Publications & Multimedia

Carnegie Quarterly - Spring 1995

Stalin & the Bomb
The View from Inside the Kremlin

Contents:

Stalin & the Bomb
The View from Inside the Kremlin

In the half-decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West has learned some of the darker secrets of the East: that East Germans routinely spied on their neighbors; that Soviets bankrupted themselves in their efforts to match the West missile to missile; and that the dictator of Romania created an infernal child care system that abused those unlucky enough to be placed in its hands.

Another Soviet secret is now in the open, but this time it reveals an accomplishment that the people of the former Soviet republics look to with guarded pride. In Stalin & the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 464 pp., $30.00), David Holloway, codirector of the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University, tells the story of how a handful of Russian scientists were able to catch up to American and British atomic bomb programs (the use of stolen secrets helped) and eventually explode their own thermonuclear device. To research the story, Holloway used his access to the archives of many Soviet scientific institutions and interviews with many of the principals in the Soviet bomb program as well as documents that have recently become available.

Providing a view from inside both the Kremlin and the nation's laboratories, he explores three broad themes: how Soviet scientists overcame their late start in building the bomb; the oftentimes distrustful relationship between Soviet rulers, especially secret police chief Lavrentii Beria, and Soviet scientists and engineers; and the impact of nuclear weapons on the Cold War.

He poses many "what if" questions, answers to which might have altered the course of history. For example, what if Beria and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin had listened to the warnings of their own spies (one ensconced in the heart of the Manhattan Project) about the seriousness of the United States and British bomb development projects, instead of waiting until after the U.S. destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to start their full-scale bomb program? After World War II, would Stalin's hard negotiating line on the geographical boundaries of Europe, when the U.S. had a monopoly on the bomb, have been softened if the Americans had kept him better informed of their plans to develop and use the bomb?

The Role of Espionage

A spy in London for the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, a forerunner of the Committee of State Security (KGB), was the first to verify to the Soviet Union in September 1941 that Britain had decided to build a bomb. Even more valuable information began to flow from Klaus Fuchs, a spy on the British bomb team who also worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944. According to Holloway, it was Fuchs who gave the Soviets key information on the "implosion" method of detonating a bomb, which is the process of using conventional explosives to compress nuclear material until it reaches "criticality" and detonates, as well as a sketch of the U.S. bomb, its components, and important dimensions.

The main beneficiary of this espionage was Igor Kurchatov, scientific director of the Soviet nuclear program from 1942 until his death in 1960. Holloway believes that stolen secrets helped the Soviets cut months or even years off their own bomb program. Wrote Kurchatov to Communist party member Mikhail Pervukhin, "[Espionage] has made it possible to obtain very important guidelines for our research, to bypass

many very labor-intensive phases of working out the problem, and to learn about new scientific and technical ways of solving it."

Kurchatov was unable to tell his scientific colleagues about his nation's espionage and had to find a way to spur nuclear research without revealing his sources. Notes Holloway, "This he did by proposing promising lines of research, and by suggesting ideas in meetings and seminars." Soviet physicists would then take that information and conduct their own independent research.

However, the progress of the project was too slow for Kurchatov. Though the Soviet leaders -- Stalin, Beria, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Viacheslav Molotov -- were by now well informed about the Manhattan Project, they felt no urgency to speed up the research program, even with the U.S. on the verge of testing its first atomic bomb in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The reason, stated one officer of the KGB, was that Beria doubted his own intelligence reports. The officer wrote a fellow KGB agent, Anatolii Iatskov, "From the beginning, Beria suspected disinformation in these reports, thinking that the enemy was trying to draw us in this way into huge expenditures of resources and effort on work which had no future."

Whatever the reasons, it is clear that -- in spite of Fuchs's report that the United States was planning to test the bomb on July 10, 1945, and to use it against Japan if the test was successful -- neither Stalin nor Beria nor Molotov understood the role that the atomic bomb would soon play in international relations.

After Nagasaki

That misunderstanding changed dramatically after President Truman used the bomb to bring Japan to its knees in mid-1945. Now Stalin could not push his physicists fast enough. Money and resources that were scarce in the first half of the decade were suddenly made available to Kurchatov. "Ask for whatever you like," Stalin told him. "You won't be refused."

With the United States in sole possession of a nuclear weapon, Holloway reveals Stalin was concerned that "the atomic bomb had altered the state of power and would enable the United States to shape the postwar settlement to its own advantage." Though there were discussions in the West about using the bomb as a "master card" in negotiations with the Soviets concerning the future of Eastern Europe, "no clear strategy was devised for using the bomb to win concessions from the Soviet Union."

Even so, Stalin expected to be threatened with the bomb and acted accordingly. Rather than kowtow to U.S. interests, Soviet negotiators took a hard line on the future of Berlin and Eastern Europe. Thanks to Fuchs, the Soviets also knew that the United States had only a handful of nuclear weapons after the war -- nine in 1946, thirteen in 1947, and fifty-six in 1948 -- far too few to seriously threaten the massive Soviet Union. The goals of the Soviet negotiating tactic, according to Holloway, were "to break the American monopoly [on the bomb] and in the meantime to ensure that the United States did not derive political benefit from that monopoly."

Meetings between the Western allies and the Soviets after World War II took an adversarial turn, with the West trying to put the bomb and international control of atomic energy at the top of the agenda and the Soviets placing it at the bottom to emphasize their supposed lack of concern. "Atomic diplomacy -- the hope on the one side, the fear on the other, that the bomb would prove to be a powerful political instrument -- contributed . . . to the deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations."

One of the low points in postwar relations came in mid-1948 with the Soviet blockade of Berlin. The crisis was resolved, but the fissures between East and West grew. "The tactic [Soviet leaders] devised for dealing with [the bomb] was to show that the Soviet Union would not be intimidated. This tactic, however, appears to have led to a quicker breakdown of cooperation than Stalin might have envisaged. In that sense the bomb contributed to the collapse of the wartime alliance and the origins of the Cold War."

A Different Outcome?

It is here that Holloway asks one of the key questions of his study, which received partial support from the Corporation. Would the Soviet Union have agreed to international control of nuclear weapons and nuclear research if Stalin had been kept up to date on the bomb before it was used against Japan? The answer, according to the author, is probably not. "Even if Stalin had been informed, he would still have wanted a bomb. . . . To Stalin and Molotov it was clear that the United States wanted to use the bomb as an instrument of political pressure. "Even if the Truman administration eschewed all thought of atomic diplomacy, the bomb would have existed, and would have been seen by Stalin and Molotov as a factor in the balance of power. . . . For Stalin the danger was not the atomic bomb as such, but the American monopoly of the bomb. The obvious solution to this problem, in Stalin's mind, was a Soviet atomic bomb."

The development of an industrial base to build an atomic bomb was something the Soviet Union was perfectly equipped to handle -- particularly with top scientists, engineers, and managers to do the thinking and an unlimited supply of prisoners from the labor camps to do the manual labor. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimated in 1950 that as many as 460,000 people were working on refinement of the Soviet bomb, which was first tested in August 1949.

Holloway gives due credit for the Soviet achievement. While espionage assuredly played a key role in the Soviet atomic program, the best estimates are that the Soviet Union could have built a bomb by 1951 or 1952 even without intelligence about the American bomb. "Soviet nuclear research in 1939-41 had gone a long way toward establishing the conditions for an explosive chain reaction. It was because Soviet nuclear scientists were so advanced that they were able to make good use of the information they received from Britain and the United States about the atomic bomb. [Moreover,] Soviet scientists showed their ability by developing thermonuclear weapons [the hydrogen bomb] independently."

Though Soviet scientists were forced to work in the presence of informers and under the threat of repression, the scientists themselves thought their work was for the ultimate good of the Soviet Union. Concludes Holloway, "Those who took part in the project believed that the Soviet Union needed its own bomb in order to defend itself, and welcomed the challenge of proving the worth of Soviet science by building a Soviet atomic bomb as quickly as possible."

Even with the Soviets joining the nuclear club, Stalin's "war of nerves" immediately after the Second World War reinforced "the conviction of the Western powers that the Soviet Union was an aggressive expansionist power, and that they needed to defend themselves by forming nato and building up their armed forces."

The hope that relations between the West and East would thaw once the Soviet Union had its own atomic weapon never materialized. Rather than strengthening the Soviet Union's military position, the fact that it had tested an atomic weapon only served to increase world tension: ". . . the test did not remove all feelings of insecurity. The secrecy surrounding the atomic test, and the misleading claims that were made once the test had become public, tend to support Khrushchev's account [in his memoirs] because they indicate that Stalin did not believe that the atomic test had made the Soviet Union secure. On the contrary, the test heightened U.S. anxiety at a time when the Soviet Union had not yet acquired a significant atomic capability."

Nuclear Energy

With both sides now in possession of the bomb, the possibility of a nuclear arms race -- a concern that had been expressed years earlier -- was now approaching reality. Danish physicist Niels Bohr and Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. Office for Scientific Research and Development,

felt the best way to avoid an arms race was to disclose the history of bomb development without details about manufacturing. That did not happen.

Peter Kapitsa, an important physicist in the Soviet atomic program, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1978, pushed for international cooperation in the development of atomic energy for peaceful uses. Paraphrasing a letter from Kapitsa to Molotov, Holloway writes, "The success in harnessing atomic energy marked the opening of a new era in human culture. Its main significance was that it gave the human race a powerful source of energy. To see atomic energy only as a means of destruction was as trivial and absurd as to regard electricity primarily as a source of energy for the electric chair."

That was dangerous thinking to Beria, however, and by mid-1946 Kapitsa had been removed from his position in the atomic project.

But even with a healthy dose of mistrust between Communist party leaders and physicists, those working on the Soviet bomb emerged relatively unscathed in the period between the late 1930s, when millions died in Stalin's purge, and the mid-1950s, with the development of the even-more-powerful hydrogen bomb. Though some scientists quit the nuclear project after Stalin's death in 1953, work to advance the nuclear program continued.

However, as Holloway points out, the bomb had begun to serve a different purpose in relations between East and West. The new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, realizing the potential destruction of an all-out nuclear war, altered Soviet foreign policy to reflect that fear. "Either peaceful coexistence or the most destructive war in history," he intoned. Even the father of the Soviet bomb, Igor Kurchatov, eventually acknowledged that the nuclear genie created by the superpowers must never be loosed on the world. Returning from a scorched and devastated test site caused by the Soviet's second explosion of a hydrogen bomb in 1955, Kurchatov told a friend, "That was such a terrible, monstrous sight! That weapon must not be allowed ever to be used."

-- Barry Rosenberg

For information:
David Holloway, Codirector, Center for International Security and Arms Control, 320 Galvez Street, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.

Mercenary Stranger in the House

Apart from public television, our television system is a business attuned exclusively to the marketplace. Children are treated as a market to be sold to advertisers at so many dollars per thousand eyeballs. In such a system, children are not seen as the future of democracy, nor does the television industry consider that it has a special responsibility for their education, values, and nurturing."

With that declaration at the start of Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment (New York: Hill and Wang, 237 pp., $20.00), Newton N. Minow and Craig L. LaMay launch their attack on the system of American television that trains children to be consumers, not citizens, and rationalizes this in the name of First Amendment rights of the media.

An easy target, perhaps, and not for the first time; yet Minow and LaMay have given it new urgency. They not only accuse the broadcasters involved of acting blatantly and arrogantly in their own economic self-interest at the expense of children, but they lay bare the timidity -- or worse -- with which the U.S. Congress and federal regulators have addressed the deficiencies of children's television. They follow up with a prescription for giving children a "healthier television environment."

Reviewing the Stakes

But despite such efforts as Charren's, children watching hour after hour of television continue to be subjected to stunning amounts of violence and sex, along with salesmanship. Although it can be argued that broadcasting invokes the former in service of the latter, they represent separate problems. Dismissing those who see no real proof that "toxic programming" affects youngsters' minds, Minow and LaMay assert to the contrary that it does shape their per- ceptions, fears, and expectations about the adult world and about the future. And the world portrayed by television is "an exaggeratedly brutal place . . . making a norm out of the extreme, the sensational, and the improbable."

They come down equally hard on salesmanship. They especially cite the pervasiveness, well known to American parents, of programming that is inspired by "hot" toys and aimed at selling them to as many junior consumers as possible.

Indeed, by 1987, more than half of all children's programs were toy based -- integral parts of mega-merchandising campaigns that include dolls, videocassettes, and fast-food promotions. Moreover, the broadcast industry chose to meet federal "service" requirements to air a certain number of hours of educational programming each day, by running such programs in early-morning time slots that few children watch and few advertisers find attractive.

"If you came home and you found a strange man . . . teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house," says Yale psychology professor Jerome Singer, quoted in the book. "But here you are; you come in and the tv is on, and you don't think twice about it."

Minow and LaMay suggest Americans should think twice.

Defining the Public Interest

The belief that the public interest can best be expressed in the language of dollars and cents has been a part of broadcast history since the 1920s and the earliest days of radio. But that belief, Minow and LaMay remind us, has been balanced against another: that the public interest, at least in theory, requires broadcasters actually to do good. When the U.S. Congress wrote the Federal Communications Act in 1934, it gave broadcasters free and exclusive use of broadcast channels on the condition that they serve the "public interest, convenience, and necessity." The problem is, the public interest was never defined, "and the Congress, the courts, and the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] have spent sixty frustrating years struggling to figure it out."

Omitting a definition of the public interest proved fateful. Arguably, since it uses the public airwaves, broadcasting should have been regulated from the outset as a public utility -- like railroads and the telephone and telegraph. But the 1934 act specifically exempted broadcasters from those obligations, which meant, Minow and LaMay write, they had the benefits of both worlds: the quid -- exclusive, free use of the public airwaves -- without the quo. So it has remained. "The history of broadcast regulation is a history of conflict between the public's interest and the industry's."

In the Communications Act, Congress took pains to ensure equal access to the airwaves for only one group of Americans: politicians. Children were not on the agenda, because, Minow and LaMay state, "Congress did not think about connecting broadcasting with the needs of children."

In the years since, when television exploded into American homes and transformed the culture, Congress still did not think about the best interest of children. Even so, broadcasters up through the 1970s shared some sense of moral and social obligation to provide good children's television, with shows like Captain Kangaroo and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.

Then, in the early 1980s, the FCC, interpreting the Communications Act in a new way, effectively jettisoned the public interest mandate, declaring that thereafter the marketplace, with its preference for economic efficiency, would determine the public interest.

The agency argued that too many of the public-interest regulations borne by broadcasters unduly restricted their right to determine the content of their broadcasts. In other words, they infringed unduly on the First Amendment rights of the broadcast media. (Even the U.S. Justice Department weighed in: In 1982, the department pressed successful anti-trust legislation against the broadcasters' own voluntary code to restrain commercials on children's shows.)

Children's television was dropped from the agency's list of concerns almost overnight, and children's programming became "quickly overrun by toy and food companies eager to create programs that featured their products. News, educational programs, and other types of tv broadcasting for children virtually disappeared, replaced by programs that commanded higher advertising rates. . . . Violence in children's programs increased considerably; so, too, did the number and frequency of commercials."

So exploitative did children's programming practices become as a result that in 1990 the U.S. Congress finally passed the Children's Television Act (cta), restoring time limits on commercials in children's programs and requiring broadcasters to air at least some "educational and informational" fare suitable for children. The cta marked the first time Congress recognized children as a special audience. Even so, broadcasters "all but ignored the law," until the FCC began a proceeding to "make them clean up their act."

Today, Minow and LaMay declare, there are more good children's television shows than there have been in more than a decade, but even now 60 percent of the programs that broadcasters claim meet the minimal requirements of the law air between 5:30 a.m. and 7 a.m.

Spurious Claims of Censorship

To Minow and LaMay, the argument that regulation of children's programming on television infringes on the First Amendment freedoms of the

broadcast industry rests on a false reading of the Constitution. "It would surely come as a surprise to those who wrote the First Amendment to see that Americans now cite it not to begin discussion of the public interest, but as a reason to close it."

In fact, as the authors point out, the First Amendment, "our most fundamental freedom," forbids only the government from interfering with free speech and the expression of ideas; it does not prohibit citizens from voicing their displeasure at speech that, whether for good reason or bad, they do not like.

Thus, when the chief executive of Time Warner, one of the nation's largest news and entertainment companies, characterized public disgust at a rap song about killing police officers as an attack on his and the singer's right of free speech, it was irrelevant, because the government was not involved.

The history that broadcasters should cite when warning of "censorship" is the kind of insidious pressure that the federal government brought to bear on radio and television during the "Red scares" of the 1930s and 1950s, not the prospect of giving America's children decent programs to watch or of protecting them from programs intended for adults, Minow and LaMay assert. "Both of these goals can be achieved without harming anyone's First Amendment rights."

The Right Direction

Among their major recommendations is the use by parents of the so-called v-chip (v for violence), a programmable computer chip that would allow parents to lock out programs they deem unsuitable for their children. In this, Peggy Charren parts company with her comrades-in-arms, on the ground that "it is a form of censorship because it preselects what gets screened out" -- precisely the rationale that Minow and LaMay believe is "in need of rest."

But Charren also notes that the v-chip would "exclude good programs with a little bit of violence in them as well as bad ones with a lot." To which Minow responds, "If the v-chip is censorship, and a parent is the censor, what is wrong with that?"

Minow and LaMay also endorse proposals to end television's commercial exploitation of children. Specifically, they ask that the 1990 Children's Television Act be amended to forbid commercials in programming directed primarily at preschool children. The reason? Advertising in programming specifically designed for the preschool audience is inherently deceptive because children of this age cannot distinguish between advertising and programming material.

Can broadcasters make money that way? Minow says yes. "Nickelodeon is very profitable, and by and large they do a good job." But Nickelodeon, a cable television channel that, by its own estimates, has 30 percent of the entire child television audience, began to carry advertising after Congress deregulated the industry in 1984. The most popular children's television service for six- to eleven-year-olds, Nickelodeon now plans to compete with public broadcasting, which carries no advertising in its children's programs, in reaching the "virgin" market of two- to six-year-olds. Abandoned in the Wasteland asks pointedly, What is to prevent it from increasing its advertising in preschool programs from four minutes per hour to eight or ten and a half, the new maximum? What is to ensure that its original programs do not vanish into an array of reruns and cheaply produced cartoons?

If all this sounds like reregulation of broadcasting, Minow and LaMay do not shy away from the characterization. "If we're going to allow the exclusive use of our airwaves, we must spell out obligations in return. The difference between our proposals and some others' is that we want to give broadcasters a choice: serve the public interest or pay so it can be done elsewhere. As it now stands, they neither serve nor pay."

The authors favor a spectrum fee of between 1 percent and 3 percent of annual revenues, with the revenues "required by statute to go to the production of children's programming on public broadcasting." A huge golden egg awaits: with U.S. gross radio/tv revenues "conservatively" estimated at roughly $34 billion a year, "a bare minimum of 1 percent [as a fee] would pay annually for $340 million of children's programming."

Not least, they want to see Congress "explicitly define the 1934 Communications Act's "public interest" standard in terms of broadcasters' service to children and their obligation to protect and educate the young.

A Second Chance

Given the seemingly long odds against real reform, why have Minow, a busy and successful Chicago attorney, and LaMay, a communications scholar and journalist whose career is currently in academia, chosen to joust with television programmers at this time? Because of the onset of the worldwide telecommunications revolution, they reply, fueled by the technologies of satellites, digitization, and fiber-optic cable and introducing a new era of competitition in a multichannel marketplace. This development gives Congress "a second chance to define what Americans mean by the public interest . . . as the information superhighway enters our lives.

"The choice is to serve the needs of children and use the opportunities presented by the superhighway in the digital age to enrich their lives. If we turn away from that choice, the consequences of our inaction will be even greater educational neglect, more craven and deceptive consumerism, and inappropriate levels of sex and violence -- a wasteland vaster than anyone can imagine, or would care to. Let us do for our children today what we should have done long ago."

The coauthors make clear that, left to the marketplace, children will receive either very bad service or none at all. "Policymakers in every country know this is true because they have the example of American broadcast television to show them it is true."

Yet Minow and his colleague LaMay find the current prospects for reform of children's television discouraging: "What you have in the legislative process are warring industry interests worrying about who can outlobby whom rather than who's going to protect kids."

Minow's hope is that a combination of parents' groups and the nonprofit community and schools will act together and become a force for reform. "I am optimistic only if those kinds of citizens will make their voices heard."

-- Roger Williams

For information:
Newton N. Minow, Sidley &; Austin, One First National Plaza, Chicago, IL 60603; and Craig L. LaMay, Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University, 617 Noyes Street, Evanston, IL 60208.

One American World ...

"Am I racist or not?" is a question students of social psychologist Raphael S. Ezekiel often ask themselves. But as Ezekiel suggests, disturbing though the answer might be, the question misses the point.

"Racism is a way of perceiving the world and a way of thinking. To a certain degree it is part of everyone who lives in a racist society," Ezekiel writes in his pioneering new book based on a decade of field research, The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen (New York: Viking, 330 pp., $24.95). It is as though racism is in the very air we breathe. ("Imagine growing up next to a cement factory, and imagine the cement dust inevitably becoming a part of your body.") But although ordinary people absorb, even in subtle ways, racist beliefs, most do not make it the centerpiece of their lives, as the militant white supremacists profiled in the book have chosen to do. Ezekiel's powerful work probes how these people think, how their actions relate to their ideology, and what it means to live a life consumed by hatred. Their targets are African Americans, Jews, homosexuals, Asians, Latinos, and all other non-European immigrants.

"Our Blood is Different and Special"

Swastikas, "Aryan Only" signs, white Ku Klux Klan robes neatly folded in car trunks, Nazi salutes in church, and shouts of "Praise God for aids" and "White Power" are commonplace in the American world Ezekiel observed so closely for ten years. Like an anthropologist studying a civilization, the author, now an ethnographer at the Harvard School of Public Health, after spending thirty-one years on the psychology faculty of the University of Michigan, penetrated the culture of the white racist movement. His findings,

reported in this book, while shocking, provide a critical opportunity to go beyond stereotypes -- to understand the depths of racism in order to combat it effectively.

Always open about his own background as a Jew and a scholar opposed to racism, Ezekiel inspired openness both in the leaders of the movement and in their followers, who shared with him their ideas, their motivations, and their visions for their country. To gain access, as he reports, he would speak with a directness and politeness that sometimes caught his subjects off guard; on occasion he would take personal risks. Introducing himself, he would explain the philosophy behind his work: "My research as a professor was to visit with people who were doing something that seems different to most others. I had found that almost everyone leads a life that makes good sense to himself or herself, and I liked talking with the person and letting the person explain to me the way that the life makes good sense." With his easygoing style, he found that his subjects frequently forgot that he was the "enemy."

The degree of access he was given might seem surprising, but, as he explains in an interview, the leaders are very interested in publicity. Even negative publicity depicting them as dangerous makes them seem significant and helps recruit new members. And for many of the followers, he often found that he was the first person who had ever really listened carefully to their thoughts. They seemed to crave the attention.

Leaders and Followers

The Racist Mind is divided into three sections, detailing three layers of research. Ezekiel attended a Klan rally at Stone Mountain, Georgia, an Aryan Nations Congress in northern Idaho, and a major sedition trial in Arkansas. He held repeated interviews with three prominent national leaders -- Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance, Dave Holland of the Southern White Knights, and Richard Butler of Aryan Nations. And he held a series of interviews with most of the members of a Detroit-based neo-Nazi cell. Ezekiel interleaves their words, as they spoke them, with his commentary, analysis, and observations.

According to the latest estimates of the Center for Democratic Renewal and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the militant white racist movement includes about 23,000 to 25,000 hard-core members who belong to Klans, Nazi groups, skinhead groups, militant congregations of the Christian Identity sect, and break-off groups. Movement literature is bought by about 150,000 sympathizers who might also send money or participate in rallies; an additional 450,000 people are said to read the literature, although they don't actually pay for it. However, as Ezekiel points out, "the movement's impact is far greater than its numbers, because of the reputation for violence." The relationship between white supremacist groups and the right-wing militia groups gaining national visibility is not yet clear.

Ezekiel recognizes that his view is a limited one -- "one man's reflections" -- and that someone else might have interviewed other people and asked different questions. But it is nonetheless an important window into a guarded world, based on solid field work. He finds wide differences between the leaders and the rank-and-file members. Whereas the leaders are self-confident, cynical, talented political organizers who seek personal power, the followers are often lost souls, angry at what they do not have, who try to give meaning to their lives with vile slogans and potentially violent activism, who seek friendship in white racist groups for lack of a set of constructive competing ideas and choices.

Confounding Stereotypes

In doing his research, Ezekiel, who grew up in segregated Texas, encountered rabid anti-Semitism -- in unadulterated form. At the Stone Mountain Klan rally, a young man demanded to know if he was "kosherish" -- his way of inquiring if Ezekiel were Jewish -- and then tried to have him thrown out, but Ezekiel stayed, since his presence had been approved by the rally's organizer. "Keep the dream alive. Kill a Jew. Keep Hitler's dream alive," the young man taunted. Later, the author interviewed the man, who, with "volcanic fury," told him that the Holocaust was a hoax and that Jews were evil, children of the Devil -- beliefs Ezekiel heard echoed many times.

For most of the neo-Nazis and Klansmen he met, Ezekiel was the first Jew they had actually confronted, although they had spent much of their time and energy railing against Jews -- the people they think control banks and government and have a habit of ritually murdering infants. Interest-ingly, they were surprised by the author's appearance -- he almost looked like them. Ezekiel realized that their contemporary image of Jews was based on the medieval stereotype of a long-robed Shylock.

For members of the Detroit neo-Nazi Death's Head Strike Group (pseudonym), Blacks are the prime target of their hatred. Most members were recruited from the impoverished, mainly African American, urban neighborhoods that their families were too poor to escape. With a median age of nineteen when Ezekiel first met them, they shared several qualities that made them ripe for involvement in the group: they lacked education (most dropped out of school), came from dysfunctional and broken families (many lost a parent at a young age), were ignorant about the world, and had no jobs and little chance for satisfying employment. He describes them as people "with a very limited future, the vanguard of a new white underclass." Over the course of the three-year period in which Ezekiel studied the group, most members drifted away, to be replaced by others just like them.

These young men and the few women involved in the group grew to trust and feel genuine warmth toward Ezekiel. He looked into their eyes, listened, and showed concern for them in a way that perhaps no adult had ever done before. Significantly, none mentioned a teacher or any adult figure who had been an influence in their lives. Ezekiel explains that one of the most interesting things he came to realize about these young neo-Nazis is that, although they expressed racist sentiments, they were members primarily because the group gave them a sense of belonging. "They didn't have to be Nazis," he writes. "Given another format in which they could have relieved their fears, given an alternative group that offered comradeship, reassuring activities, glamour, and excitement, they could easily have switched their allegiances. . . ."

Seeking Alternatives

When asked about alternative groups, he explains that "not the Boy Scouts" but a radical, anti-establishment environmental group like Earth First! might appeal to young people like these. Ezekiel, who is now researching ways of preventing youth violence, suggests that involving young people in constructive activities with adult mentors could have a favorable impact on their lives and decrease the likelihood of their being recruited to racist groups.

He also calls for interactive teaching that avoids preaching. "I am very interested in education that begins with where people are instead of where you hope they are." The key age group is middle school and younger. Noting that very little research has been funded on organized racism, he recommends studies to clarify further the connection between the white supremacist movement and mainstream society.

Although he says his involvement in this project has not affected his life as profoundly as did earlier research into the lives of inner-city blacks in Detroit and of Peace Corps volunteers in Ghana, Ezekiel has become

increasingly interested in education. He explains that he was struck by how "unprotected" the minds of many people are; they have no sense of "structured truths -- anything could be true to them." Additionally, he was startled by their lack of interest in ideas of democracy and community -- somehow their lives had not given those words any content.

After ten years of listening to racist rhetoric, he says there is "no limit to the foolishness I've heard." It was very depressing to find out how "stupid thinking" could be taken so seriously. Considering the lives of young people like members of the Detroit group, he says "the waste is profound."

Part of Society

At the conclusion of his timely book, Ezekiel reminds readers that the white racist movement is "not an alien presence in America; it grows and wanes as general American racism grows and wanes." In this country's current economic, political, and social environment, racism is widespread. "Vigilance is called for -- many racists wear suits, not sheets."

While Ezekiel's odyssey through the white racist movement and the compassion he manages to evince towards its members are extraordinary, his book is a warning that "the situation is going to become worse." Given the state of the economy, among other factors, white Americans will become "more and more vulnerable to a movement whose ideas are already a part of their inner life."

The Racist Mind, supported by the Corporation, is dedicated to the memory of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three young civil rights workers -- the former a Black Mississippian and the others Jewish New Yorkers -- murdered by Klansmen in Mississippi in 1964, and Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley -- the adolescent girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.

-- Sandee Brawarsky

For information:
Professor Raphael S. Ezekiel, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115.

Sidebars

The Soviet Hydrogen Bomb

The Soviet Union had the basic design concept for a workable thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb before the end of 1948, well before its first atomic bomb test. The decision to develop the "superbomb," as the Americans called it, was seen as a logical next step and, notes author David Holloway in Stalin &; the Bomb, occasioned none of the soul-searching that took place in the United States.

Andrei Sakharov had been asked to join the atomic project but declined to do so. He agreed, however, to join the Soviet hydrogen bomb development program. Interviewed by Holloway before his death in 1989, Sakharov said he did so because he was convinced the Soviet Union needed nuclear weapons to restore the balance of power with the United States, "in spite of the fact that we were giving the weapon into the hands of Stalin and Beria."

The first Soviet atomic bomb had been a copy of the first American bomb. But the first Soviet hydrogen bomb was an original design, and the path of development pursued by the Soviet Union was different from that of the United States. On August 12, 1953, the Soviet Union exploded its first thermonuclear bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. The scene at ground zero was described by one of the Soviet scientists on the project, who went out to the site on the third day after the test: "The general impression of a terrible and huge destructive force took shape already at a distance. . . . The impact of it apparently transcended some kind of psychological barrier. The effects of the first atomic bomb explosion had not inspired such flesh-creeping terror, although they had been incomparably more terrible than anything seen in the still recent war."

About the Authors

Researched and written under a Corporation grant to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Abandoned in the Wasteland is very much a two-party enterprise. In making Craig LaMay his coauthor, Newton Minow secured a journalist with a solid understanding of public policy issues in telecommunications. (He edited the Media Studies Journal at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University.)

LaMay has his own ideas about the appropriate role of television in American society, and it is a tribute both to him and the elder Minow that together they have managed to forge a document that satisfies them both.

"In a personal sense, the greatest value to me was working with Mr. Minow," LaMay comments. "He made me less cynical about the communications industry. He convinced me that you cannot take a simple, punitive approach in figuring out what the public interest is in this area." Observes Minow, "I was very eager to have a different generation and different point of view to work with. And Craig provided me that. It is a better book than it otherwise would have been."

The Public Interest

It is a conviction apparently shared by current FCC chairman Reed E. Hundt, who drew upon Abandoned in the Wasteland in a recent speech.

Carnegie Corporation News

In April the Wilmer Shields Rich Awards for Excellence in Communications were announced, and the Corporation's 1993 annual report received second place. The awards are made by the Council on Foundations and the Communications Network in Philanthropy. The Corporation tied with the Kresge Foundation in the category for private foundations with assets of $25 million or more.

TRUSTEE NEWS

Elected to the Corporation's board of trustees for a four-year term in April was Judy Woodruff, prime anchor and senior correspondent of Cable News Network (CNN). Ms. Woodruff, who joined CNN in 1993, coanchors Inside Politics, The World Today, and CNN's special coverage of political conventions and summits. Earlier, she served as chief Washington correspondent for the Public Broadcasting Service's MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour and as White House correspondent for NBC News.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

In addition to the books highlighted in this issue, a number of Corporation-supported publications of general interest have been published in recent months. These may be ordered directly from their publishers:

China's Strategic Seapower: The Politics of Force Modernization in the Nuclear Age, by John Wilson Lewis and Litai Xue (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press)

Congress, the Press, and the Public, edited by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and Brookings Institution)

DØtente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, by Raymond L. Garthoff (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution)

Economics in a Changing World, Volume 1, System Transformation: Eastern and Western Assessments, edited by Abel Aganbegyan, Oleg Bogomolov, and Michael Kaser (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press)

The Fragile Contract: University Science and the Federal Government, edited by David H. Guston and Kenneth Keniston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Indigenous Peoples and Democracy in Latin America, edited by Donna Lee Van Cott (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press)

The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, edited by Gail W. Lapidus (Boulder, CO: Westview Press)

Unifying Germany, 1989-1990, by Manfred G¦rtemaker (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press)

Carnegie Quarterly

Carnegie Corporation of New York
437 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10022

Phone (212) 371-3200, Fax (212) 754-4073

Editor, Avery Russell
Assistants, Anne S. McCook, Laura A. Clark, and Lynn Jordan
Illustrations, Toni Kurrasch
Art on p. 5 based on photograph by Lloyd DeGrane