WWII : when Massachusetts ran the whole world

The secretive team that ran the OSRD and ran the Manhattan Project and ran America's go-it-alone atomic bomb foreign policy that ruled the postwar world were not elected officials of course.

(We are talking America , after all.)

They were instead five white protestant native-born well paid male scientists, further linked together in a consensual intellectual circle jerk by all having very strong Massachusetts-based academic connections.

The most powerful figure in wartime America vs an unknown dying doctor

It wasn't a fair fight : the unknown dying doctor won.

It was a classic Hollywood-type story of powerless, selfless , agape-good triumphing over all-powerful evil of the most banal kind.

Yellowcake (and Yellow Magic) Diplomacy : Plan B of a Plan B

It never was supposed to end up like the way it all did in 1945.

The original Plan A for America, from 1938 to late-1942, was to rely on the Norden Bombsight and the Sulfa Drugs to see America safely through any dangerous faint echoes from a possible European war.

Both inventions failed to work out anywhere as well in the field as they had been touted they would work by their starry-eyed promoters.

So, from late-1942 to mid-1943, there was an improvised Plan B.

Janus Manhattan 1945 , part 2 : FDR's WPB restores the human fabric ...

If is not just ordinary Americans who find America's political system 'inside the Beltway' to be overly complex and confusing.

Outsiders - some as presidents with hands on nuclear red buttons and some as terrorists with hands on cellphone detonator buttons - find the daily mass/mess of signals coming out of the Beltway totally confusing.

Perhaps never more so than during FDR's 12 year reign when he closely mimicked Adolf Hitler's policy of setting up competing powerful bureaucracies and letting the strongest and most determined claw and elbow its way to the top.

Janus Manhattan 1945 , part 1 : FDR's OSRD rends the human fabric ...

Memo to basic scientists :

General Leslie Groves doesn't deserve your bad press, for the same reason that Vannevar Bush doesn't deserve your good press.

It was Bush, the head of the wartime OSRD (and reputed to be the most powerful un-elected man in Washington) who carved in stone America's selfish postwar determination to keep the atomic bomb and atomic energy a secret American monopoly -- General Groves was merely following Bush's orders.

I repeat - it was a scientist, one of your own, who carried on the old Republicans' policy of selfish Isolationism (albeit in a new guise).

Janus Manhattan 1945 : Atomic ISOLATIONISM & Penicillin's NEW DEAL

Janus Manhattan Island had something for everyone in 1945.

The spirit of ISOLATIONISM , last seen going under in the wake of Pearl Harbour, was back stronger than ever , albeit in a new Easter bonnet.

For God's America had decided its role was no longer to stand above and away from a wicked, wicked European-dominated world.

Rather it was to become God's avenging angel , benevolently ruling over a badly fallen world , with a velvet fist in a nuclear glove.