Often wonder if the Manhattan Project failed and the atomic bomb not worked, would General Groves really have had to live on the hill, testifying to Congresses inquisition or would it have been covered up & classified away unknown forever?
Too big to just cover up forever — too much infrastructure, too many Congressmen already curious about it in 1945. I doubt he would have had to testify forever though.
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As Alex is too modest to do so himself, he documented the thin veneer of secrecy hiding the effort.http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/29/narratives-of-manhattan-project-secrecy/ …
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Modesty is not generally one of my attributes but thanks. There were also many leaks even during the war — the idea that a lid would have been kept on it in the postwar when the censorship regime lifted seems unlikely to me:http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/20/worst-manhattan-project-leaks/ …
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What about recruitment secrecy, do you know it was as strictly enforced as claimed or do you think they told *some* of the scientist to get them to join. Heard a few found out accidentally e.g. Think Feynman and even Oppenheimer. Thoughts? Maybe you’ve written on this too?
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The scientists at Los Alamos knew what they were doing on the whole. Many at Chicago did, too. My very rough and speculative estimate is that on the order of 2,000 people in the whole project knew what it was about. So about 1% of the people involved.
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It should also be noted that many of the scientists involved (even those at the top, like Bush/Conant) believed the secrecy was a necessarily *short-term* evil. They did not believe it could persist into the postwar even if the bomb wasn't used.
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And we know that at least one scientist later claimed that he was tempted to leak about it *at the time*. Surely others would have leaked afterwards. https://nyti.ms/1kbHraF
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Including, notably, The senator Trumans committee on avoiding waste in the war-enterprise. Truman says in Plain Speaking that he was told to back off by FDR when he got near Manhattan.
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Yes. But Truman was only one of several Congressmen who had been snooping around Manhattan work. There were several attempts to audit it, all shut down by personal intervention from Stimson.
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Didn’t Groves have special Independent government auditor (IGs) audit the project every month as payments were made on the various contracts? He certainly knew how to play the game so congressional testimony would be uncomfortable but he probably had bases well covered?
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It was auditors from GAO [General Accounting Office] that I was thinking of. They apparently did proactive audit every 30 days... from here in Nichols interviewpic.twitter.com/w7u4wwvoHR
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According to Rhodes: "He didn’t want to have to face congressional committee having spent $2 billion on a weapon that was not ready in time to use. He told one of his colleagues, 'We’ll all spend the rest of our lives in Leavenworth prison.'" https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/richard-rhodes-interview …
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I mean, I know Groves believed that. I am just not sure it would have happened in reality. Groves certainly made many enemies, so it's possible he'd have been replaced. But it would have been easy for him to document that he was told to do this by FDR himself.
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Because they'd just have crucified him after a little while?
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