America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen In August 1955, the United States traded one man for eleven U.S. Air Force airmen at the Wang-Johnson talks in Geneva. The eleven were the crew of a B-29 shot down over China in January 1953 and convicted as spies. The one man was Qian Xuesen, the co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the colonel in the assimilated rank…