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Comment by opwieurposiu | Hacker News Reader

The thing that struck me from this book (or maybe it was in "Dark Sun") was how much the soviets were spying. We were giving them detailed plans for chemical factories, tire factories, engines, alloys, anything you can think of. They did not trust us so they would spy on all this stuff anyway. They would fill up a C-47 Skytrains(lend-lease) with stolen documents and fly them out to Moscow through Alaska.

I have to give the soviets the win on this one. Their spying was very effective. All that spying let them get the bomb PDQ.

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Well, to be fair, spying on a free and open society is much easier than spying on the opposite.

There's a parallel here with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Ya, that was the most memorable part of Dark Sun. IIRC the State department confronted the Soviet ambassador about the routine exfiltration of boxes and boxes of US R&D documents, and the response was something like "We're losing 10,000 people a day in this war. This is how you be our ally.".

The same today with the war on Ukraine. Spending citize' s lives is a great way to prop up a failed regime.

Yup. If Russian soldiers stop dying then Putin falls out of a window.

I don't think it's that easy to explain. Putin could declare victory (Ukraine is demilitarized) and withdraw today, and most Russians would believe it (or at least, not care about the truth).

The worse but more explicable answer is that it's stubbornness and pride on Putin's part in his national aspirations for Russia, for his external image, not his internal one.

If he withdraws from Crimea - he's dead. Everybody will see that as a miserable defeat.

He doesn't have to. It's not seriously in play.

More like all that Uranium in the Czech and East German mines. The US thought that buying off the Uranium from East-Congo in Belgium protected them, but it only protected them from the Heisenberg bomb.

The bomb itself is trivial once you have enough uranium or plutonium.

This. It gets far worse the further you get - it wasn't just spying. Sean McMeekan's recent book details how pervasive it was - for example, Harry Dexter White was in the Department of treasury, helped write the Morgenthau plan, which extended the war, and assigned "the booty" of germany to the soviets and leaked it to the soviets and the press. That led to "a near-miraculous revitalization of the German army."

The soviets under Stalin played the allies _hard_ during World War 2.

What do you mean? Why would leaking the plan to the Soviets mean anything?

Why would the Soviets want a longer war?

At that point, a longer war in the West meant further and more secure Soviet advances in the East.

The Morgenthau plan implied a harsh post-war settlement for Germany, and at the time was viewed as effectively inspiring the Germans to fight on rather than capitulate or revolt against the failing Nazi regime.

The Soviets can thank folks like Oppenheimer for it.

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