American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Late in the summer of 1943, Oppenheimer explained his views on security to a Manhattan Project security officer: “My view about the whole damn thing, of course, is that the [basic] information we are working on is probably known to all the governments that care to find out. The information about what we’re doing is probably of no use because it is so damn complicated.” The danger, he said, was not that technical information about the bomb might leak to another country. The real secret was “the intensity of our effort” and the scale of the “international investment involved.” If other governments understood the resources America was throwing into the bomb effort, they might attempt to duplicate the bomb project. Oppenheimer didn’t think even this knowledge would “have any effect on Russia,” but “it might have a very big effect on Germany, and I am as convinced about that . . . as everyone else is.”