Author Archives: RF_Alum

Sanibel Island Vacation

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This commentary is a summary of my notes taken during a vacation with our daughter and her two children. The oldest grandkid was on Spring Break and the youngest was excused from school to go on the trip. The Denver metro area is having a blizzard and our backyard has about two feet of snow accumulated so far today while Sanibel is supposed to be in the high 70s with sunshine today. Denver International Airport is mostly closed, but our flight came back two days before all that started.

We flew non-stop on Frontier with very small and uncomfortable seats to Fort Myers, Fl and drove our rental car over the causeway to the island. We stocked up on groceries at a Publix on the way. We stayed at the Sundial Resort, where our daughter negotiated a 40% reduction in the room rate. We had nearly perfect weather of sunny skies and mid 80 temperatures with only one impressive and short squall that dumped more rain in minutes than what we get in the Denver area in a normal month. The biggest disappointment was that we weren’t able to do snorkeling to look at all the sea creatures. We heard Lake Okeechobee had to be drawn down from the heavier than usual rains. That made the surf too murky for snorkeling. The people at the visitor center told us it is a common spring occurrence, and they are working to get the practice stopped or modified in some way. One warning is that we did not use insect repellent on early beach visits and paid the price with the very itchy “no-see-um” bites that have stayed with us until after the vacation.

There are many fun and interesting things to do on a Sanibel vacation. Walking or relaxing on the beach with the sound of the waves, watching all the birds and boats, and twice seeing a pod of dolphins chase schools of fish up toward the shore. The bike riding is great on the island with the extensive biking paths where the only changes in elevation are the raised bridges over canals. One bike ride was to the light house and fishing pier, which was crowded. Sheepshead and mangrove snappers had been caught. (The bikes were “complimentary, although there is a $40/night resort fee for those and other recreational equipment.) A visit to the sea shell museum was a hit.

Favorite things done on the trip were lounging at the pool or on the beach and the night low-tide “shelling” with flashlights. Probably the most common creature left above the water by the receding tide were beautiful “fighting conch,” which were commonly 2 inch shells of various colors. One night expedition found three of the very large conch. (We were told it is pronounced “conk.”) We read several warnings that keeping a shell with a living inhabitant was prohibited. It might be difficult to put a really beautiful shell back when you see it’s occupied, but it’s the right thing to do.

We saw two 5-6 foot alligators up close (from our rental van). One was beside the main road that connects Sanibel with Captiva. It hissed at us as we pulled up beside it and took its picture. The other was sunning beside the water during our drive through the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge, which is popular for all the varieties of birds. We saw numerous lizards and one of the endangered Eastern Indigo Snakes. It was crawling across the grass by our condo and disappeared into dense vegetation. An interesting fact about the snakes is that they kill prey by violently thrashing against whatever is nearby. Captive snakes are given dead animals to prevent them from injuring themselves in this violent activity!

There are many wonderful restaurants on the island, and we had a running conversation about which was the best that we tried. All were busy. The Bubble House is a strange place apparently so named because it has chandeliers made of bubbling Christmas lights. Our waiter was a young woman wearing Boy Scout shorts and shirt and a headband with cat ears. The meal came with wonderful cheesy bread and sticky rolls. The menu was a bit odd, not extensive, and relatively expensive. The key lime pie was declared the “best ever.” The best of Doc Ford’s was the pound of “Calypso” peel and eat shrimp. We tried the Island Cow, and thought it was so good we went back for our last meal on the island. The most interesting meal there was the “Holy Cow,” which was a combination of fried shrimp, oysters, clams, and calamari. Alligator could be and was added to make a meal that could easily be enough for two to three people. I’ve decided to leave the Lazy Flamingo for last because it was my favorite. Very friendly people in what I think of as a beach café setting with a mix of locals and tourists. We recommend that you try the fresh grouper there or anywhere else it is on the menu. There were two trips to Pinocchio’s, which is a very busy ice cream place. Try the “dirty sand dollar,” if you like chocolate.

I’ll close with a description of a memorable 16×20 inch cake decorated with a beach motif from Bailey’s for a tenth birthday celebration. The cake had blue icing waves on the sides, blue water and sand (graham cracker crumbs) on top, and a variety of sugar “sea shells.” There also was a miniature beach chair, palm trees, a beach bucket and shovel, umbrella, and sand castle. A wonderful birthday cake and wonderful vacation. Try Sanibel, you’ll like it!

Rocky Flats Museum Still Searching for Home

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A recent article describes how members of a nonprofit have “…salvaged thousands of items during the decontamination and destruction of the Rocky Flats Plant.” They are searching for a permanent space for the artifacts after years of moving in and out of temporary spaces. There had been a federal grant of $492,000 obtained by former U.S. senator Wayne Allard in 2007 to find a space, but that money is gone.

The directors are paying about $600/month out of pocket for storage rental and other expenses. The items in storage include 400 boxes of photographs, maps and drawings along with thousands of items such as glove boxes and safety and monitoring equipment. Museum president Murph Widdowfield said, “Our goal is to find space for a small display so the Rocky Flats Plant can live on and continue educating people.” Museum historian Ron Heard said, “It’s one of those stories that’s not a happy story—the building of nuclear weapons—but it’s a part of Colorado history.” The vice president, Larry Wilson, “…said the items not only help tell the story of the country’s nuclear legacy, but also the story of Jefferson County.”

Scott Surovchak, Rocky Flats legacy site manager for the Department of Energy, added that “…more than 100,000 workers passed through the site in the course of its roughly 50-year history, allowing a middle-class buildout of Arvada, Broomfield, and Westminster.” He added that the board wants a place to take grandkids and great-grandkids to show them and the general public, “here’s what we did.”

I find it encouraging that Surovchak commented, “The current board is different than the original group, which included a bunch of the ‘anti crowd’.” That’s a welcome change from the time when I volunteered to help inventory what was in many of all those boxes and write papers about the history of the plant.

Engineering Communism

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engineering-communismThe subtitle of the book by Steven R. Usdin is, “How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley.” I’ve always been interested in why Americans spied for the Soviet Union, and this book tells me at least two of them eagerly spied and believed in Communism to their deaths. The book tells how Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, members of the Rosenberg spy ring, provided technical details of radar, antiaircraft aiming devices, and the proximity fuse to the Soviets during World War II. The KGB, a Russian abbreviation for “Committee for State Security,” helped them escape when the spy ring began to crumble. The KGB then helped them overcome Soviet bureaucracy to build electronics industry with new identities. Barr became Joseph Berg and Sarant became Phillip Staros. Their story is extraordinary because the two led happy and productive lives behind the Iron Curtain while most defectors “…were despised and distrusted by their Soviet counterparts…and quite a few drank themselves to death.” Neither ever admitted their espionage activities. Barr did readily acknowledge that he felt greater loyalty to the USSR than to the United States “…because the Soviet Union was the only nation on earth trying to build the communist utopia he fervently believed in…” Neither Barr nor Sarant ever indicated any remorse that the secrets they passed to the Soviets were used against American pilots and soldiers in Korea and Vietnam.

Barr and Sarant learned engineering at the City College of New York (CCNY). The two were among the half of the 100 engineering students who were communists. Their informal cell, which was led by Julius Rosenberg, included Barr, Sarant, Morton Sobell, Max Elichter, Bill Danziger, and Bill Perl, and all would eventually spy for the Soviet Union. Sobell, Elichter, and Danziger landed jobs the Navy Bureau of Ordnance. Barr started at the Civil Aeronautics Authority and had to hide his Communist affiliation because the Hatch Act barred government employment to anyone belonging to certain organizations, including CPUSA. Barr did distribute literature encouraging fellow employees to join the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians (FAECT). The KGB used FAECT and other similar organizations to recruit agents. By 1940 Lieutenant General Pavel Fitin, head of Soviet foreign intelligence, commanded a covert force in the United States that exceeded the number of FBI agents.

Barr worked at Fort Monmouth and eventually went to work for Western Electric, where he worked on perfecting the Norden bombsight. He was allowed to carry classified documents to his home to “work overtime”

The book mentions that the FBI finally began to wake up to the Soviet espionage threat “…around the time of the Soviet victory over the Nazis at the epic battle of Stalingrad…” The FBI ballooned to 4,380 agents, and many of them were working on surveillance of suspected Soviet activities. Continue reading →

Not Playing with a Full Deck

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According to Phrase Finder, this is one of many derogatory phrases that became popular in the 1980s to indicate someone “having a bit missing,” or “not all there,” as would be a person playing cards without the full deck.

I’ve read a theory that the expression came from a time when a tax charged was charged on the ace of spades and that people chose to play with 51 cards with that card missing to avoid the tax. Wikipedia has a slightly different story. Charles I of England extended stamp duty to playing cards in 1711. One of the cards in the pack, and usually the ace of spades, was marked with a hand stamp. Another story was that some decks of cards were made without aces because the members of the royal court didn’t want a card that outranked the king and queen.

Robotic Cockroaches for Disaster Searches

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This seemed to be a nice change of pace from depressing commentaries (although I understand disaster preparedness isn’t exactly a light-hearted subject). An article about robotic cockroaches leads with some amazing statements about the characteristics of the disgusting bugs. They can “…squish their bodies to one quarter their normal size, yet still scamper at lightning speed. Also, they can withstand 900 times their body weight without being hurt. That’s equivalent to a 200-pound man who wouldn’t be crushed by 90 tons on his head.” They can travel 50 body lengths a second, which is the equivalent of a man running 140 mph. They’re slowed down when they compress to squeeze through a small opening. Compressed they can only travel at 20 body lengths a second, or the equivalent of just under 60 mph.   Study of cockroaches led scientists to create a mini-robot that can be fitted with cameras, microphones, and other sensors for sifting through rubble after a disaster to search for survivors.

The prototype is called the Compressible Robot with Articulated Mechanisms, or CRAM. It’s actually about twenty times the size of a cockroach, but it’s simple and cheap. Kaushik Jayaram, a Harvard robotics researcher, said he used off-the-shelf electronics and motors to build the prototype in about half an hour at a cost of about $100. He estimated the cost would be about $10 for a mass-produced version. Jayaram also said he is still disgusted by cockroaches, “But we can learn a lot of interesting things from even the most disgusting animals.”

America’s Plans for War Against the Soviet Union, 1945-1950

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I’ve mentioned that I have been working on a book to explain the decision to build the Rocky Flats Plant where nuclear weapon components were manufactured from 1953 until 1989. The 15 volume set edited by Steven T. Ross and David Alan Rosenberg contains a wealth of information about the war plans created by the military that helps explain that decision. First and foremost is the belief that the objective of the Soviet Union was to select a time when they could invade Western Europe to begin the process of imposing Communist control of the world. The set, which consists of oversized books, “…reproduces in facsimile 98 plans and studies created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

The JCS in 1945 believed that Moscow was not ready to launch a Third World War until they had rebuilt their war machine, but as prudent planners they had to prepare for armed conflict on a global scale earlier than expected. The plans, which were all classified Top Secret or Secret and occasionally were also marked to contain Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) restricted data, were of course all declassified before the series was published. I will warn that you won’t find the volumes on Amazon, or at least I didn’t. My local public library was able to find several of them on interlibrary loan. I’ll give all the detail I know about Volume 1 at the end of this review if a reader wants to try to obtain the volume by the same process.

American war plans included:

  • Emergency War Plans for a conflict during the next fiscal year
  • Mid-Range War Plans for a war two to five years in the future
  • Long Range War Plans for a war five to ten years in the future
  • Industrial Mobilization Plans describing a general war to provide guidance for military and economic mobilization planning
  • Special studies, which describe a global conflict in order to guide long range fiscal planning

Supporting papers included:

  • Estimates of Soviet power (and their overwhelming advantage in men under arms)
  • Logistic feasibility studies of American war plans (which were often  found to not be feasible)
  • Examinations of the impact of atomic weapons on the future of modern warfare (which were not encouraging for the protection of American cities and offensive capabilities)

America and Allies no match for Soviet army:

All of the war plans recognized that the huge Soviet and Satellite armies would be able to overwhelm the relatively small allied forces. Earlier plans listed “…the possession and, until 1949, a presumed monopoly of atomic weapons…” and a large and expanding industrial base to be the main advantages of America and its allies. The plans virtually conceded that the Soviet armies could decisively and quickly take Western Europe and most of the Middle East. The allies hoped to be able to establish and maintain “…bases in Great Britain, Egypt, Japan, and possibly northern India and Greenland, from which to launch the strategic air offensive…The liberation of Western Europe would not be the result of direct military operations, but rather a function of the presumed Soviet collapse under the combined weight of the atomic and conventional aerial attack and the counteroffensive against the southern regions of the USSR…the United States would not seek to defend or recover any positions on the Asian mainland, a position that remained unchanged even after the start of the Korean War.”

As an example of an individual plan, the first was “JIS 80/7, 23 October 1945, Russian Capabilities.” The Joint Intelligence Staff prepared this report “To estimate the Russian political situation with particular emphasis on aims and potentialities for expansion of her sphere of influence by means short of war, by 1 January 1948…” World War II had left the Soviets at a high level of political prestige, but weakened by massive destruction and loss of life. A major weakness was the lack of an atomic bomb capability.

I’ll give you a flavor of what the plans included by summarizing “JCS 1477/1 30 October 1945, Over-All Effect of Atomic Bomb on Wartime Organizations.”

The plan states that the greatest effect of development of the atomic bomb was the security of the United States after another country acquires that weapon. It was noted that an aggressor nation with atomic weapons could “…achieve the effects of Pearl Harbor on a vast and relatively complete scale.”The risk presented by another country acquiring the weapons “…emphasizes the importance not only of readiness for immediate defense, but also for striking first, if necessary, against the source of threatened attack.” The only defense against atomic attack is by destroying the carriers in flight, and lessons from World War II indicated that defense cannot be total. Some planes would get through and cities would be destroyed. It was estimated at the time of the report (30 October 1945), that, “…the United States has a head start which is roughly estimated as the equivalent of five years of technological advantage.” (That estimate wasn’t far off.) It was also stated that the U.S. had control of “…major sources of uranium and other essential ores.” (That statement turned out to be incorrect.) It was recommended that there be an accumulation of a “…stockpile of atomic bombs and other new weapons sufficient to implement United States strategic war plans.” That last statement is an example of why the series goes a long way in supporting the decision to build Rocky Flats.  

I may post reviews of some other volumes, but you’ll have to wait for me to finish the book before you see my full assessment of what is include.

Information on the series:

Steven T. Ross and David Alan Rosenberg, editors, America’s Plans for War Against the Soviet Union 1945-1950, A 15 volume set reproducing in facsimile 98 plans and studies created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, A Garland Series, 1989-1990. The information in this posting is from Volume 1, which has a subtitle of The Strategic Environment.