FDR's 'Freedom of Thought', it turns out , is "BORN SECRET" : Pax Yellowcake, 1946

From early 1941 to early 1946 is only five years but that was long enough to kill FDR's "Freedom of Thought" stone dead.

The McMahon Act said that whole classes of thoughts, even if they are thought uniquely by one person inside their head - or assembled from various information already in the public domain - are born secret and to be known only by the government.

1984's Thought Crimes had arrived in America , not in Orwell's Britain , and arrived 38 years early !

This is what happens when Pax Americana is built around the deluded groupthink (Pax Yellowcake) that the atom bomb was ever an intellectual secret and could ever remain so.

Ignore the nuclear secrets - just follow the money trail

But a real A-bomb program is still an overwhelming financial challenge - as it costs trillions to make and deliver enough nuclear weapons to threaten all the rest of the world if need be.

To date, Britain, France, China, India , Pakistan, Israel have been unable to cough up enough dollars to do so.

In the past, at least two dozen other countries had a serious go at building a nuclear weapon delivery system but bailed out due to the cost.

A single canister of nerve gas, a vial or two of anthrax, one twenty ton low yield atomic gun bomb does not make a world war - 'only' a very serious attempt at non-state organized terrorism.

All the idealists around FDR , including Republicans like Bush and Conant , who thought they could finally carry out the Wilsonian vision of 1917-1919 , could never see how their private secrecy around the non-secret Bomb would totally negate their public claims to be seeking free trade in goods and thoughts.

By contrast Pax Yellow Magic (Dawson's cheap abundant wartime penicillin for all) did embody the Four Freedoms in every detail.

Pity then , that it never was given its head and Pax Yellowcake disassembled as a real bad idea ...