
WWII Atomic Bomb Project Had More Than 1,500 "Leaks" - smacktoward
http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2014/08/manhattan-project-leaks/
======
ufmace
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.

~~~
fiatmoney
"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.

~~~
walshemj
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.

~~~
ianstallings
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.

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allegory
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.

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wintersFright
someone here recommended this book a month or so ago
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb)

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

~~~
axman6
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](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/nukes-of-hazard)

~~~
gambiting
>>(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.

~~~
arethuza
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/Cuban_missile_crisis)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov#Involvement_in_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov#Involvement_in_Cuban_Missile_Crisis)

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legulere
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.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/08/secret-
history-...](http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/08/secret-history-atom-
bomb-now-available-full-online/92156/), which points (indirectly) to this.

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

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spingsprong
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.

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

~~~
axman6
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.

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

