No doubt I am not the first to have this flash of insight – in fact, just as George Harrison* picked up My Sweet Lord from Ronnie Mack and the Chiffon’s He’s So Fine, unknowingly and with great embarrassment, I am sure I will be reminded that this idea has passed here on the blog by commenters, and at other places too.
I’ve been thinking about public hoaxes that have been pulled off during my lifetime, but there was a gigantic one that played out in the years before I was born, while dad was chauffeuring a general in the Philippines and playing clerk/typist in safety. It was called The Manhattan Project. It was an ‘eyes only’ affair that was gripped in military discipline and compartmentalization. Only a very few had a wider view of the whole project.
I had an uncle who was involved in Manhattan. He was a shop foreman for various workers at Hanford, Washington. (I’ll bet you thought I was going to say he did something really important. He did not.)
What was Manhattan about? Building the bomb, we are told. But readers here, and those who follow MM, might have serious doubts that this is the true purpose of the program. After all, we learned, various atomic tests were obvious fakes, using photography tricks to make the explosions, which were probably just stacks of TNT, look massive. But I think we can be certain that Manhattan was a huge sink for real money that could not openly be authorized for expenditure.
Continue reading “I’ll take Manhattan, and give you Houston …” →