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NUCLEAR ENERGY AND THE
PUBLIC'S RIGHT TO KNOW Resources >
Openness
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 is 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," 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 confirmed to be unclassified. (For more
information on Manhattan Project-related publications, 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.
Sources and notes for this page.
The text for this page is original to the Department of
Energy's
Office of History and Heritage Resources. The "Smyth Report" is Henry DeWolf
Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report
on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices
of the United States Government, 1940-1945
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945), vii; the
Smyth Report was commissioned by
Leslie Groves and originally issued by the
Manhattan Engineer District; Princeton
University Press reprinted it in book form as a "public
service" with "reproduction in whole or in part
authorized and permitted." The
Vannevar Bush and
James Conant memorandum to the Secretary of
War is in Groves's file of "Top Secret" MED
Correspondence, 1942-1946 (available from the
National Archives on
microfilm M1109, reel #4/5). The photograph of Henry
Smyth and Ernest Lawrence discussing the
Smyth Report is reprinted in the History Office publication:
Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr.,
The New World, 1939-1946: Volume I,
A History of the United States
Atomic Energy Commission
(Washington: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1972), facing
page 376. Click
here for information on the photograph of Bush and
Conant at Berkeley in 1940.
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