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?
-
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?
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.
-
-
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.
-
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
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.