America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen

If you wanna read an article containing essentially the same information without the pesky LLM voice: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/december/m...

I buy it that this guy is incredibly important in the history of aerospace engineering and the weapons industry, but the article seems like it's making an overly strong claim that the trajectory of American and Chinese tech development was so affected by Qian Xuesen. There are, after all, many other people involved in both trajectories. Would Qian have been so successful in China if the economic and political incentives to listen to him had not been there? Had Qian stayed in America, is there a guarantee that the infrastructure necessary to support his doctrine on technological development would have been available?

What became JPL had numerous colorful characters who had trouble with the security apparatus not least

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons

who invented modern composite solid rockets and was also a collaborator of Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.

Reminds me of the results of a large Slavic country going to war with a much smaller, once subordinate, now independent republic that was the source of their best engineers.

Qian is a typical opportunist, who had been contacting ccp since 1930s. He was already away from military and academia for years, while pouring huge sum of money into his immigration case. After deported from US, his job in China was mostly management.

I'm gonna let you finish, but starting a completely pointless war with Iran is one of the greatest strategic blunders of all time.

That is a good piece on a truly major technology debacle. The title is overblown.

I doubt it's the greatest given all that's happened in the past year. But it's certainly up there, no pun intended.

I don't quite get why the author thinks it would be impossible to get a big budget nose-rub in the dirt to the security apparatuses about their incredible abilability to create self-fulfilling prophecies against themselves via bigotry. It isn't like it takes pentagon cooperation for history biopics, the tech is all old.