I’m not an expert on the works of Antony C. Sutton (1925-2002), but I hope to be one day, and this post will explain why.
Deep within the second volume of his magnum opus, Sutton posed the following alternative:
To subsidize and support a system that is the object of massive military expenditures is both illogical and irrational. . . . it calls into question not only the ability and the wisdom but indeed the basic common sense of the policymakers. The choice is therefore clear: either the West should abandon massive armaments expenditures because the Soviet Union is not an enemy of the West, or it should abandon the technical transfers that make it possible for the Soviet Union to pose the threat to the Free World which is the raison d’être for such a large share of Western expenditures. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1945-1965, Stanford, Hoover Institution, 1968, p. 400.
When I chanced upon Sutton’s trilogy at a public library in the early ’70s, I was still viewing the world through Herbert Aptheker’s red-tinted spectacles. The massive amount of evidence of technology transfer that Sutton had discovered, organized, and published—under the imprint of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution—cohered with neither the Communist worldview I then held nor my anti-Communist one a few years later.
For Sutton proved that for at least fifty years capitalists had sold their supposed mortal enemies helming the Soviet Union much more than the proverbial rope with which to hang them (thereby fulfilling a prediction apocryphally attributed to Lenin).
His wife, Margit, had been an actress, and she had great beauty, intelligence, and presence as well.
For most of his life Joad was not only a socialist, but also a professed atheist who became dissatisfied with the worldview that underpinned that profession. He returned to the Church of England of his youth a few years before his death. (He never repented of his socialism, although he increasingly acknowledged, and feared, that the means to that end was a bloated and rights-violating state.) In The Recovery of Belief (1953) the many arguments he had relied on in support of his atheism pass in review. Some of them are arguments that have occurred to me, as have Joad’s criticisms thereof.
As its preface drew to a close, I noticed that the author’s eloquent affirmation of purpose, excitement and hope betrayed hardly any awareness of limitations. Here are the words of a man undertaking a massive project in his fiftieth year, in the aftermath of Wall Street’s collapse, the memories of the Great War still fresh in his readers’ minds as the winds of its successor begin to blow in Europe. Where the latter will soon take Western Civilization, of course, he does not predict: 
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, immersed in theological studies and spiritual formation between his profession of vows in 1924 and ordination in 1936, Lonergan produced that manuscript. In the ‘70s, after his methodological work was done, he returned to it.
Earlier that year I had dropped into Hook’s office at 25 Waverly Place to ask about the class. As a young Red, I couldn’t pass up the chance to meet this infamous anti-communist in the flesh.