Book Review:
National Suicide – Military Aid to the Soviet Union
by Medford Evans
Reprinted with permission from American Opinion, November 1973
The following is a review of the book National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union by Antony C. Sutton. Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 283 pages.
Don’t stop to read this review till you have placed your order for the book. Anybody that won’t read Antony Sutton is not serious about America. And please don’t try to take this or any other review as a substitute for reading the book. I have used up most of the rest of my space this month lambasting Kissinger and Rockefeller — and I hope you do give what I have to say about them priority over what they have to say for themselves. But Sutton you should study for yourself. He is the most important writer in America today.
Sutton and Kissinger are approximately the same age—forty-eight and fifty respectively; they are both foreign-born (British and German respectively) and both highly educated (Sutton’s advantages at London, Göttingen, and California fully match those of Kissinger at Harvard); they are both formidably intelligent and both expert writers, though Sutton’s crackling clarity will no doubt impress the culturally ambitious less than Kissinger’s imposing obfuscation.
Perhaps that isthe answer to the question I was about to ask: Why does America exalt Kissinger and ignore Sutton? We admire Kissinger because we cannot understand him; we ignore Sutton because we can, if we read him, understand him all too well—and we do not want to hear what he is saying.
I’ll give you a few quotations from this indispensable book, and then you are on your own. Put your shoes on, Elmer, you’re a big boy now. Here goes:The 100,000 Americans killed in Korea and Vietnam were killed by our own technology. This tragedy was brought about by irrational policies, based on unsupportable premises and reflecting grossly inaccurate analyses of the available information.***About 80 percent of the armaments and supplies for the Vietnamese War came from the Soviet Union, and a key part of President Nixon’s policy is the transfer of technology to the USSR.***The Stalingrad Tractor Plant was the first of three massive plants for the production of tractors in peace and tanks in war. It was built in every sense of the word in the United States and was reassembled in Stalingrad by 570 Americans and 50 Germans.
So far, Export-Import Bank direct loans for [the] Kama [truck plant] amount to $86.5 million, and Chase Manhattan Bank of New York anticipates it will grant loans up to $192 million…. The Soviets have no indigenous truck-manufacturing technology. The Soviet trucks on the Ho Chi Minh trail are from Western-built plants and Kama is projected to build 100,000 multi-axle heavy trucks per year — more than the output of all U.S. heavy-truck manufacturers combined.***
In 1946 the Soviets bought fifty-five [British] Rolls-Royce centrifugal compressor-type turbojets – twenty-five Nenes and thirty Derwents. These Rolls-Royce engines, the most advanced in the world, were well suited to Soviet production methods and for the time…proved to be the best possible equipment for the Mi-G 15, which was designed by [the German] Siegfried Gunther and put into production under the name of the Soviet designers Mikoyan and Gurevich.***All modem technology, including modern military technology, depends on the use of computers. To make any progress in weapons systems the Soviets have to utilize modern high-speed computers. These computers and the necessary computer technology have come from the West and still come from the West, almost exclusively from the United States.
That’s skimming the surface. I’ll not try here to summarize Sutton’s account of his own dealings with our State and Defense Departments in his vitally important research. He is admirably concise himself. Originally he got significant assistance. Later he got the run-around. I conclude with his own comment on his own Appendix C, ‘which lists, from an authentic Soviet source, the technical specifications of the ninety-six ships used by the Soviet Union to transport weapons and supplies to Haiphong for use against the United States and its allies…. [W]hile the ships on the Haiphong run may fly the Soviet flag, most of them are certainly not Soviet in construction. Moreover, all their propulsion systems originated outside the Soviet Union.”
Don’t waste your time discussing foreign policy with anybody who hasn’t read Antony Sutton. If you haven’t done so already, buy and read a copy immediately.