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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how effective his intel was? Did he transfer key secrets, or crude napkin drawings?

Put another way: did he change the world? That’s the goal of idealism, after all.

It seems absurd to say that the USSR developed nukes thanks to his help. And yet, I can’t help but wonder... Could one person have made all the difference?

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It wasn't just one person. There is a list of some of them at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies.

Those are the known knowns. There are also the known unknowns, the aliases from intercepted messages who were never matched to identities, and the unknown unknowns, the ones we haven't found out about. One of the spies on the Wikipedia list only had their identity revealed last year.

It's about 'when' more than anything. We live in a world today with mostly free information sharing on most scientific subjects. But picture a time when cutting edge science like the nuclear programs were veiled heavily in secrecy. Every single development took time, effort, work, science. And the result is... an answer that can probably be written down in a single piece of paper. Easily shared.

The USSR would have developed the same bombs eventually, but not as quickly, I would guess.

Once there's knowledge of the possibility, it becomes inevitable.

Like fusion. It’s just 10 years away. For the last 50 years.

We have not yet figured out how to make fusion work yet. A lot of money and scientific effort is being spent to find out. We aren't talking about things that are 10 years away, we're talking about research that has succeeded being shared.

But as soon as someone does figure out fusion (ITER looks good) and publishes, everyone will know, and everyone will have it.

I thought GP was talking about 'knowledge of the possibility'

It's not like fusion, because nobody has done it.

Basic science is done in the open, but science relevant to military goals is still kept secret. For example, do you know how stealth fighter jets are made?

There's actually quite a bit of information about the development of the F-117, as well as the science and math that made it possible: https://www.f117sfa.org/f117-development

It gets even better.

The base of the research was deemed to be of no significant military or economic value by the USSR so it was published internationally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Ufimtsev#The_father_of_st...

But how much of that information was available to the public in the 1970s?

Sure, 40 years later its all out in the open, but that's because there's no longer a reason to keep it secret.

He passed on a great deal of highly technical information, it wasn't napkins. It probably helped the Soviets get to a working weapon faster but it's generally accepted they'd have got there without the espionage as well.

It would have taken them longer. They might have learned of the dangers of radiation from research rather than after causing unbelievable nuclear pollution. Or from the American experience once the dangers of radiation were well publicized later (though that might not have happened without a nuclear arms race).

If you read Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the author claims that the information was mostly used by soviets to make sure they were on the right track, rather than outright copying. If there were 10 ways to do something, the soviets picked a couple of the most promising, then used intel to make sure they what they were doing was broadly similar to what the americans were doing. This still could save a lot of time and money vs. the american way of doing all 10 at once and seeing which worked.

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