The Fraud Against Edward Teller
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
December 9, 2000
I have read two, related hoaxes, which rewarm the old frauds against the SDI which were circulated by now deceased Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Daniel P. Graham and his Heritage Foundation accomplices back during the 1982-1984 interval. The first of these is a piece titled "The Odd Couple and the Bomb," authored by London School of Economics graduate in politics William Lanouette, which appeared in the November 2000 edition of Scientific American. A more disreputable hoax, crafted by one T.A. Heppenheimer, appeared in the Winter 2001 edition of the periodical Invention and Technology. The political significance of this pair of hoaxes now, is their bearing upon the current geopolitical rage paraded as current proposals for nuclear ballistic missile defense. Both are, revealingly, attacks upon the original SDI policy.
Lanouette's hoax is a puff piece for the memory of Bertrand Russell cat's-paw Leo Szilard, and, thus, a cover-up of the legacies of such Szilard accomplices as the late John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and Bundy's lackey Henry A. Kissinger. Heppenheimer's hoax is the relatively more interesting of the two, chiefly because it is even worse: more anti-scientific than Lanouette's elimination of all reference to the fact, that in all relevant matters touched upon in that article, no mention is made of the actual authors of the nuclear-weapons doctrine, that created by H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, on behalf of which Szilard was steered, every step of the way, by his master, Russell. Heppenheimer's vicious and fraudulent attack upon Dr. Edward Teller requires a bit more explanation. Since I was a central figure in opposition to the way in which the Heritage Foundation set up Teller and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, I am better situated than the principals of that laboratory to pin-point the nature of the hoax perpetrated by Invention and Technology magazine.
The original design of SDI was a product of my initiatives of the 1977-1983 interval, into which Dr. Teller figured, from Autumn 1982 onward. Although the name of "Strategic Defense Initiative" first appeared in President Ronald Reagan's address of March 23, 1983, what became known as the policy of SDI was first publicized by me in a widely attended Washington, D.C. conference of mid-February 1982, and presented in a widely circulated attack on Henry A. Kissinger's détente policies, which first appeared in print during March 1982. From no later than Summer 1982, I came under frantic attacks by a Daniel Graham then deployed as a stooge for the Mont Pelerin Society's Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation. During the Autumn of 1982, Graham's bile was also directed against Dr. Teller.
President Reagan's initial version of SDI was consistent with what I had introduced into U.S.-Soviet back-channel discussions over the period beginning February 1982. However, immediately thereafter, the mice went to work. Daniel Graham, the leading opponent of SDI up to that time, now proclaimed himself the virtual author of the policy, and was used, thereafter, to remove all of the crucial elements from the original policy.
A critical turning-point came during the Summer of 1983, when a compromise was reached between the partisans of Graham and Dr. Teller. Graham, typical of his personal character (or, lack thereof), attempted to use his peace-agreement with Teller to attack me publicly, presenting Teller, by fraudulent cropping of a letter which Teller had issued, as having repudiated Teller's own disagreements with Graham. Graham's fraud resulted in a temporary patch-up of relations between me and the circles of Dr. Teller.
Meanwhile, many among the key backers of SDI from inside the Reagan Administration, were shunted aside, excepting, as a discomfitted Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev was reminded in October 1986, the President himself. Under the de facto peace-treaty between the Heritage Foundation and Lawrence Livermore Lab, the laboratory was boxed into what proved to be a predictably untenable position. The predictable result, was the circumstance used by Heppenheimer's fraudulent account.
How the Hoax Was Done
The original design of SDI was premised upon two crucial premises: 1) the necessity of seeking cooperation from the Soviet Union, and 2) that the realization of the goals of strategic ballistic missile defense would depend upon a quality of relevant "crash scientific program" whose economic spill-overs would reverse the current depressing trends in the world's per-capita physical productivity. Even after Andropov's peremptory, irrational rejection of President Reagan's proffer, the President and I typified, in our respective statements, a continuing commitment to reaching the point at which the Soviet Union would change its posture and agree.
The fatal error of Teller and Lawrence Livermore Lab, was never scientific; it was political. Instead of sticking to their guns, and insisting that only a "crash scientific program" of the type of the Manhattan Project, for example, could gain the performance projected for SDI, they allowed themselves to be boxed in politically, to putting up a few selected hardware targets as the basis on which the validity of methods other than Heritage's axiomatically incompetent insistence upon "kinetic weapons only" could be "justified." Lawrence Livermore National Lab's "brilliant pebbles" is an example of the fruits of submission to that rotten political compromise. Thus, the feasible X-ray laser conception was reduced to a specific framework of development and testing, the kind of target which no scientific program would ever tolerate. The result was predictable, and intended by the Heritage Foundation side.
The key to understanding how and why this hoax was perpetrated by the pro-Heritage faction's demands upon Lawrence Livermore National Lab, lies in recognizing the fully witting character of the fraud by the Heritage gang. The U.S.A. has never, yet, produced a competent design of a strategic ballistic missile defense, and, under present policies, never could, and never actually intended to do so. From the beginning, in 1982, Graham never really claimed anything different. Graham's argument was pure double-dipping, to create a bonanza for existing arms manufacturers, by enriching their opportunities for peddling their existing, off-the-shelf sales!
Only a "science-driver crash program" could do what SDI proposed to do, and every competent authority in the world, including "crash program" veteran Dr. Teller, knew that. The minute SDI was degraded to a specific set of hardware, rather than a continuing development program, the technical success of the program was foredoomed to fail. Thus, by its Summer 1983 "peace agreement" with Graham's crowd, Lawrence Livermore National Lab set itself up for the trap which the enemies of SDI then closed.
In my opinion, Teller made no scientific error; he sacrificed himself on the altar of politics, in the effort to save the continued existence of Lawrence Livermore National Lab (his people) from the vengeance of Lawrence Livermore National Lab's enemies.
Heritage's Fraud
This returns us, in conclusion, to the relevant implications of Scientific American's hoax. The Mont Pelerin Society is the world's leading political spokesman for the political-philosophical standpoint of the nuclear-weapons policy created jointly by H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. The objective was always "world government," exactly as Russell had agreed publicly and fully to the political basis for the nuclear-weapons doctrine of H.G. Wells, as expressed in Wells' The Open Conspiracy. The purpose, as Russell summed this up in the September 1946 edition of Szilard's The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was to use the threat of nuclear terror to bully the nations of the world into giving up their sovereignty, and accepting rule by a new global Roman empire, called "world government."
It was Russell's lackey Szilard who, at the 1958 Quebec conference of Pugwash, laid out the doctrine which became the life's work of such figures as McCloy, Bundy, and Kissinger. Build up the threat of a general barrage of thermonuclear ballistic missiles, but prohibit the development of any competent defense against such a barrage. This was not a policy born during the post-World War II period; it was already Wells' stated nuclear-weapons policy prior to World War I, and dominated the Solvay conferences' Russell-led efforts to suppress crucial lines of scientific progress, during the 1920s.
Neither then, nor now, does any political force, inside or outside the U.S.A., which is allied politically with the Mont Pelerin Society, intend to develop and deploy any capability for actually defending nations against nuclear ballistic missile assault. Russell's crew acted to suppress the development of nuclear physics during the 1920s, and in the 1930s turned to organize nuclear weapons-policy as an instrument for creating world government. Atoms For Peace, never; atoms for world government, always.
Daniel Graham's only interest in ballistic missile defense, was to create for Wall Street's defense contractors but another opportunity to loot the public till.
What poor wretches Lanouette and Heppenheimer appear to be, when the facts are taken adequately into account.
