Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

Posted by thnaks 6 hours ago

Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)(www.usni.org)

86 points | 50 commentspage 2

LAC-Tech 2 hours ago|

I feel like this article is leaving some important bits out for the sake of a narrative.

From Wikipedia

By the early 1940s, U.S. Army Intelligence was already aware of allegations that Qian was a communist

This predates the red scare - at the time the US was in bed with "Uncle Joe" Stalin.

While at Caltech, Qian had secretly attended meetings with J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank Oppenheimer, Jack Parsons, and Frank Malina that were organized by the Russian-born Jewish chemist Sidney Weinbaum and called Professional Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party.[43] Weinbaum's trial commenced on August 30 and both Frank Oppenheimer and Parsons testified against him.[44] Weinbaum was convicted of perjury and sentenced to four years.[45] Qian was taken into custody on September 6, 1950, for questioning [7] and for two weeks was detained at Terminal Island, a low-security United States federal prison near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. According to Theodore von Kármán's autobiography, when Qian refused to testify against his old friend Sidney Weinbaum, the FBI decided to launch an investigation on Qian.[46]

This seems incredibly pertinent to the story as well.

platinumrad 1 hour ago|

Every other intellectual and artist was a communist or socialist back then, but not in any way that seriously threatened the state. They all happily worked on the bomb, after all.

LAC-Tech 52 minutes ago||

I don't claim to be an expert on this case.

But I can tell when things are being omitted or glossed over.

xbar 43 minutes ago||

It does not detail those facts. I gloss over them in my reading of the article because I think the topic is been well covered elsewhere. For example, the Oppenheimer movie did a fair job of depicting the communist party activities among intellectuals in the late 1930s.

The fact that those activities led to a thing called McCarthism in the early 1950s is pretty well documented.

Imprisoning Qian for 5 years for a meeting in the late 1930s after his contributions to the war effort was very Red Scare consistent.

feverzsj 9 hours ago||

Qian is a typical opportunist, who had been contacting ccp since 1930s. He was already away from military and academia for years, while pouring huge sum of money into his immigration case. After deported from US, his job in China was mostly management.

raincom 4 hours ago||

Any source for your claims?

contingencies 4 hours ago||

Being raised by KMT and switching to CCP via the US matches this general narrative. But perhaps 'pragmatist' is more appropriate than 'opportunist'. After all, there were only so many countries with a missile program and resources for someone who speaks Mandarin and English and had a family who didn't want to learn Russian. In the interpretations I've been given, Taiwan at that stage was a mess. I think he was probably deeply hurt by the purge and would have stayed in the US and contributed further if it wasn't for the tide of McCarthyist nationalism. The US in the current era definitely has similar tones, which I have personally encountered. This warning piece comes late and may fall on deaf ears.

catigula 4 hours ago|

Wernher von Braun didn't have a rival/opponent nation he could betray America to.

Qian Xuesen did and did.

fakedang 3 hours ago|

Did you forget that most of his colleagues worked with the USSR? Von Braun was just lucky that the US got to him and captured him first.

atrettel 1 hour ago||

Von Braun was not "just lucky" to get captured by the US. He and his immediate staff took active steps to get captured by the Americans [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to...