ADDENDUM :
I wrote this post in haste on my way out the door and re-read this morning - at leisure. So :
I didn't mean to imply that Alex Wellerstein was only interested in how secret the WWII Bomb was but rather that he is interested in the various (usually negative) affects secrecy had and is still having on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy issues around the world.
And I wondered about the accurate spelling of Norman F Ramsay's last name - it is really "Ramsey" and he ultimately won a Nobel prize and headed the team set with actually dropping the Bombs over Japan.
Of greater interest to me, he thought a Canadian-made Lancaster would be a far better Bomb dropper than the American-made B-29 , which at that time of the war was almost more lethal to its air crew than the enemy.
Americans would probably would have marched off quietly to the Nazi ovens rather than admit the Canadians built better airplanes than themselves - so this idea was a total non starter.
General Groves had been well coached by his ultimate bosses, Bush and Conant , on the need for an all American Bomb , (after the other Allies had provided most of the ideas and much of the materials needed to make it work.)
My revisionist point being that the Ally cum commercial and scientific rival the Americans really seemed most worried about was the British Commonwealth - not the USSR.
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Alex Wellerstein is a historian and blogger (RESTRICTED DATA) intensely interested in examining whether nuclear bombs were ever as secret as general opinion holds them to be.
His blog is highly informative and great fun to read.
As part of my overall interest in whether 'secrecy' is ever truly possible or easy, I am casually interested in instances when nuclear secrets were revealed inadvertently , despite heavy security efforts to contain them.
But I must admit that my real interest in secrecy is whether the other Manhattan Project, wartime penicillin, was ever as secret as it too is reputed to be.
Still, every once an a while I too come across examples of lapses in security over the wartime A-bomb program that might have tipped off a more alert enemy.
No WWII North America city had more resident spies (from the Axis , Neutral and Allied camps) than New York, the city of immigrants, consulates and wartime in-transit visitors.
It won't have been hard for any spy there to read the student newspapers of the more research oriented institutions in the NYC metropolitan area.
The kids could be remarkably chatty about their profs' comings and goings.
So on April 13th 1942, The Columbia University Spectator tells readers of some of their professors swept up in secret war work.
Among them : Fermi, Urey, Dunning, Rabi as well as the lesser known Dana Mitchell and Norman Ramsay Jr.
More remarkable is the fact that all these are clearly described in the article as experts in nuclear and atomic research, with details about their personal areas of expertise.
Given all the discussion for the previous 35 years about atomic bombs (in the public media and in fiction) an ordinary person - let alone an astute spy - might have drawn some not inaccurate conclusions ....
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