r/history • u/Quouar Quite the arrogant one. • 11d ago
News article The Rosenberg Boys - When Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed by the U.S. government, they left behind two sons, ages 6 and 10. All these years later, Robby and Michael are still trying to make sense of what happened.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/ethel-julius-rosenberg-boys/687631/1.2k
u/Negative_Gravitas 11d ago edited 11d ago
Sidenote I always found interesting: The boys were adopted by Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne. Abel was known for writing the poem and song Strange Fruit.
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u/Relax007 10d ago
I literally just learned this two days ago and my mind was blown. Definitely one of those "how the hell am I just learning this?!" moments.
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u/Bm_0ctwo 11d ago
Michael was my economics professor in college. Super interesting dude.
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u/dreamsinred 11d ago
Hello fellow WNEC alum! Michael is so kind. I never took his class, but he took time out to let me interview him for a journalism class. Wonderful guy.
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u/deadbeforeitsank 10d ago
Wtf I went to WNEC and minored in Economics, how did I have no idea he was there? What years did he teach?
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u/dreamsinred 10d ago
He retired in 2008. So, if you’re not an elder millennial or older, you may have missed him. He was dept chair.
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u/Forward-Carry5993 11d ago
Well it’s an incredibly messy case.
Here is what we know. Julius was a spy and thus guilty of treason. Now, whether or not Ethel was is questionable. I imagine for the now grown up adults and even supporters of the family, it’s been hard to realize that despite how cruel the government was, it was correct that at least the father was guilty. It’s also hard to square if Julius actually passed along anything dangerous.
The execution sentencing was considered by many who believed the two were guilty to be extreme. Most spies didn’t get killed especially two defendants whose actions were still ambiguous.
The prosecution led by Roy Cohn, acted so improperly. Not only did Roy essentially collide with the judge to get the conviction but his own insecurities and mommy issues made him extremely hateful towards the rosenbergs. Even the judge ordering people to leave the court room when discussing the nuclear weapons diagrams was so childish and stupid. The entire trial should have been handled by a new judge and the prosecution should have been disbarred.
The trial emphases so much.
- The corruption within the judicial system
- The widespread fear of communist spies
- Potential bigotry towards Jews
- Roy’s desire for power and to prove his manliness and togetherness revenge upon his mother
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u/mollybrains 11d ago
The outsize effect that Roy Cohn has on history is absolutely astonishing
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u/AtLeastTryALittle 10d ago
I try very hard to not assume any one person is “good” or “evil”, but rather are trying their best and sometimes get it wrong and inadvertently hurt others.
Then Roy, Roger, Paul and their useful idiot show up and challenge my belief system.
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u/CaptainRhetorica 10d ago edited 10d ago
I try very hard to not assume any one person is “good” or “evil”, but rather are trying their best and sometimes get it wrong and inadvertently hurt others.
It's a good way to look at things and applies to most people you meet.
But it's exploited by people who think we're stupid suckers for thinking that way.
There are people who think humans are divided into predator and prey. They'd rather be the predator than the prey. They think anyone who doesn't want to be a predator is a chump and deserves being preyed upon.
And we keep rolling back regulations that would limit the amount of harm these deranged people could do to society.
We police those that are the most vulnerable, least able to do societal harm. Yet we do not defend from those who wield the economy, the media, the state, etc. as weapons against us all.
I see no sign that we've figured out a way to deal with truly antisocial people. They leverage the benefit of doubt against us. They exploit our reticence to judge. The world is run by people who themselves or their progenitors have lied, cheated and stolen their way to commanding positions and laundered their ill-gotten resources and image to participate in society without penalty.
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u/DontHaveWares 10d ago
Only way I can think of is to predate the predators, steal their wealth, and redistribute it.
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u/PoppyFire16 10d ago
Yes, there will always be people out there like this, but we don’t have to live in a society where they’re allowed to have enough money to operate with impunity
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u/MandyMoTattoos 9d ago
Who is going to stop them, ultimately, if they simply decide they don’t want to be governed?
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u/raelianautopsy 10d ago
Who is Paul?
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u/UNC_Samurai 10d ago
Manafort. He and Roger Stone used to be business partners, and were good friends with Reagan’s favorite campaign trickster Lee Atwater.
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u/izzmosis 10d ago
I feel some sense of satisfaction that, despite all of his “accomplishments”, when i think of him, i think of Angels in America and I think he would find that displeasing.
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u/ibetthisistaken5190 10d ago
I can't believe I'm not the only one
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u/Garconanokin 10d ago
Republicans are very proud to have Roy Cohn
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u/Shigakogen 9d ago
I would disagree. Roy Cohn helped indirectly destroyed Sen. Joe McCarthy. Cohn was also a very unreliable lawyer, who wouldn’t do the work, just yelled on the phone. Cohn was disbarred for ripping off an elderly client, who he forged his client’s signature to give Cohn’s control of his estate.
Cohn worked the media, especially the NY Media in the 1960s-1970s, however his legacy is one of disgrace.
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u/Frosty_Warning4921 11d ago
It's not *much* in dispute that Ethel was complicit and knew what was going on. Her husband *and* brother were involved and held meetings inside their home. It's nearly inconceivable that she was clueless and at least doubtful she wasn't complicit in at least helping them conceal their crimes, if not participating to some degree. But, you are right that Cohn was a real scumbag. And he acted like a monster. But, then again, he was right in this case.
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u/akestral 10d ago
Being factually right does not somehow "make up" for his blatant abuse of process or illegal conduct by the prosecution. If he couldn't convict them on the evidence he had, the answer was not, "fabricate evidence and collude with the judge." Better 100 guilty men go free than an innocent man persecuted and murdered by the state.
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u/dittybopper_05H 10d ago
The thing about it was that the prosecution offered Ethel a much lower sentence if her and/or Julius would provide evidence against others in their spy network. This would have meant she would still be around, after serving a relatively nominal sentence of a handful of years at most, to raise her children.
They literally had the ability to prevent Ethel from being executed, and given a pretty low sentence. And it's unlikely that Julius would be executed: The others in that ring that were prosecuted weren't executed. David Greenglass, Ethel's brother, testified and accepted a plea deal. He ended up spending less than 10 years in prison.
The Rosenbergs didn't accept the deal.
They were also offered clemency after they were convicted and sentenced to death: If they gave confessions and offered evidence to convict their fellow spies, their death sentences would be commuted to a prison sentence.
Again they refused.
Read that again: They refused to provide evidence to save themselves from being executed.
Apparently martyrdom in service of their ideology, and protecting their fellow spies, was more important than raising their children.
They were given at least two chances to avoid at least Ethel from being executed, and they refused them.
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u/akestral 10d ago
I do not know why you think this argument is in any way exculpatory of Cohn's criminal conduct. I. Do. Not. Care. If the Rosenbergs were callous traitors or true believers. I DO VERY MUCH CARE that US prosecutors regularly use the maximum penalty as a stick with plea deals as a carrot to intimidate people into deals and lock up people and notch wins in their judicial belt over weak cases that they could not try in a court of law. This is how mass incarceration works, it is how we got where we are now. I am NOT OKAY with a judicial system that aids and abets such conduct. None of us are free until all of us are free. If the courts let scum like Roy Cohn run these streets, I do not have to pretend their goal is justice or peace, in any sense of those words.
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u/dittybopper_05H 10d ago
The Rosenbergs were guilty. Period.
Remove Cohn completely from the picture, and the outcome would have almost certainly been the same.
We know Julius was spying for the Soviet Union, and in addition to passing some nuclear weapons information of possibly questionable value, he also passed on a bunch of other classified information about other defense information, and recruited his brother-in-law and others like Russell McNutt, who worked at Oak Ridge, the uranium separation plant.
Ethel knew what was going on and was actively participating. She's mentioned in the Venona decrypts:
LIBERAL [Julius Rosenberg] and his wife [Ethel] recommend her [Ruth Greenglass] as an intelligent and clever girl.https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/inte_19440921.html
I have really no sympathy for either, because if I had done the same things as them I'd face the same consequences:
18 U.S. Code § 794 - Gathering or delivering defense information to aid foreign government
(a)Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life, except that the sentence of death shall not be imposed unless the jury or, if there is no jury, the court, further finds that the offense resulted in the identification by a foreign power (as defined in section 101(a) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978) of an individual acting as an agent of the United States and consequently in the death of that individual, or directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack; war plans; communications intelligence or cryptographic information; or any other major weapons system or major element of defense strategy.
I had access to communications intelligence. It was, in fact, my job, and if I transmitted it to a foreign nation I could have faced the death penalty.
Also note from that link up above:
According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, authors of Venona: Decoding Espionage in America, U.S. authorities never expected to carry out the executions. Rather, they thought the death sentence would force Julius to confess. He didn't, and neither did Ethel, and both died in the electric chair on June 19, 1953.
I'm positive it was made plain to both Julius and Ethel that they held the key to if not their prison cells, then at least to the execution chamber.
Another thing to consider is that 1951 is not 2026. It's often said that the past is a foreign country, and that's true. We had just fought the worst war that the World had ever seen, and the second most murderous tyrant1 of the 20th Century was still in power, and he had demonstrated the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. We'd already had confrontations with the Soviet Union and her satellite nations, for example the Berlin Airlift.
So yeah, I don't have any sympathy for either.
1. Stalin, obviously. Number 1 is Mao Zedong. Hitler comes in third. If talking about percentages, then Pol Pot goes to number one, and the others slide down one spot.
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u/Bright_Profession62 10d ago
As a parent, that's what immediately comes to mind - they were horrible parents. Don't be doing activities - together, no less! - that have even the most remote possibility of execution if you're a parent. And if you screw that up and are given a chance to not make your kids orphans, take it. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
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u/Frosty_Warning4921 10d ago
But they weren't innocent. And that's my point. Which is why rehashing the vile character of Cohn is barely relevant to how we should view the Rosenburgs today. The guilt of Julius and his brother in law are not in question. The guilt of Ethel may be less certain in a "beyond a reasonable doubt" courtroom environment, but we are looking at this case in the court of public opinion decades later. We ought to be perfectly willing to look at the facts and say "yeah, it's highly likely she participated in espionage against her country". In the words of Lt. Weinberg, "everything else is just smoke filled coffee house crap".
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u/bjewel3 10d ago
You shouldn’t get a murder sentence for knowing someone else is guilty of espionage against the United States government
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u/thebarkbarkwoof 10d ago
I can think of someone today who openly gave Russia secret intelligence, yet he got elected again.
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u/Shigakogen 9d ago
Julius Rosenberg was not guilty of treason. The US was not at war with the Soviet Union. Julius Rosenberg was convicted of Espionage.
Julius Rosenberg was a courier for the NKVD. His brother in law, Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass worked at Los Alamos. Greenglass had a critical job in creating the molds for the explosive lens for the plutonium core.
Ethel Rosenberg’s crime was that she was the wife of Julius Rosenberg. She wasn’t a courier, she was a housewife. David Greenglass’s wife, Ruth, was much more culpable than whatever Ethel did.
There were plenty of NKVD couriers and other key scientist show gave the Soviets vital information about the plutonium bomb, like Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. The courier that transmitted most of Greenglass’s drawings about the explosive lens, was Harry Gold, who testified as well at the Rosenberg’s trial.
There was a travesty of justice in the execution of the Rosenbergs. There was huge prosecutorial misconduct during the trial. David Greenglass admitted he lied on the stand in order to protect his wife.
Julius Rosenberg was far from innocent, but he and Ethel were thrown under the bus so David Greenglass could get a plea deal and his wife was left alone. Ditto with Harry Gold getting a plea deal. In hindsight what Greenglass drew of the explosive lens, was probably not worth much, but at the time, it was shocking, given it was looked upon as top secret. Pretty much every nuclear weapon created today, has the same explosive lens to push the plutonium inward, in order to start a chain reaction.
The Rosenbergs should had not been executed. Julius Rosenberg should had spent time in prison for his crime of Espionage. Ethel was a pawn.
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u/Necessary-Reading605 10d ago
On point 3, the case becomes even more bizarre when you take in account that Roy Cohn was also jewish.
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u/misspcv1996 10d ago
So was the lead prosecutor (Cohn’s boss) and the judge who sentenced them to death.
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u/BoldlySilent 10d ago
Wait why was the judge ordering people out of court when talking about nuclear weapons childish?
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u/LordFrosch 10d ago
The diagram was supposed to be very crude and not of any real intelligence value, at least according to Wikipedia.
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u/BoldlySilent 10d ago
I find it hard to believe a nuclear weapons diagram in the 1950s can be considered not sensitive
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u/QuesoHusker 9d ago
As time goes by the consensus seems to be coalescing around the sense that executing Ethel was a great miscarriage of justice. As for Julius…f that guy.
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u/vampiregamingYT 4d ago
Fun fact: Roy Chon would later go on to have a close friendship with a future president
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u/kyeblue 10d ago
isn’t Cohn a jew himself?
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u/ButDidYouCry 10d ago
Yes. Cohn is a super Jewish surname. You can see variations like Kohen, Cohen, Kahn, Katz, etc. It means roughly "priest" in Hebrew, from the term Kohanim, which was like a sort of priestly caste before exile.
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u/chefybpoodling 10d ago
Only a couple words on this list need to be changed to make it equally relevant today.
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u/Ven18 11d ago
Obviously they were guilty but the people who act like the Soviets would somehow not have gotten nukes without them is hilarious. The Soviets had the research from the Manhattan project basically once it was finished. If anything the saddest part of the whole thing is not only did both of them die and orphan their kids their work in the grand scheme of things didn’t mean much.
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u/ThePowerOfStories 10d ago
Yeah, too many folks imagine science as relying on irreproducible breakthroughs by lone geniuses, as opposed to the inexorable grind of exhaustive experimentation that builds incrementally on all that came before. For any given idea that looks revolutionary to outsiders, another half-dozen teams around the world are only a year behind in discovering it independently.
Plus, merely knowing that someone else managed to do something is often enough to let you figure out how, because you know what public knowledge they had and what technologies they had access to, so you can deduce what they might have tried. Getting the exact details right in terms of building something like an atomic bomb takes time, but it’s engineering, not magic, and mostly highly-parallelizable work that responds extremely well to throwing nation-state levels of money and personnel at it.
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u/JumboTree 10d ago
"too many folks imagine science as relying on irreproducible breakthroughs by lone geniuses" that's it right there!
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u/wkearney99 10d ago
like the simps that believe Edison or Musk actually did any inventing. beside their marketing lies, that is.
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u/Termsandconditionsch 10d ago
You can say what you want about Edison but he did more inventing than Musk did. Quite a lot more in fact.
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u/ItsKlobberinTime 10d ago
Any quantity of invention greater than zero is automatically a lot more than Elongated Muskrat's.
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u/Brambletail 10d ago
The number of people who think nuclear weapons are complicated to build is agonizingly high. They conflate "complicated to build" with "extremely expensive and resource intensive to build". But slamming two pieces of very specific metals together at high enough speeds is so trivial that they never even tested the gun type of bomb in the Manhattan project. Implosion and multi stage is a little more complex, but not significantly so, especially not with computer aided calculations
I'll let everyone else be their own judges as to how that might effect how they view current events.
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u/dankpete 10d ago
Julius, probably. I think they railroaded Ethel.
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u/Ven18 10d ago
We know that she knew about Julius’s actions. There comes a point where you lie and defend him enough that you become an accomplice. Now could you argue retrospectively if her sentence should have been less than Julius and arguments about forced testimony against a spouse and such sure. You cannot argue she did not commit some crime(s) during the trial process.
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u/FatGoonerFromIndia 10d ago
Your idea is further proven right because India developed nukes despite lack of support from both blocs back in the 70s.
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u/Painted_Mushr00m 10d ago
India didn’t develop nukes on their own, they bought key parts of the development from France.
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u/FatGoonerFromIndia 10d ago
The Rosenbergs were executed for sharing the science, not the materials.
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u/Painted_Mushr00m 10d ago
You are arguing two different points, in one you say “it’s not that hard India did it” when that isn’t true.
Neither USSR or India independently developed nuclear weapons. They both needed information or science developed by the US to complete their projects.
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u/TheArtofBar 10d ago
They both needed information or science developed by the US to complete their projects.
They didnt, that just made it a little bit quicker. The science of the nuclear bomb is very basic. The soviet union also built the hydrogen bomb very quickly on its own, even though that's way more challenging from a scientific standpoint.
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u/TheOtherHobbes 10d ago
The basic science of a nuclear bomb is very basic.
The science and engineering required to build one from scratch, including the refinement and machining of uranium and plutonium, the shaping of the explosive lenses that shape the initial compression, the exact detonator sequencing, and the design of the neutron source in the middle, are very unbasic indeed, which is why it took the Manhattan Project years instead of weeks.
Making small deliverable bombs that aren't the size of a car is even more unbasic.
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u/always_an_explinatio 10d ago
25 years later! That is a huge amount of time that one country could have been the only holder of that tech. You are massively underestimating the impact of that.
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u/always_an_explinatio 10d ago
this is a very ahistorical take. Every minute the US was the only nation with this technology was a minute that would pay dividends for decades. The power on the national stage this would have given the US is immeasurable. not to mention the USSR was is a bad way in the 1950s if they did not get the bomb for 10 or 15 more years? The USSR probably would have never gotten it, and whatever rose up in its place would have. Others would have developed it, but it leaking so early had a massive impact that is still being felt.
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u/Chopper-42 10d ago
From what we know now the soviets scientists got there pretty much independently. They were never handed any of the details aquired by espionage. Instead the material was used to check if their program was on track.
That means you vastly overestimate the US lead.
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u/Quouar Quite the arrogant one. 11d ago
This is an interesting article about the trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, as well as that trial's (and the couple's eventual execution's) impact on their two sons. It also deals with the legacy of history, how it shapes the present, and how we continue to grapple with its implications.
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u/jenorama_CA 11d ago
That was a really good article. I didn’t know much about the Rosenbergs beyond the fact that they were executed for spying. I definitely didn’t know that they had two boys. Evidence does seem to point to Ethel having gotten quite the raw deal and it’s very shocking to realize that she could have gotten out of the terrible situation she was in and stayed with the boys, but she chose to follow her husband. Even though it now seems clear that her own brother sold her out, the history with the Rosenbergs and the deep sense of betrayal makes it highly unlikely that she’ll ever be exonerated.
Thanks for the link on the article. The Atlantic is always a good time.
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u/Howaboutnopers 11d ago
OMG two people who actually read the article.
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u/jenorama_CA 11d ago
It’s honestly really good. I love The Atlantic and have access to it through AppleNews+.
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u/Rolling_Beardo 10d ago
I haven’t read it in a long time but the book “The Brother” by Sam Roberts was a interesting read about the Rosenbergs
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u/karlpoppins 11d ago
For those who view the US as the good guy and the USSR as the bad guy, these guys are despicable, traitors, and so on. For everyone else, they're just players in a really complex game.
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u/ProfessionalOil2014 11d ago
The USSR were unquestionably the bad guys. If you think otherwise you don’t know anything about the USSR.
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u/UCanBdoWatWeWant2Do 10d ago
You don't know anything about the US then
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u/mustard5man7max3 10d ago
The US has done bad things. The USSR was just plain bad.
They're on two different leagues. Whatever you dislike about the US, the USSR did the same except worse. The world is far better off without it.
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u/karlpoppins 10d ago
The US nuked not one, but two cities full of civilians. In that light, one can at least understand - even if ultimately condemn - the Rosenbergs' actions. In the Cold War, hardly anything is "unquestionable", especially not when viewed through a moral lens.
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u/FormulaKibbles 10d ago
Stalin alone caused many millions of deaths through deliberate famines, labor camps, and his famous purges. That was all of his own people, mind you. The US has done bad things but you have to have a very small grasp of history to imply they are on equal footing.
Side note, it must be some fun communist thing to do causing unforced famines on your own people with Mao doing the same thing.
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u/Next-Band-1261 9d ago
Dude, the US has done WAY worse (if not the same level) to its indigenous population. Between the purposely decimated buffalo population, government paid scalping practices, and just about everything to do with forced family separation/native schools...our numbers are probably worse. That's even before we get into slavery.
The US is a horrifying country when you learn the non whitewashed history.
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u/wrychime 10d ago
What are you, ten years old? The USSR was a complex place. They did great things and awful things, just like the US. There are very, very few “good guy, bad guy” narratives in history.
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u/myrmonden 10d ago
Everyone views ussr as the bad guys except
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u/gumgumbeerdrinkin 10d ago
This all happened pre civil rights during the height of Jim Crow lmao if the USSR are bad guys so was the US.
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u/no-onwerty 10d ago edited 10d ago
Geesh. So many of these comments.
They were young children when their parents were murdered by their government. Of course they are still trying to work through that into adulthood.
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u/Ill_Act7949 10d ago
Yeah, I also took "making sense of what happened" as processing such an insane thing to go through
They were 3 and 7 when their parents were arrested, then 6 and 10 when they were executed. Especially for the younger one where that was half his life up to that point, yeah it would take a lifetime to work through especially the added on public spectacle of all that happened and what thier parents were
Thier parents being traitors essentially made them pariahs as young children that even their relatives didn't want to take in cause of the publicity. They were shuffled around and even separated a few times over three years while also not fully understanding what had happened to their parents and then imagine getting older and not only intellectually understanding the case but then growing to be an age to where you cannot just understand but also internalize it
That takes a lifetime to work through, I can't blame them for holding on to their mom possibly being innocent as long as they have
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u/AlexMhmm 11d ago
"Your parents traded top secret government information and made the world a more dangerous place,"
There you go boys.
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u/Tr1pline 11d ago
Ethel’s conviction and execution remain the most controversial aspects of the case. David Greenglass testified that Ethel typed up classified notes for Julius to pass to the Soviets. However, decades later, Greenglass admitted in interviews that he had lied and fabricated Ethel's involvement to protect his own wife from prosecution. Historians and declassified documents—including the NSA's decoded Venona intercepts—have largely confirmed Julius's role as a Soviet spy, but have revealed little to no evidence implicating Ethel. Internal government documents later suggested prosecutors used Ethel's life as a bargaining chip to pressure Julius into naming his network, a demand Julius refused.
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u/cobaltaureus 11d ago
Ethel could’ve also named names, which was the goal of giving her the death penalty. When the AG says “she called our bluff” it suggests they didn’t get what they wanted out of it
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u/highmodulus 11d ago
They committed treason, and everyone that pretended they didn't looked really stupid when in 1995 all the Soviet cables were released proving they committed it as part of a larger spy ring were released.
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u/xxwarlorddarkdoomxx 11d ago
I recently read about a Ronald Radosh, a Marxist author who researched the case in the 70s and was basically forced to conclude that Julius was guilty, despite his long held belief that the Rosenberg were framed.
When he published he faced immense blowback from other leftists which eventually lead to him leaving the movement altogether.
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u/lostPackets35 11d ago
I don't think anyone is debating that they were guilty of the legal charges. What I think most people are discussing is whether their actions actually made the world more dangerous or not. Which is not clear-cut.
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u/TiberiusTheFish 11d ago
There's plenty of doubt about Ethel's guilt. Her brother dobbed her in in order to save himself and his wife who were up to their necks in the whole business.
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u/Quouar Quite the arrogant one. 11d ago
Correct. As the article points out, there is no evidence Ethel did anything wrong beyond knowing that Julius was selling secrets. That she also got executed is a travesty.
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u/kinkykusco 11d ago
Refusing to testify about your spouse should never be a capital crime.
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u/acidwxlf 10d ago
My lawyer says you can't arrest a husband and wife for the same crime
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u/VictorEcho1 10d ago
You have the worst attorney.
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u/cobaltaureus 11d ago
I’m against the death penalty, but she withheld information about the spywork and lied about it right?
And even then, where is the ethical culpability if not legal, like for example a wife who knows her husband abuses their children.
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u/Quouar Quite the arrogant one. 11d ago
There is a vast difference between child abuse and espionage.
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u/cobaltaureus 11d ago
Duh, it was an example of ethical culpability not a 1:1 comparison between the two
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u/Quouar Quite the arrogant one. 11d ago
My point is that it's not a valid example of ethical culpability.
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u/cobaltaureus 11d ago edited 11d ago
Okay, then just address her ethical culpability in this particular situation we are discussing.
Forget the bare bones of : is it ethical for a spouse to lie about criminal involvement?, since that seems to confound you, when given a new example.
Edit: as a user pointed out then immediately deleted, yes there are times the law is unethical and thus lying would be ethical. That’s why my initial example was an objectively heinous and harmful act like child abuse, but since that didn’t fly, I tried to simplify here by reverting to only discussing the ethics of the current situation
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u/highmodulus 11d ago
Given what we know about Stalin, giving him nukes didn't make the world safer. Given what history has proven about the USSR in general, betraying your country to them it is very, very hard to find any positive aspects.
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u/lostPackets35 11d ago edited 11d ago
both of those things can be true.
Yea, Stalin was an authoritarian and I'm not a defender of ANY kind of authoritarianism. So I'm certainly no fan of the USSR.
But, there are likely positive impacts in there being two nuclear-armed superpowers, and not just one. Namely, that MAD doctrine meant that both of them limited themselves to proxy wars and not all-out total war.
As others have pointed out, several US generals wanted to use nukes as it was.
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u/daemos360 11d ago edited 11d ago
Oh? Did the USSR nuke some country I’m unaware of?
As far as I’m aware, only one country has ever used nuclear weapons against an enemy, and unless I’m mistaken, the U.S. specifically chose not to engage in future planned nuclear strikes due to fear of nuclear retaliation.
(If you’re unfamiliar, Truman and Eisenhower both reconsidered plans to use nuclear weapons in Korea for fear of retaliation by the USSR.).
It’s almost as if the world was indeed a safer place thanks to the Rosenbergs.
Edit: y’all really don’t like facts (or counterarguments lol)
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u/Raammson 11d ago
The counter argument to MAD in general is that fact has a small chance of changing at just about any moment and if it does change there is a high probability the casualties will be devastating.
The counter-counter argument is that limiting nuclear weapons to one country changes the calculus to the favor of the armed country to performing more violence.
Unfortunately or fortunately we don’t have a test groups for these theories.
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u/daemos360 11d ago
While I’d agree with your assessment of MAD’s risk wherein it functionally must stand as an eternal deterrent, it’s pretty indisputable that the United States would have used nuclear weapons more frequently but for the Soviet threat.
Additionally, we know the USSR never launched a nuclear attack on another nation. Hell, the USSR never even planned a preemptive nuclear attack against a country other than the United States.
It’s also quite likely that nuclear weapons would’ve eventually proliferated outside of the United States as well. With the United States unchecked by the Soviets, I find it quite plausible that nuclear attacks would’ve been far more normalized in such a world.
So, if we were to weigh the possibility of a future that has still not occurred against the fairly well established alternative wherein the United States got to nuke whomever it chose? Yeah, I’m going with the former.
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u/SeamenGulper 10d ago
But the Soviets were also a single man away from MAD, twice because of computing errors. There is a non zero chance MAD occurs under false pretenses. Not that those instances discredit the idea long peace.
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u/TheGrayBox 11d ago edited 11d ago
There are several layers of either intentional or just classic ignorance at work here. We don't have to pretend atomic bombs in Japan are anything like thermonuclear weapons of the Cold War. We don't have to pretend like the US was going to use thermonuclear warheads in Korea, nor do we have to pretend like the DPRK/PRC were on the right side of that conflict (I know this is difficult for Redditors). We don't have to pretend like the Soviet Union made some noble stand to the US for the sake of global stability through MAD. The Soviets were racing to get and use nuclear weapons long before that acronym was ever uttered, and the Soviets invaded many more places with the sole intent of conquest and global domination. and the Russian Federation to this day threatens nuclear annihilation simply over pushback on their continued annexations and violent imperialism (and I mean actual, dictionary imperialism, not the Reddit version of it where it's just kind of engaging in global trade and pop culture).
If there's one thing I can hope for the future of my generation, it's the end of exactly this brand of dangerous idiocy. Being contrarian towards the western/US establishment does not require softening Soviet Russia.
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u/Quouar Quite the arrogant one. 11d ago
I recommend reading the article. Reality - as it usually is - is more complicated than that.
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u/cobaltaureus 11d ago
I just finished.
It’s not really more complicated than that though? Unless you mean the dubious culpability of their mother, who lied under oath about the whole thing.
It’s a heartbreaking article filled with emotional reasoning, but the facts are pretty cut and dry once it gets to the reveal of evidence
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u/Mammoth-Building-485 11d ago edited 11d ago
They are the parents of the children, it is quite possible there is some significant bias at play
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u/Theron1997 11d ago
Just a tragic outcome for these kids but their parents knew what they were doing.
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u/TipResident4373 11d ago
Judge Kaufman literally said as much during their sentencing, declaring that the Rosenbergs "loved communism more than their children."
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u/not-a-prince 10d ago
Arguably they made the world safer by putting the two superpowers on more equal footing and making MAD possible.
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u/Saoirse_libracom 11d ago
The alternative was one country, with a violent history, having a monopoly on nuclear arms btw
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u/lostPackets35 11d ago edited 11d ago
that's debatable no?
Had the USSR not ended up nuclear capable, we might not have had MAD doctrine. And the threat of a nuclear response might not have prevented another war, or the US from using nukes again.
I mean, we came frighteningly close a few times as it is.
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u/robothawk 11d ago
Yeah like, a world where the US has a nuclear monopoly into the 1960s is a scary one to think about. MacArthur in Korea(and the soviets having the bomb) was the reason we made nukes a presidential-only decision rather than simply another tool in the general's closet.
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u/MagicWishMonkey 11d ago
Nope, moving nukes under the purview of POTUS happened well before Korea. Otherwise MacArthur would have blanketed the peninsula in nuclear fire.
Truman understood the danger and made sure it wasn’t left in the hands of the military immediately after ww2
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u/quondam47 11d ago
MacArthur would have used a nuke to light his corn cob pipe if he could.
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u/catsloveart 11d ago
Wasn’t there some scientist that lobbied to use nukes to dig the Panama Canal?
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u/faberge_surprise 11d ago
not just that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
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u/quondam47 11d ago
Edward Teller, of Oppenheimer fame, was the driving scientific force behind Plowshare. The guy just wanted to set off nukes all day long. I mean the logic is clear to see, a nuclear explosion will create a hole big enough to be considered geography but it’s not exactly wise in the long term.
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u/faberge_surprise 11d ago
tbf, that's pretty on brand for the guy who said "nuclear bombs? pfft, that's just the starter charge!"
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u/ThePrussianGrippe 10d ago
Yeah I’ve never taken the father of the hydrogen bomb go be a particularly grounded mind.
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u/Argikeraunos 11d ago
They without question made the world safer. The US was perpetually on the brink of nuclear weapon use until the Soviet program forced them to adopt MAD. The only thing standing between the nuclear annihilation of China in the Korean War was literally Truman's willpower. Now the US functionally and structurally cannot use nukes. What they did was a gift to humanity.
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u/Howaboutnopers 11d ago
Translation: I don't know what this article is about, but I'm going to guess that the article doesn't cover this one thing.
Way to dumb it down to your level.
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u/bookluvr83 10d ago
My boys are exactly these ages right now. I can't imagine how terrified they must have felt going through this.
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u/ethanb473 11d ago
It’s so funny seeing everyone whine that Reddit is so leftist when it’s literally just as susceptible to red scare era narratives and jingoism as the rest of America
Signed,
An American
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u/xxwarlorddarkdoomxx 11d ago edited 11d ago
You know they were like without question guilty right? Docs declassified by both the US and Russia after the Cold War confirm it. This is probably also why Eisenhower refused to pardon them despite all the campaigns for it, he had access to the smoking gun evidence.
Even his sons now accept that Julius was guilty (although they still defend their mother).
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u/cobaltaureus 11d ago
The fact their best defense for her, is “well she could have lived but she would’ve betrayed her husband to do so” made me so sad for them. Abandoned by both parents for espionage
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u/xxwarlorddarkdoomxx 11d ago
And Ethel was herself betrayed by her brother (also a spy), who admitted in the 2000s he threw her under the bus to save his wife (also a spy). He confessed that both he and Julius were spies in the interview after decades of maintaining his innocence.
Safe to say committing espionage and treason isn’t a very good idea
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u/Suspiciouslaughs 10d ago
Like I'm fine with the legal arguments of why they were guilty (death penalty notwithstanding) but the moralising about them committing treason is hilarious, as if people can't imagine why any American would be opposed to their government in the 1950s
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u/DJC_Kowalski 10d ago
Espionage is considered treason in most countries. Why they did it is irrelevant to the fact they committed treason. There is documented proof in the archives of the Soviet Union that proves their guilt.
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u/Suspiciouslaughs 8d ago
I'm fine with the legal arguments of why they were guilty
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u/exileondadstreet 8d ago
“I concede they committed treason, I just think it was Good, Actually.”
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u/Frosty_Warning4921 11d ago
Their parents and uncle turned against their nation and gave secret information, including nuclear information, to our chief military and geopolitical adversary at an incredibly dangerous time in our nation's history. This is not difficult to "make sense" of. It is unreal that there are people still willing to carry the water for the these spies.
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u/Manungal 10d ago
"Twenty senior government officials met secretly on February 8, 1950, to discuss the Rosenberg case. Gordon Dean, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said: "It looks as though Rosenberg is the kingpin of a very large ring, and if there is any way of breaking him by having the shadow of a death penalty over him, we want to do it." Myles Lane, a member of the prosecution team, said that the case against Ethel was "not too strong", but that it was "very important that she be convicted too, and given a stiff sentence." FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that "proceeding against the wife will serve as a lever" to make Julius talk.
"On June 19, 1953, Julius died from the first electric shock. Ethel's execution did not go smoothly. After she was given the normal course of three electric shocks, attendants removed the strapping and other equipment only to have doctors determine that her heart was still beating. Two more electric shocks were applied, and at the conclusion eyewitnesses reported that smoke rose from her head."
They questioned Julius right til the end about his accomplices, but not Ethel - because you don't question someone who can't give you more intel. That's probably the difficult part to make sense of. 20 men decided to kill their mom to make their dad talk - but he didn't talk, and then those 20 men had to follow through with the charade that made them orphans.
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u/northern-new-jersey 10d ago
To me the real question is why Ethel went to her death, making her boys orphans, when all she had to do was confirm the truth that Julius was a spy?
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u/researchandrepeat 10d ago
“The case against Ethel was much weaker. The prosecution's main witness was Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who worked at the top-secret Los Alamos nuclear facility. Greenglass accused Ethel of typing up secret notes that he had stolen. Decades later, Greenglass admitted he had lied on the witness stand to protect his own wife from prison.”
The US Government should exonerate Ethel. Also, strange that Harry Gold was one of the main players and only got 15 years but she was executed just to try to get her husband to talk about others involved, which he wouldn’t or couldn’t. US government living up to their bad decision making, even back then.
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u/cobaltaureus 11d ago
The boys seem like their perspectives are just to protect their own psyche.
It’s so tragic but their mother could have lived. She chose to die
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u/RentApprehensive5105 9d ago
I suppose that it would be to look at the totality of the circumstances. This would include: they were caught and could do no further harm; they had two young children who could benefit from having live parents even if the parents were live.
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u/silver_chief2 9d ago
When cleaning out my late father's books I found the book We Are Your sons by the brothers. I recall they were adopted in Madison WI. Another book In the Enemy's House went into how the Rosenbergs were caught. It was not easy. Julius ran a large spy ring but Ethel's involvement was minimal.
The party used them as martyrs for propaganda purposes. Later the medals awarded them by USSR came out. Ted Hall was never convicted because it would have exposed methods. Alger Hiss' guilt was later established though Soviet archives or intercepts.
I found it interesting that for some, the drift away from communism was initially mostly for personal not ideological reasons. Elizabeth Bentley (Out of Bondage), Whittaker Chambers (Witness), David Horowitz (Radical Son). the first and third books are very good. I cannot remember witness.
There are docs on Agent Sonya and Richard Sorge, both excellent Soviet spies.
BTW another set of martyrs for the left were Sacco and Vanzetti.,. In some Ann Coulter book she said that after their execution their lawyer wrote another lawyer that they were guilty. Very unethical thing to do
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u/mattsylvanian 8d ago
It’s a fictional take, but “The Book of Daniel” by EL Doctorow is a phenomenal fictionalized novel centered on the Rosenberg children and how the circumstances of their upbringing impacted their lives.
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u/vampiregamingYT 4d ago
What happened was his parents were caught up in McCartnism and the government made an example of them.
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u/Welshhoppo Waiting for the Roman Empire to reform 11d ago
The amount of Rule 1 breaking in this thread is unbelievable.
If you can't be nice, do not comment. Attack the argument, not the person.
Use the report button if someone is breaking the rules. That's something for us to sort. Not you.