The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was the most influential communist party in the Western Hemisphere until the 1950s. Although it never had a mass membership, it gained the allegiance of many influential political and cultural figures. Its membership consisted of Anglo-Saxons as well as immigrants and children of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. The CPUSA played a controversial role in American political history in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s when attempts by anti-communists to discredit the party as an arm of the Soviet Union backfired. Scholarship on the CPUSA is deeply divided as a result of these political controversies. Traditional scholarship emphasized the CPUSA as an indigenous development with limited ties to the Soviet Union. This school lauded the CPUSA for its apparent support of civil rights, unions, and racial equality. A revisionist approach emphasized the party’s ties to Moscow and viewed it as dedicated to supporting a foreign totalitarian regime. Since 1991, the release of many secret CPUSA documents has strongly supported the revisionist school, demonstrating that the party followed closely the political and operational directives of Soviet security services and was deeply involved in assisting Soviet espionage and acted as an agent of influence for the USSR.
The Manhattan Project is the code name for the most recognisable weapons programme in modern history. Although it was not the first nuclear weapons programme, it was certainly the largest and best known. More than a hundred thousand people took part in it: theoretical scientists and engineers, technicians and lab technicians, administrative and support staff, and soldiers. The most prominent are the scientists – the real cream of the scientific world of the time. Former or future Nobel Prize winners. Among them was a large representation of people with Polish roots and two young scientists from Poland: a mathematician and a physicist. One is recognised as the co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb, the other of the classical uranium bomb. This article presents the profiles of these two great Polish scientists, who made a considerable contribution to the project that culminated in the creation of the most destructive type of weapon – a nuclear weapon.
PL
Projekt Manhattan to kryptonim najbardziej rozpoznawalnego programu zbrojeniowego we współczesnej historii. Chociaż nie był pierwszym programem budowy broni jądrowej, z całą pewnością był największym i najbardziej znanym. Brało w nim udział ponad sto tysięcy osób: począwszy od naukowców-teoretyków i inżynierów, jak również techników i laborantów, pracowników administracji i personelu pomocniczego, a skończywszy na żołnierzach. Najbardziej znani są naukowcy – to prawdziwa śmietanka ówczesnego świata nauki, byli lub przyszli laureaci Nagrody Nobla. Wśród nich znalazła się liczna reprezentacja osób o polskich korzeniach oraz dwóch młodych naukowców z Polski: matematyk i fizyk. Jeden uznawany jest za współtwórcę bomby wodorowej, drugi – klasycznej bomby uranowej. Artykuł przedstawia sylwetki obu wielkich polskich naukowców, którzy wnieśli niebagatelny wkład w projekt zakończony stworzeniem najbardziej destrukcyjnego typu broni – broni jądrowej.
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