one. An OSS secret agent, Moe Berg, had talked with Werner Heisenberg, at a Swiss scientific conference during the war. He was going to assassinate the greatest of the German physicists if Berg thought he was working on a nuclear device. Berg concluded from his discussions that Heisenberg did not know enough about nuclear fission to have been working on that. Berg did not kill Heisenberg, and reported that he did not think the Germans were developing a bomb as if they were Heisenberg would have been deeply involved. However, the American intelligence people and the American scientists, did not trust Berg’s analysis and conclusion. Berg was not a trained scientist. He was a professional baseball player—the NY Yankee backup catcher to Bill Dickey. He was a college graduate, a brilliant guy and a very fast learner who had studied physics books and papers before his assignment. Berg turned out to have been right, but that was not confirmed until a few years after the war. Truman had relied on an incorrect intelligence estimate when he made this quotation. It was not the first such error of intelligence analysis in American history and it would not be the last.
At the time, Pakistan was the only nuclear nation that was very unstable and full of terrorist groups which the government nor the military could control and in some cases even wanted to control. A takeover by militant Islamic terrorists was a possibility or the acquisition of one of the nuclear weapons byr terrorists was then a possibility. India, the United States, and other countries were very concerned.
John Edward Sununu is an American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives and United States Senator from New Hampshire. He is the only Salvadoran American ever elected to the U.S. Congress (having served in both the House and the Senate). Sununu was the youngest member of the Senate for his entire six-year term. He is the son of former New Hampshire Governor and former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu. On November 4, 2008, Sununu lost his re-election bid to former governor Jeanne Shaheen. His younger brother, Chris Sununu, has been the Governor of New Hampshire since January 2017.
