Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

Another fun Manhattan fact: They needed a code name for plutonium, so they called it "copper", but what was a poor scientist or engineer who needed to use actual copper to do? The official code name for copper was "Honest-to-God copper".

View on HN

I am intrigued at how much thought went into "copper". Was the thinking that everyone's eyes would glaze over at such a common material? My initial reaction would be to use a different rare element. However, a rare element might draw more scrutiny to the casual observer. Then again, the potential for confusion is incredibly high. Interesting spycraft.

Supposedly the opsec at the Manhattan Project was so good, significant portions of the workforce had no idea on what they were laboring. Post war interviews thought the facility was all a sham, dedicated to nothing but medical testing.

Copper had the advantage of already being directed 100% at the war effort.

And almost all of that for bulk uses like shell casings and electrical wiring - vast supply chains which no competent enemy agent would waste time looking into.

> vast supply chains which no competent enemy agent would waste time looking into.

Isn’t this exactly what should be looked into? Find weak point and hit them. Germanys ball bearing plants and oil refineries got targeted this way.

If the Axis had been dropping 1000+ tons of bombs on American industry every day, then maybe that would have been rational.

Similar if the Axis had large-scale resistance forces operating in America, able to sustain at-scale acts of industrial sabotage.

But the Axis already knew that America had a huge copper industry. With no way to affect that industry, at scale - long lists of American copper mines, refining facilities, factories, etc. were no more valuable to the Axis than collections of apple pie recipes.

You're thinking of the honest-to-god copper supply chain, not the "copper" supply chain.

There wasn't much of a Nazi spy presence in the US much less effective saboteur operations. One of the few people convicted for espionage had their conviction overturned because the information they passed was publicly available. The US was never under much direct threat, there were a smattering of attacks and raids on the West Coast but those didn't amount to much. Extreme distance was a better shield than any secrecy or military might, it's part of why the post war years were so good and continued for decades afterwards, the US was completely untouched and the rest of the (then) modern world was bombed to absolute smithereens.

https://www.neh.gov/article/nazi-spies-america

The bearing plants didn't have much of a long term impact if I recall...

The oil campaign OTOH, worked out well.

I'd guess actually going after stuff like wire/brass casing production, while it could have an impact, the 'ROI' is likely lower than more important logistics meta-targets (i.e. oil and gas production and transport infra/equip) and those are far easier to 're-boot-strap', one can theoretically draw copper wire from their garage with a reasonable base starting piece and draw jig/rig.

Also, like bearings, it's easier to 'surplus'. Surplus Oil sitting in a field or penetrable location? Obvious easy pickings. Stockpiled wire? I mean you could but frankly even if you burned/melted all the wires someone can just collect it and re-make wire. It's not like oil where the resource gets completely destroyed in the process.

(Ammo depots, OTOH, would make sense.)

My dad’s relative (uncle I think?) ran the team that fabricated the detonators for the bombs. They weren’t told what the purpose was when they built them. They found out what the purpose was when they were used.

Real genius

> My initial reaction would be to use a different rare element. However, a rare element might draw more scrutiny to the casual observer. Then again, the potential for confusion is incredibly high. Interesting spycraft

Worth noting (unless someone else already did) that the UK program that technically started before the Manhattan Project was called 'Tube Alloys'.

That sounds like the start of a story that ends up with wires made out of plutonium.

Nothing like H2GCu. It’s even just pennies on the dollar.

They called Polonium cobalt.

Think about it, cobalt is too slow. Polonium is ideal - you need a much smaller amount, and in five years it's gone, ten years, it's undetectable. Except that it decays into a specific isotope of lead, which could raise some questions, but you call it a toxin, and hope that the evidence gets destroyed in the process...

And they wondered how the Soviets infiltrated the project so thoroughly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com