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Subject:
The saga of Tsien Hsue-shen
elcid
6/16/2004 7:10:37 AM
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| For more data, see Thread of the Silkworm by Iris Chang.
Tsien was a Chinese student who came to American in the 1930s. He had a talent for mathmetics and he was interested in rocketry. One of his theories was used by the Germans during the war for supersonic flight. Educated at CalTech and MIT, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project and went to Germany as part of the Alsos mission. He studied a secret Luftwaffe research institute which had something like 300 oil drums of burried technial documents. In a matter similar to Oppenheimer, he was cought up in the great commie hunt a few years later. Everyone who went to school knew communists then - because there were about 200,000 card carrying CPUSA members, mainly on college campuses. Being an immigrent, he had few rights, and got none of them. In spite of no trace of evicence against him, he was detained for three years and then deported to PRC in the early 1950s. PRC decided to let him direct the missile program it needed to deliver atomic weapons after the decision was made to go for that in 1955. He had a real head start, and he organized very well. |
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