Sensible Advance

Within a generation after Peter the Great imported a large group of picked Western technicians, Russia for the first time became a great power. A portrait of Peter the Great now hangs in Stalin's study-- and Stalin has not forgotten the lesson.

In Goettingen last week, cheerful, bushy-browed Dr. Werner Heisenberg, a top German physicist and winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize, said that Russia had made a standing offer of $6,000 a year to any German atomic scientist who would work for the U.S.S.R.

"I was promised in addition," said Heisenberg, "50 pounds of fresh meat a month, a ration of 3,500 calories of food a day for each of my six young children, and a comfortable, well-furnished house with many amenities."

Heisenberg had declined, but he named others who had not. While the U.S. had imported over 200 German scientists, mostly in the rocket and aviation field (TIME, Dec. 9), there were still thousands of cold, hungry scientists in Germany to whom Russia's offer might well appeal. If they went to Russia they would take with them the kind of mass technological know-how, theoretical and practical, from rockets to railways, which only the U.S. and Germany (and, to a lesser extent, Britain) had before 1939.

Said one U.S. observer: "The Russians are being very sensible. They have a chance to advance themselves technologically by 50 years."

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