Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedRichard Rhodes: belief
23 May 2023 Dwarkesh Podcast Richard Rhodes — The making of the atomic bomb
“When the Soviet Union collapsed and the scientists became available, I learned that the KGB in the interest of promoting its service to the state in this new world they were going into, had published a historical piece about their good work in stealing the secret to the bomb.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Richard Rhodes
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 23 May 2023
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…And then is there anything you've learned that you can't put in your books because it's... The only thing I didn't put in the book, rightly so, was the dimensions of the Fat Man bomb that were on the original Fuchs documents that he passed to the Russians. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the scientists became available, I learned that the KGB in the interest of promoting its service to the state in this new world they were going into, had published a historical piece about their good work in stealing the secret to the bomb. And they included a picture of the sketch that Fuchs did showing the dimensions of each of the shells of this multi-shelled implosion weapon with the numbers there in millimeters. And when the scientists realized that the KGB had published this stuff, they raised a great hue and cry and said, that's in violation of the Nuclear Non-Puller Variant Treaty. They said, we have to pull all the issues of that journal. And they did. But I had a very enterprising assistant in Moscow, this geologist I mentioned before. And he said, I think I know where I can find a copy of the journal. And he jumped on the night train from Moscow to St. Petersburg and went to a science library there. And they said, no, of course not. We pulled that. And then he thought, wait a minute, where's the public library? It was across the street. And he went across the public library. And they said, yeah, we have the journal. And handed it to me. He made a copy and gave me one. But when I realized that I had this, I never published that information. That's the only one, though. That is a wise thing to do. One of the final questions. A lot of times people use the phrase, we need a Manhattan project for X. If it's some new technology or something. When you hear that, do you think that is a naive comparison? Or does it make sense to use that terminology?…
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