Terry Blanton wrote:
http://www.newworldorderreport.com/News/tabid/266/ID/980/33-Conspiracy-Theories-That-Turned-Out-To-Be-True-What-Every-Person-Should-Know.aspx
This list is interesting but the history part is inaccurate. It lists the Manhattan Project as a successfully covered-up "conspiracy." That is wrong on several levels:
It was not kept secret very well. The Soviet Union found out about it and spied on the project quite successfully. I have a magazine from 1943 that says the US government is mining uranium and keeping the reasons secret. Anyone familiar with up-to-date physics at that time could have guessed what that meant. The original results by Hahn and Meitner were in the open literature, and it was not difficult to connect the dots. Rumors about the U.S. project were widespread at high levels in the Japanese government, military and physics communities. I do not know how accurate those rumors were, but a physicist in Japan recommended to the government that it start a nuclear weapons project, so obviously they understood the potential. In the UK House of Lords members in the know were openly talking about atomic bombs in 1944. They were not supposed to, but they did. There were many other leaks.
Everyone in the project knew that the secret would be revealed when the bomb went off, so there was no need for them to reveal it. If the authorities had told them it would be kept secret forever they may have acted differently.
Probably, the Manhattan Project was kept as secret as anything on that scale could have been. I doubt that better security was humanly possible. But, by late 1944 the project was leaking like a sieve and discovery was inevitable. Truman claimed that he knew nothing about it until he became president. That is not quite the case. Truman and his committee staff members began to discover a lot about it. Before he assembled many technical details someone at a very high level who Truman trusted called him up and asked him to please stop investigating. He stopped, immediately. (It was someone like George Marshall who contacted him -- I don't recall who.) So it was what you might call "voluntary ignorance."
Despite the author's introduction, it is impossible to keep secret something known by thousands of people, or even dozens of people.
Some of the other assertions in this article are ridiculous, such as "the Mafia . . . was virtually unknown until the 1960s." I have political cartoons and references to the Mafia from the 1870s.
- Jed
