Which was not terribly secret. The details of the Project were indeed super-secret, to the point where most of the politicians hadn’t known anything, but despite the massive global-scale censorship & secrecy, many had observed the signs of a major project of some sort and some got as far as a nuclear bomb specifically. Also, commercial satellites with meter resolution did not exist which could quantify major facilities or new cities like Los Alamos or Hanford (but overflights, and then satellites, now exist and have helped reveal later nuclear bomb programs). I’m sure you can find plenty more about secrecy breaches in Rhodes.
This was not necessarily all that useful in the context of WWII—of course America had some big secret projects going, everyone did. It was a total world war. Everyone was aware there was a war on. The devil was in the details of what the program was—a failure like the V2-s, or a success like Enigma decrypts and Manhattan? But a binary exists/does-not-exist is useful in a peacetime context and the current discussion.
(If nothing else, the fact that DeepSeek keeps publishing is a signal. I would note here BTW that you cannot argue, without tying yourself into some pretzel knots explaining 4-D chess logic, that Chinese AI is about to catch up to and surpass the West because the best Chinese AI group, DeepSeek, just released a model or published this-or-that revealing the secrets of OA, and argue that there is already a secret all-out Chinese Manhattan Project going on which will potentially reach AGI first—because the first thing the latter would have done is stop the former from publishing anything which might help Western AI and then devour it for researchers.)
I think the idea is that there would be clues, particularly talented engineers not doing public work. Of course, I don’t know who’s carefully tracking that for Chinese scientists.
Scientists did guess the Manhattan project existed because several top physicists had ceased publishing. I don’t know if that made it to the relevant governments. That would be vastly easier to do with the internet—if anyone is bothering.
Thought: Confidently saying “(X) has no Manhattan Project”. Is forgetting how secret the Manhattan Project was.
Which was not terribly secret. The details of the Project were indeed super-secret, to the point where most of the politicians hadn’t known anything, but despite the massive global-scale censorship & secrecy, many had observed the signs of a major project of some sort and some got as far as a nuclear bomb specifically. Also, commercial satellites with meter resolution did not exist which could quantify major facilities or new cities like Los Alamos or Hanford (but overflights, and then satellites, now exist and have helped reveal later nuclear bomb programs). I’m sure you can find plenty more about secrecy breaches in Rhodes.
This was not necessarily all that useful in the context of WWII—of course America had some big secret projects going, everyone did. It was a total world war. Everyone was aware there was a war on. The devil was in the details of what the program was—a failure like the V2-s, or a success like Enigma decrypts and Manhattan? But a binary exists/does-not-exist is useful in a peacetime context and the current discussion.
(If nothing else, the fact that DeepSeek keeps publishing is a signal. I would note here BTW that you cannot argue, without tying yourself into some pretzel knots explaining 4-D chess logic, that Chinese AI is about to catch up to and surpass the West because the best Chinese AI group, DeepSeek, just released a model or published this-or-that revealing the secrets of OA, and argue that there is already a secret all-out Chinese Manhattan Project going on which will potentially reach AGI first—because the first thing the latter would have done is stop the former from publishing anything which might help Western AI and then devour it for researchers.)
You mean Hanford.
Before the internet?
I think the idea is that there would be clues, particularly talented engineers not doing public work. Of course, I don’t know who’s carefully tracking that for Chinese scientists.
Scientists did guess the Manhattan project existed because several top physicists had ceased publishing. I don’t know if that made it to the relevant governments. That would be vastly easier to do with the internet—if anyone is bothering.