Historians Seek Release of Rosenberg Grand Jury Records
A coalition of historians is petitioning a federal court in New York to release sealed grand jury records from the 1951 indictment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and executed in 1953.
The Rosenberg case, a crucible of atomic secrets, American communism, Soviet spying, U.S. counterespionage, and more, remains a landmark in the history of the Cold War. But after decades of debate and disclosure, some of the basic records of the case still remain inaccessible. The historians’ initiative aims to change that.
The National Security Archive, one of the petitioners, has published the petition along with a diverse collection of declarations here.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.