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The strategies for secrecy in America’s Manhattan nuclear bomb project

How the Manhattan Project’s Nuclear Suburb Stayed Secret, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, once home to 75,000, went up fast and under the radar. But it was built to last, too. Atlas Obscura , BY JESSICA LEIGH HESTER , MAY 03, 2018  “…… Oak Ridge isn’t like most of the country’s other suburbs. The town was conceived and built by the United States government in the early 1940s as base for uranium and plutonium work, as part of the Manhattan Project. As the nuclear effort marched along, the town grew, too. By 1945, a dense suburb had taken shape, home to roughly 75,000 people. At war’s end, Oak Ridge was the fifth-largest city in the state—and all along, it was supposed to be a secret.

…….. the pace of building there was stunning enough, but doing it all under the radar required a little willful blindness. The town didn’t appear on any official maps, and visitors were screened by guards posted at the entrances. Still, at that scale, it couldn’t be truly clandestine. “People saw stuff, certainly,” Moeller says, but probably chose not to wonder too deeply about what was happening there out of a combination of patriotism and ignorance. Moeller speculates that those who saw workers and supplies streaming into the site may have sensed that asking too many questions would have been un-American. The idea was, “it’s not my business; it’s for the war effort,” he says. “There was a much greater spirit of national unity than we could even fathom now.”
 
Billboards were installed all over town to remind workers to keep their mouths shut about their work, even though most workers knew very little about the project’s true scope.
 
Similar “secret cities” were built in other parts of the country, such as Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington, home to 125,000. Designers of these towns had additional tactics to obscure specifics. In Los Alamos and Hanford, sometimes everyone was given the same mailing address. At Oak Ridge, street addresses were designed to be confusing to outsiders. Bus routes might be called X-10 or K-25 or Y-12, in reference to the factories they led to, while dorms had simple names such as M1, M2, and M3. If you didn’t already know where you were trying to go, none of it would make sense. “There weren’t any signs on buildings, just numbers, codes names, and numbers,” Wilcox recalled. The town was full of such ciphers, and even employees didn’t know how to decode them all. ……https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-build-secret-nuclear-city

May 5, 2018 - Posted by | history, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, weapons and war

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