WWII Atomic Bomb Project Had More Than 1,500 "Leaks" | Hacker News Reader

WWII Atomic Bomb Project Had More Than 1,500 "Leaks"

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60 pointssmacktoward18 comments

Fascinating subject, title seems a little baity, though. There were 1500 investigated reports of leaks, most of which were more along the lines of a guy saying a little too much to family, store clerks, etc. Foreign spies, not so much.

Still, that's an amazingly small number of leaks for such a huge project.

"Foreign spies, not so much."

The Manhattan Project (along with many other portions of the US government at the time) was in fact plagued by Soviet spies.

more like foolish "useful idiots" who leaked to the soviets because they thought we ought to share with our allies rather than a famous 5 type spy ring.

One could argue that Roosevelt was also taken in by uncle Joe to a lesser extent if you read the history of the various 3 power summits.

Yes that's typically who actually spies for governments, people that are manipulated by the field agents. A typical agent's job is to recruit and collect data from those recruits.

For a fascinating take on this I suggest the book See No Evil by Bob Baer. He talks a lot about his experiences as a CIA agent doing just that in a lot of interesting places during the cold war.

I recently read "Surely you're joking Mr Feyman" which had a number of anecdotes about the Manhattan Project's security from sneaking through fences to picking safes. It makes the whole project sound a little more human, even if the results weren't.

You can draw several analogies to computer systems and security products as well.

someone here recommended this book a month or so ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb

I'm about halfway through, well worth the (long!) read.

I agree -- this is a terrific book, very rewarding read. A subsequent work on the same general topic, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, is also an excellent book:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/19/specials/rhodes-dark.h...

Both of Richard Rhodes' books were (but are no longer) on the STRATCOM reading list (http://militaryprofessionalreadinglists.com/authors/richard-...). It's been a while since I read them, but although it was heavy going at times there were plenty of good bits.

Apparently that one isn't the most correct one though, this (very long) article is a nice read about a guy who recreated the inner details of the two bombs. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/atomic-john

I've been reading "Command and Control" after it was linked here a month or so ago [1]. It's fascinating to see just how lax the US was about nuclear safety for almost 2 decades before really researching how to make nuclear and hydrogen bombs safe (the book doesn't cover the Soviet side of the story, but it's my understanding they were just as risk prone if not more so).

Excellent read, highly recommended. First book I've had time to fit in in a long time and I'm really glad it's such a joy. There are many paragraphs that make you laugh quite unexpectedly.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/nukes-of-hazard

>>(the book doesn't cover the Soviet side of the story, but it's my understanding they were just as risk prone if not more so).

Right at the end of the book there is a few pages about Soviet systems, saying that there were always inherently safer, because no one trusted anyone,so they had launch codes and interlocking safety mechanisms pretty much from the very beginning of nuclear age.

Would also very highly recommend that book.

I don't think the Soviets had that tight controls and they often just came down to trusting the officers in control of weapons - during the Cuban Missile Crisis the commanders of troops on Cuba, and of submarines, could have used tactical weapons to defend themselves:

"the Soviet Union had deployed 100 tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba, and the local Soviet commander there could have launched these weapons without additional codes or commands from Moscow"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_missile_crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov#Involvement_in_...

And yet the soviets got wind of it when they saw that at some point there wasn't any american research about nuclear decay published anymore.

Url changed from http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/08/secret-history-..., which points (indirectly) to this.

The historical docs themselves are at https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan_district.jsp.

And this is why we landed on the moon.

Seriously. The Manhattan project involved 130,000 people at its peak and lasted four years, and it leaked.

The Apollo program involved 400,000 people at its peak and lasted eleven years.

Ditto for all conspiracy theories that require massive numbers of people to be involved. Notably many 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Would 9/11 really need that many people to stage? The actual plot was executed by a fairly small number of people; surely faking it wouldn't take more than an order of magnitude more, especially when you control much of the process of investigation.

I don't believe it was a conspiracy, but I also don't think that there's a fundamental reason why it definitely couldn't have been.

I remember an estimate was that it would require 7,000 people.

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