JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

Truman continued to use the bomb as a threat to force Soviet concessions. He felt he did so successfully in Iran just seven months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Russian army was prolonging a wartime occupation in northern Iran, seeking Soviet oil leases like those of the British in the south. Truman later told Senator Henry Jackson that he had summoned Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko to the White House. The president demanded that the Russian troops evacuate Iran within forty-eight hours or the United States would use the atomic weapon that only it possessed. “We’re going to drop it on you,” he told Gromyko. The troops moved in twenty-four hours.[130] On a wider front, the United States enforced a Cold War strategy of containing the Soviet Union. The containment policy was formulated by State Department diplomat George Kennan, writing as “X” in the July 1947 Foreign Affairs. Although Kennan said the purpose of containment was more diplomatic and political than military, the Pentagon carried it out by encircling the U.S.S.R. with U.S. bases and patrolling forces. To match the efficiency of a totalitarian enemy, U.S. military leaders urged legislation that would mobilize the nation to a state of constant readiness for war. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 laid the foundations of a national security state: the National Security Council (NSC), the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), the Munitions Board, the Research and Development Board, the Office of the Sec...

Truman used, and then abused the notion of using nuclear weapons that he claimed only the U.S. had and then proceeded to do, on its face, the same thing the world did to Germany at the close of WWI which in part, led to Hitler's rise to power and eventual takeover, all in the name of preventing communism and something like what happened in Germany and WWII, from happening again? Ironically, all while fostering the same type of environment in the USSR, only with far more dangerous weaponry, expecting a different result. Essentially, the U.S. fostered, called for, and encouraged other countries to build nuclear weapons and then built agencies in America to regulate aspects of their use around the world/make sure America was winning the arms race, including the creation of the CIA who had unchecked power. The same CIA who attempts to corner President Kennedy and force a nuclear war with the USSR in the early 1960s? ..... WHAT?!