No document Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed authenticates the fateful decision to expedite research toward an atomic bomb that Vannevar Bush reported in his October 9 memorandum to James Bryant Conant: the archives divulge no smoking gun. The closest the records come to a piece of paper that changed the world is a banality. Bush personally delivered the third National Academy of Sciences report to the President on November 27, 1941. Roosevelt returned it to him two months later with a note on White House stationery written in black ink with a broad-nibbed pen, a note that would communicate
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