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I'm surprised that there's been no mention of Operation Paperclip, neither in the article nor in the comments here. Seems like a huge part of the story to leave out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

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Hard to overstate how much effort the US put into collecting all the best scientists in the post WWII world.

Yes, including surrounded and forcibly brought them into US camps. But yeah, the Soviets did the same and we had the nuclear bomb race, the space race and the Cold War.

This is the first thing that struck me. Dangerous to weave narratives where large scale phenomena are elegantly explained by a single cause. It's always a confluence of multiple factors: influx of Nazi scientists, the policy mentioned in the article, the fact that Europe was recovering from a war, and perhaps others we're failing to notice.

A favorite example of mine is the idea that World War 1 would not have happened if only Duke Ferdinand's driver had been told of the route change during the Sarajevo visit.

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