NUCLEAR ENERGY AND THE PUBLIC'S RIGHT TO KNOW
Resources

Given ongoing concerns with terrorism and nuclear proliferation, a word about secrecy, the information presented on this web site, and the public's right to know are in order.  The information on this web site is currently available, and has long been available, in any major university library.  The basic story of the Manhattan Project was first released to the public in August 1945 in the "Smyth Report" (right), a book-length study of the Manhattan Project.  It was personally reviewed by Leslie Groves, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest O. Lawrence, and others, to ensure that it contained no information that would be of assistance to anyone who might try to build a nuclear weapon.  The information from the Smyth Report and other contemporary MED press releases has been supplemented in subsequent years by numerous other histories of the Manhattan Project, including a comprehensive official history produced by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) historians Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr.  As for the most potentially-sensitive category of entries on this web site, "Science and Technology," most of the text for these entries was taken directly from an unclassified 1963 AEC publication, The Atomic Energy Deskbook.  Created under the personal supervision of AEC Chairman Glenn T. Seaborg, the Deskbook was intended from the start to be a reference work for the public.  The intent of all of these publications was to reveal what could be revealed and to keep secret what needed to be kept secret. Accordingly, this web site has been reviewed by the Department of Energy's Office of Classification and Information Control and confirmed to be unclassified. (For more information on any of the publications mentioned in this paragraph, see the list of "Suggested Readings.")  

The public has a right -- indeed, an obligation -- to be adequately informed about nuclear energy.  Henry D. Smyth, himself a scientific consultant to the Manhattan Project, perhaps summarized best the importance of the public's right to know in his preface to the Smyth Report: "the ultimate responsibility for our nation's policy rests on its citizens, and they can discharge such responsibilities wisely only if they are informed."  As Vannevar Bush and James Conant (right) wrote even earlier, in a letter to the Secretary of War on September 19, 1944, once atomic weapons are first used

"it will be essential to release to the public information about these bombs . . .  This information, in our opinion, should be presented in the form of a rather detailed history of the development which gives all the essential scientific facts and assigns credit to the many individual scientists concerned."  

It is in this spirit that this web site is presented, in the hope of furthering public understanding of nuclear energy, and of the men and women -- scientists, administrators, and "common people" alike -- that made the Manhattan Project possible.