U.S. czar in Cold War: Smack in the USSR

John Holdren

John Holdren, President Obama's "science" czar, visited the Soviet Union during the Cold War as vice chairman of a group whose founder was accused of providing vital nuclear information that helped the Soviets build an atom bomb, WND has learned.

The original leaders of the group, the Federation of American Scientists, also served on the board of a magazine whose personnel were accused of passing crucial nuclear information to the Soviets. Holdren served on the board of directors of that magazine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Just after President Reagan's March 1983 "Star Wars" speech in which he proposed a missile-defense shield to protect the U.S. home front, a group of Soviet academicians sent a letter to the U.S. scientific community asking about the feasibility of such a shield.

The only group that responded directly to the Soviet scientists was the Federation of American Scientists, or FAS, leading to an invitation to visit from Evgeny Velikov, director of the Soviet Kurchatov Institute of Science.

Physicist David W. Hafemeister relates in his book, "Physics and Nuclear Arms Today," how he was part of the FAS delegation to the USSR along with Holdren, who at the time was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

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The FAS is non-profit organization formed in 1945 by scientists from the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. The FAS has long petitioned for nuclear disarmament.

Scientist Leo Szilard, a member of the Manhattan Project, was a principal founder of the FAS. Szilard also was accused of providing vital information to the Soviets that helped them build an atomic bomb.

In 1994, Pavel Sudoplatov, a former major-general in Soviet intelligence, named Szilard as a key source of crucial atomic information to the Soviet Union.

"The most vital information for developing the first Soviet atomic bomb came from scientists engaged in the Manhattan Project to build the American atomic bomb – Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard," wrote Sudoplatov.

Founders of the FAS also were board members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a journal that argued for the U.S. to hand its nuclear weapons to an international organization. It began publishing regularly in 1945.

Szilard founded the Bulletin along with Oppenheimer, who was long accused of spying for the Soviets and passing along vital nuclear secrets.

WND found other FAS founders that served on the Bulletin board, including nuclear physicists Eugene Rubinowitch, Hans Bethe and V. F. Weisskopf

Sudoplatov wrote the Soviet Union "received reports on the progress of the Manhattan Project from Oppenheimer and his friends in oral form, through comments and asides, and from documents transferred through clandestine methods with their full knowledge that the information they were sharing would be passed on."

Indeed, Oppenheimer was accused in Senate hearings of bringing communists into the Manhattan Project. He brought his brother Frank and three former graduate students into the project, all of whom, according to Senate hearings, were well known to him to be "members of the Communist Party or closely associated with activities of the Communist Party."

Oppenheimer admitted he knew by August 1943 that two of the scientists working under him were Communist Party members. Three of five scientists under Oppenheimer's direct supervision were accused of leaking secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviets.

On Oct. 25, 1945, Oppenheimer met with President Truman at the White House, urging him to surrender the U.S. nuclear monopoly to international control. Truman was outraged, reportedly telling Secretary of State Dean Acheson, "I don't want to see that son-of-a-b*tch in this office ever again."

Magazine used for 'Soviet propaganda'

Oppenheimer and Szilard were stripped of their work in the Manhattan Project, but they continued to use the Bulletin to petition for the U.S. to surrender its nuclear arsenal to international control. According to Sudoplatov, this kind of work was for the benefit of the Soviets.

"[Soviet politician and security chief Lavrentiy] Beria said we should think how to use Oppenheimer, Szilard and others around them in the peace campaign against nuclear armament. Disarmament and the inability to impose nuclear blackmail would deprive the United States of its advantage," wrote Sudoplatov.

Sudoplatov said his spymasters knew the lobby efforts of the Bulletin editors would be a "crucial factor in establishing the new world order after the war, and we took advantage of this."

Another Bulletin founding sponsor, Edward U. Condon, was mentioned by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in a May 1947 letter as having contact with an alleged spy who had passed information to the Soviets from 1941 to 1944.

Holdren worked alongside communist sympathizers

The New Zeal blog first reported Holdren worked on the Bulletin in 1984. At the time, communist and socialist sympathizers still occupied the magazine's masthead.

The Bulletin's board of directors in 1984, New Zeal reported, included:

Board chairman Aaron Adler, who also served on the board of the Chicago Center for U.S./USSR Relations and Exchanges, alongside Larry McGurty of the Communist Party USA.
Adler was also a member of what New Zeal labels a Communist Party front, the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. He was also involved in a committee to celebrate the 100th birthday of Communist Party member Paul Robeson.
Bernard Weissbourd, a former Manhattan Project scientist who later served on the transition oversight committee for incoming Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, who was active in Communist Party fronts.
Weissbourds' son, Robert M. Weissbourd, later served as chairman of the Obama for America Campaign Urban and Metropolitan Policy Committee and on the Obama Transition Housing and Urban Development Agency Review Team in 2008.
Ruth Adams, Bulletin editor, who served in the 1960s on the Advisory Committee of the Hyde Park Community Peace Center. Other Center members included lifelong communist front activist Robert Havighurst, communist activist and radical Trotskyist Sydney Lens and Quentin Young, an avowed communist who has advised Obama on health care.

Surrender to planetary regime

Holdren, meanwhile, has been a longtime climate-change alarmist who has advocated ideas such as enforcing limits to world population growth.

Holdren's name was in the e-mails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K., which show that some climate researchers declined to share their data with fellow scientists, conspired to rig data and sought to keep researchers with dissenting views from publishing in leading scientific journals.

FrontPageMag.com noted Holdren has endorsed "surrender of sovereignty" to "a comprehensive Planetary Regime" that would control all the world's resources, direct global redistribution of wealth, oversee the "de-development" of the West, control a world army and taxation regime, and enforce world population limits.

Holdren collaborated with conspiracy theorist Paul Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb" in which it was proclaimed: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

WND previously reported Holdren also predicted 1 billion people will die in "carbon-dioxide-induced famines" in a coming new ice age by 2020.

Holdren based his prediction on a theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide would produce a climate catastrophe causing global cooling, with a consequent reduction in agricultural production resulting in widespread disaster.

But Holdren also argued "global warming" might cancel global cooling. In their 1970s textbook "Ecoscience: Population, Resources and Environment," last revised in 1977, Holdren and co-authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich argued on page 687 that "a man-made warming trend might cancel out a natural cooling trend."

With research by Brenda J. Elliott