The Washington Post
'Death Beam' hoax
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
October 18, 1999
In an editorial column, entitled "NCLC: `A Domestic Political Menace," in the Washington Post of Sept. 24, 1976, Katharine Graham's Post stated, for the record, that it would never report on anything U.S. Presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche actually did or said; but, that LaRouche's name would appear in its publication only at such times as the Post elected to defame him.[1] In the Sunday, October 17, 1999 edition of the Post, that 1976-1999 tradition of defamatory hoaxes was upheld, this time using the name of Air Force Major-General (ret.) George Keegan as the Post's choice of stand-in for the name of the Post's most hated Nemesis, today's U.S. Democratic Presidential pre-candidate LaRouche.
The latter item is a mish-mash published under the by-line of Post staff writer Michael Dobbs, published under the title "Deconstructing the Death Ray." It appears from reading that article, that Dobbs is wearing scrambled eggs for brains. The article has no intrinsic, redeeming merits, not even obscure and tiny ones; but, like the ravings of British Foreign Office head, Jeremy Bentham's agent, French terrorist and madman Marat, Dobbs' incoherent ranting does shed light on the pro-George W. Bush state of mind of the Post itself.
The historical facts bearing on the Post's Oct. 17th hoax, are, in chief, the following. I begin by identifying the issue motivating Dobbs' literary hoax.
In 1913, British novelist H.G. Wells concocted the proposal, that nuclear weapons should be developed and used as weapons so awful, that nations would give up their sovereignties to world government, rather than risk future general wars.[2] Science-fiction writer, and leading Fabian Society ideologue Wells was dead serious; and his proposal, morally perverted as it was, had a scientific basis in the reports of British-Canadian chemist, and Rutherford associate, Frederick Soddy. Wells, after a thorough briefing in the topics of the Soddy lecture-series, was thinking of a radium or radium-like fission bomb. The idea of a uranium-based fission weapon came more than a decade later.[3]
Circa 1928, Bertrand Russell publicly declared his reconciliation with H.G. Wells, and with Wells' current book, The Open Conspiracy, Wells' world-government plot.[4] From that time on, Russell became the leading spokesman for Wells' policy of world-government through terror of nuclear weapons. Russell, aided by his assets N. Bohr, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner, became the principal organizer of the actual development of nuclear-fission weapons by the U.S.A., Canada, and the U.K. Russell became also the designer of the doctrine of world-government through arms-control. Russell's doctrine, as presented by Russell's lackey Leo Szilard, became the doctrine of the U.S. government, as pushed by the Pugwash Conference organization, and by John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, Henry A. Kissinger, et al.
The core of the doctrine of Russell and Szilard, as pushed by McCloy, Bundy, Kissinger, et al., has been that there shall be no effective defense ever developed against a general ("strategic") bombardment by nuclear ballistic weapons. The policy was, and is: by this means, the gradual elimination of the sovereign nation-state shall be accomplished. This, according to John J. McCloy's perverted notion of "the rule of law"--that of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Clinton-hating U.S. Representative Henry Hyde today--shall make way for true world government. That form of world government should be recognized as a new Pax Romana-style world empire, a concept which has no essential difference from the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's Romantic notions of the model of Roman law (e.g., Code Napoleon), and his notion of himself as Pontifex Maximus of a future new Rome-modelled empire, perhaps under his son, a Habsburg heir and putative "King of Rome."
To understand today's world-government-oriented dogmas of nuclear weapons, arms-control, and globalization generally, we must look back to such would-be imitators of ancient pagan Rome as the sponsor of Gibbon, Britain's Lord Shelburne, Napoleon Bonaparte, and on to Benito Mussolini's concept of fascism, and, also, the ideas of a post-war SS imperial state ruling Eurasia and beyond, a conception which Hitler initially premised upon Mussolini's fascist model. The defense of "universal fascism" by Kissinger associate Michael Ledeen, for example, is fully congruent, in content of practice, with the current, "globalization" and "free trade" dogmas of "Third Way" ideologues such as Prime Minister Tony Blair and Vice-President Al Gore.
Although "globalization" achieved a global victory with U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's SALT I and ABM treaties, this was not yet solid victory for the utopian ideologies of Wells and Russell. A patriotic reflex from among many nations recognized something of the danger these utopian policies represented to civilization in general. Among those patriotic reactions, this produced an understandable reaction from among military and other traditionalists. Among these traditionalists was physics-trained R.A.F. veteran (a U.S. volunteer) and mid-1970s head of U.S. Air Force Intelligence, Major-General George Keegan. The utopians' reaction against Keegan was savage, but appears relatively mild when compared with the reaction--then, and now--from bastions of utopianism such as the Washington Post.
The attack on Keegan, LaRouche, and Teller
Keegan was persuaded that the 1972 ABM treaty was a hoax against both science and military competence. The same hoax which Post writer Dobbs defended, so passionately, if with utter incompetence, in the Oct. 17 piece.
From my knowledge of Keegan during the late 1970s, and a bit later, I would concede that his motives were, in part, those of a political right-winger, and not particularly astute politically. However, although not a West Point product, he had elements of a Classical educational background, and basic competence in physical science and its military applications. However, as I knew him and his concerns, his interest in strategic and other forms of ballistic missile defense was Classical military concerns, rather than "right-wing." He was a capable, well qualified flag-rank military officer, and, by the evidence of his work as head of Air Force Intelligence, an exceptionally qualified intelligence officer in science-related military matters.
Keegan was far better qualified, more honest than Lt.-Gen. Daniel Graham, former author of the discredited pre-Tet Offensive intelligence assessments in Vietnam, and then, during the late 1970s, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Graham was Keegan's leading opponent within the military-intelligence community during the middle 1970s. Later, during the period from Summer 1982 through the close of 1983, Graham, then a resident kook deployed by the Mont Pelerin Society's Heritage Foundation, appointed himself my chief public political adversary and Dr. Edward Teller's, on military and science issues. By the early 1980s, Keegan was no longer the issue; Teller and I were. I had become the principal target of my old enemy, Friedrich von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society.[5]
Look at Dobbs' ranting Oct. 17th piece. Where, contrary to Dobbs' hoax, did Keegan learn about Soviet scientific feasibility for developing particle-beam applications? According to Dobbs, his own chief source is John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, an institution not unknown to me from relevant former times. I do not doubt that misinformation from that source might be blamed in large part for creating the fraudulent character of the Post's piece. Prostitutes, literal and pen varieties, tend to pick up infections that way. Dobbs traces the source of the "particle beam" capability story to a study of the patterns seen in work around a Soviet experimental facility in Kazakstan. Keegan's reference to particle-beam applications did not come from Air Force Intelligence studies of that facility. The reference to Soviet particle-beam applications came from an earlier lecture and physical demonstration, delivered at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, by a Soviet physicist, L. Rudakov, who brought his demonstration apparatus with him for that demonstration!
What actually happened, opposite to Dobbs' hoax, is the following.
During mid-1977, Keegan met with associates of mine from the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF). He outlined his study, and identified the difficulties he had had with colleagues and opponents such as Graham. He asked FEF to provide him an assessment of some of the crucial evidence which Graham et al. had ridiculed. An FEF team, headed by one Dr. Steven Bardwell,[FIGURE 101] a plasma physicist, pulled together a study of instances in which known Soviet technology might provide Moscow the scientific capability for deploying an operational ballistic missile defense system of a type based upon "new physical principles," as distinct from so-called "kinetic energy" intercept systems.
The Kazakstan site was included among the numerous topics in Soviet industrial technology which would be relevant to a U.S.A., or Soviet design of such a strategic ballistic defense capability. These studies included studies of such capabilities as phased-array radar systems for monitoring nearby space, in Earth orbit, or beyond. It included studies of special techniques for relevant sorts of rail systems, and so on, and so on. The report which Bardwell et al. gave to Keegan focussed on the following proposition. We knew, beforehand, that Soviet science recognized and was capable of defining an effective panoply of strategic ballistic missile defense based upon what are termed "new physical principles." The question was: could the Soviet economy actually deploy such technologies--outside the realm of laboratory and related tests? The further question, on which I focussed my personal attention, during late 1977 and beyond, was, could both the U.S.A. and Soviet Union jointly develop such systems, that as a way of getting out from under the common threat of general ballistic missile assault?
FEF's work to that effect had been developed as a by-product of both my general specialization in the matter of Riemannian manifolds for purposes of long-range studies in technological attrition, and my rejection of the mechanistic delusion, that so-called "Coulomb Forces" operate as law within the range of the sub-atomic and nuclear "infinitesimally small." My views in such matters coincided with my own emphasis on a modern view of Platonic "hylozoic monism," a view of Riemannian physics, and of the work of Vernadsky et al., which I had set forth as the science policy of our publishing effort, in memoranda of March-April 1973. It was those memoranda which had pushed the importance of controlled nuclear fusion, and which had been the sparkplug for the founding of the Fusion Energy Foundation.
The Rudakov lectures at Livermore had served us associated with FEF as a point of reference, a demonstration of the point at which both "super-lasers" and "particle-beam" technologies were emerging from confinement to laboratory experiments and related pioneering tests. What had been set forth as Soviet Military Doctrine, in the original edition of Sokolovsky's famous work, was now at the point of going over from laboratory frontiers into preliminary phases of large-scale applications. Our estimate was, that under the conditions of crash-program development missions, such as the impetus President Kennedy had given to the Moon Landing Mission, the laboratory work now in progress on a limited scale, could effect a technological revolution within a period as short as a decade.
In my view, Keegan did put his own political spin on the results of the report he received, but he did not fake results. If one reads the Bardwell report today, and reads it for what it says, it is John Pike and Dobbs, who have perpetrated the fraud. More to the point, is the dirty politics behind the Post's publication of Dobbs' hoax: Why are they lying about that, in this way, at this particular time? The article has no relevance, but the Post's share in the hysteria which the skyrocketting of my Presidential pre-candidacy had stirred up among the circles of Vice-President Al Gore, Bush circles, and some others. Pay attention: you shall soon discover that I am right on this latter point.
[1] Stephen S. Rosenfeld wrote: "We of the press should be chary of offering them print or air time. There is no reason to be too delicate about it: Every day we decide whose voices to relay. A duplicitous violence-prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public unless there is reason to present it in those terms. . . ."
[2] H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (London: Macmillan, 1914).
[3] Jonathan Tennenbaum, Kernenergie: Die weibliche Technik (Wiesbaden, Germany: Dr. Böttiger Verlags-GmbH, 1994); see also, Jonathan Tennenbaum, "The Women Who Founded Nuclear Science," 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1991.
[4] H.G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928).
[5] According to Michael Deaver, then heading prospective Republican Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan's Citizens for the Republic, the libel of me which appeared in Citizens for the Republic, originated with a Hong Kong meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. These attacks were launched chiefly, jointly, by Mont Pelerin's Heritage Foundation front, and by the Anti-Defamation League, in Spring 1978. In 1979, these same attacks were escalated by a cabal featuring the New York Times and former Senator Joseph McCarthy counsel Roy M. Cohn, the latter the sponsor of the career of one Dennis King. The Times' 1979 attacks were a continuation of the Times' attempted cover-up, in January-February 1974, for what was later officially documented to have been an FBI plot to arrange my "elimination" by the Communist Party U.S.A. The Washington Post attacks on me in a 1976 editorial statement, were a reflection of the continuing Times-Post arrangements overlapping the International Herald Tribune.
