The Rosenberg Case

President Eisenhower's statement on the Rosenberg's

"I can only say that, by immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world. The execution of two human beings is a grave matter. But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done."

Treason

Could not be charged with this because the United States was not at war with the Soviet Union

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Established in 1943 as site Y of the Manhattan Project for a single purpose: to design and build an atomic bomb.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

First American civilians to be executed for espionage and the first to suffer that penalty during peacetime.

Conspiracy to commit espionage

Official charges brought against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

McCarthy Era

The era many thought the Rosenberg's got caught in. 1940s and early 1950s, hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. became known as

Confession of Greenglass.

The only direct evidence of the Rosenberg's involvement

Outcome of the Rosenberg case

Tried, found guilty, sentences to death in the electric chair.

Atomic bomb materials

Type of top-secret information the Rosenberg's were accused and convicted of passing to Soviets

David Greenglass

Was a machinist at Los Alamos, brother-in-law of Julius Rosenberg, said Julius asked him to pass highly confidential instructions on making atomic weapons to the Soviet Union.

Cruel and unusual punishment

What many people protested the death sentence was. That the Rosenbergs were the victims of a surge of hysterical anticommunist feeling in the United States.

September 1949

When the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb (and effectively started the Cold War