Bleacher Bums Forum

In the past, you have condescendingly reminding me that we do NOT live in a democracy - we live in a representative republic.  In a representative republic, we elect representatives who decide for us, among other things, what things are Governmental Secrets and what things should be made public.

There is a world of difference between accepting the concept of a representative republic making laws on general matters and deferring to those who are elected to determine what information the public will or will not have available in determining whether to leave them in office.

Do you think Julius Rosenberg was justified in passing our atomic secrets to Russia, at a time when we were not at war with Russia?

I never really thought about it before yesterday, but the question, as you have posed it, is whether he "was justified."  Without knowing everything that he knew, I won't try to second guess his justifications.  Clearly it was illegal.  It is not at all so clear as to whether the world was better or worse off as a result of his actions.  (Which amounted to sharing scientific information.... think about that for a moment.  What the nation had criminalized was the sharing of scientific information.)  The nation at the time had a number of folks with the mindset of Patton, Nixon or Joe McCarthy, and if not for Rosenberg allowing the Soviet Union to develop comparable weaponry, it is not at all hard to see the United States in the 1950's to have openly used nuclear weapons in "diplomacy" around the world, and to have vaporized at least a few more cities the way it did Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to coerce nations into compliance.

I think you may be intending to ask whether it SHOULD have been illegal for Rosenberg to have given that information to the Soviet Union.  To that I would answer no.  It should not have been.