Nobel prize winner Hermann Muller knowingly lied when he claimed in 1946 that there is no safe level of radiation exposure… his decision not to mention key scientific evidence against his position has had a far-reaching impact on our approach to regulating radiation and chemical exposure.
Muller himself served on the NAS’s Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) committee, through which the linear dose-response approach to risk assessment became firmly entrenched. The two successfully suppressed last-minute evidence from the fruit fly experiment conducted in Stern’s lab by postdoctoral researcher Ernst Caspari, and the rest is history, Calabrese says. It marked the “transformation of a threshold-guided risk assessment to one now centered on a linear dose-response.”
…Muller was awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery that X-rays induce genetic mutations. This helped him call attention to his long-time concern over the dangers of atomic testing.
It was a lie that led to many restraints on medical uses of radiation even today, but also bans on the testing and development of nuclear weapons by the U.S. government–so I immediately had to ask myself: was Muller a communist?
Though I do agree with his analysis, I must note my difference with his thought process. ARI Objectivists, bloodthirsty as they are, cannot conceive of common opposition to the destruction of so many lives.
Was he doing it on behalf of a Soviet agenda, which frequently manipulated academic trends and science to the end of weakening the U.S.?
If so, this further proves evil intentions often have partial salutary effects.
For instance, the dangers of nuclear weapons causing a planet-wide “winter” was initially a Soviet “Psy-op” to manipulate the Left in this country, with the goal of influencing U.S. policy to halt weapons testing and production, as well as promoting disarmament treaties that would be beneficial to the Soviets (and now Russia). But when the nuclear winter hypothesis fell apart, it morphed into anthropogenic global warming (AGW), as a means of crippling the economies of Western countries. (In my opinion, the various attempts to limit CO2 emissions were ultimately Soviet/Russian orchestrated efforts.)
Interesting. Here’s Thomas DiLorenzo:
The way to resurrect “the honorable title of socialism” after the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 1980s, wrote prominent socialist economist Robert Heilbroner in the Sept. 10, 1990 New Yorker, is to generate public hysteria about what Heilbroner called “the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment.”
He provided a recipe for the destruction of capitalism and the resurrection of socialist central planning:
“Capitalism must be monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final order capitalism.” All under the guise of “easing the ecological burden,” wink, wink.
This would require that we ignore the reality that more affluent, more capitalistic countries are also environmentally cleaner, and that the poverty caused by socialist central planning of this sort would reverse the ecological progress created by capitalistic wealth creation. After all, the worst environmental catastrophes of the twentieth century were in the socialist world. See, for example, the book Ecocide in the USSR.
As for the CO2 campaign’s ultimate origins, this requires proof, obviously.
To show that this strategy wasn’t limited to nukes, I think there could be credible evidence that Keynesianism was a theory with KGB origins, intended to cripple Western economies–Keynes was an avowed socialist, but he openly admired communism. For instance, he is quoted here as saying
Until recently events in Russia were moving too fast and the gap between paper professions and actual achievements was too wide for a proper account to be possible. But the new system is now sufficiently crystallized to be reviewed. The result is impressive. The Russian innovators have passed, not only from the revolutionary stage, but also from the doctrinaire stage.
There is little or nothing left which bears any special relation to Marx and Marxism as distinguished from other systems of socialism. They are engaged in the vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully over a territory so extensive that it covers one-sixth of the land surface of the world. Methods are still changing rapidly in response to experience. The largest scale empiricism and experimentalism which has ever been attempted by disinterested administrators is in operation. Meanwhile the Webbs have enabled us to see the direction in which things appear to be moving and how far they have got.
…It leaves me with a strong desire and hope that we in this country [Britain] may discover how to combine an unlimited readiness to experiment with changes in political and economic methods and institutions, whilst preserving traditionalism and a sort of careful conservatism, thrifty of everything which has human experience behind it, in every branch of feeling and of action.
His defunct link now lacks the quote; find it here on the Mises Institute instead. Keynes was always altering his mind to say what would be received best at the time and place, see the above link. And he especially supported the Nazi command economy, as he wrote in the introduction to the German edition of his “General Theory”:
The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory.
Keynes was very probably a Fabian–a secret society of communists pretending to be socialists, working to promote communism. (Under Marxist dialectic, socialism is merely a stepping-stone to communism.) A well-known British political theorist and economist in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Harold Laski, was publicly a Socialist and much later revealed as a communist Fabian — he was highly influential, and the architect of post-war Socialist India, as well as the model for Ayn Rand’s fictional character Ellsworth Toohey.
Was Keynes a Fabian? Maybe. I do fundamentally disagree with the author’s attribution of supreme importance to the question, though. Rothbard, defending non-interventionism during the Cold War:
… The danger is statism. I don’t think communism is any particular danger except insofar as it is statism. We’ve got enough statism to try to roll back here, and part of that rolling back is the sort of foreign policy and anti-military policy that I advocate. I don’t think that anybody really thinks Russia or China or Albania are out to conquer us militarily. If you press the cold warriors hard enough, they will admit that.
But they’re worried about so-called subversion. In other words, they’re worried about internal communism, either here or abroad. And what I’m saying is that the internal problem we have to worry about is statism. The main objection I have to communism is that communism is statism. And American statism is what’s oppressing us.
So as I read the above story, which says that Hermann Muller’s lie led to restrictions on U.S. nuclear weapons development, I had to ask if he was a communist. Sure enough. Typing “Hermann Muller communist” into Google brings up this biography, which says
Hermann Muller was born in Manhattan in 1890 and grew into a 5’2″ science geek. His father… influenced Hermann with his socialist ideals and a love of science. …Upon graduation from Morris High School in 1907 at age sixteen, Muller attended Columbia University and was attracted to the emerging field of genetics.
…In the 1920s, Muller performed his Nobel prize-winning research showing that X-rays could induce mutations and he became instantly famous. Muller used his fame to caution against the indiscriminate use of X-rays in medicine, but despite his warnings, some physicians even prescribed X-rays to stimulate ovulation in sterile women. His warnings angered many doctors and were largely ignored.
Muller’s outspoken views on socialism also got him in trouble with the Texas administration. He helped publish a Communist newspaper at the school, and the FBI tracked his activities. Feeling that U.S. society was regressing during the Depression, Muller left for Europe in 1932.
A move to the Soviet Union in 1934 seemed to have cured Muller of his Communist sympathies, although he always remained a socialist.
Well, maybe.
By the time he left in 1937, several of his students and colleagues had “disappeared” or been shipped to Siberia.
How many people got out of Russia while it was under Stalin, simply by asking to be let out?
A zinger!
So I think we can safely say Muller was not only a communist, but he was working for the Soviet spy apparatus, in some capacity. In fact, his zeal for the dangers of radiation seemed to grow after he came back to the West, and
World War II forced Muller to leave Scotland in 1940 and he eventually found a permanent position at Indiana University in 1945. A year later, Muller won the Nobel Prize for his work on mutation-inducing X-rays and he used the opportunity to continue pressing for more public knowledge about the hazards of X-ray radiation.
Given that, I would say with very high probability that his lie about the dangers of radiation — in 1946, one year after the bombs were dropped on Japan — was part of a KGB operation to scare people in this country away from using anything associated with the word “nuclear”.
Well, good for them. The bombs “dropped on Japan” ought not to have been.
It offers some insight into how the Soviets operated then, and how Russia operates today, under Putin (who is ex-KGB/FSB). Or possibly how Obama (a closet communist, in my firm opinion) pursues destructive economic policies such as “stimulus”, tax increases, crippling regulations, and healthcare laws (a trillion dollars annually when fully implemented) — all with the object of stressing the U.S. economy to the breaking point. Or his aggressive pursuit of the new START disarmament treaty, which reduces U.S. nuclear stockpiles by 2/3, while letting the Russians increase their stockpiles.
Putin is an admixture. I say this but to demonstrate it would take too long. And who cares? Obama is not a communist, with or without a closet, but if you wish for evidence he is, look here.
