I feel like these stories are apocryphal.

They're not. But if it makes you feel better to believe that, everyone has their own coping mechanism.

What? I'm not questioning whether the weapons research actually happened. I'm questioning the sincerity of people claiming they didn't know what they were doing. I've seen plenty of weapons programs. They aren't a secret to the people working on them. My point is, the government doesn't need to lie to researchers or even pay them very well to get them to develop weapons because there are plenty of intelligent-enough people willing to do it almost for free.

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serioussecurity 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've worked as a contractor for a safety system that turned out to be for a foreign military. I was given a signal, and told to write software to fit it. The signal could plausibly be collected for a wide variety of civilian purposes.

What I realized later was that none of the civilian markets could possibly justify the cost of the project.

The particular type of signal fitting I was doing was only achievable by a few thousand expensive domain experts in the world, so, I think that addresses your other point.

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SoftTalker 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lots of people working on the Manhattan project did not know what they were working on. The core group of physicists did, but not many others.

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moron4hire 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you could get away with that excuse in 1945 when this whole system was first being created from scratch. It's been 80 years since then.

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XorNot 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They knew the US was at war and they knew it was a government program for military purposes and they knew they were dealing nuclear materials.

A journalist not involved at all figured it out just fine, but at the very least it's not like it wasn't going to be a weapon.

Frankly though I wonder what the various judgemental people in these comments think about say, the tens of thousands of people who at the time were just straight up making artillery ammo.

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Aeolun 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because working on things that go boom is like working on fireworks. The fact the end up on people is incidental.

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reaperducer 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If "This doesn't fit into my mental model, so everyone else must be lying" is how you deal with things you didn't personally experience, do what you have to.

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XorNot 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The inability to accurately cite any story about this, and the "friend of a friend" structure is what implies it's garbage.

Not to mention it itself requires a conspiracy theory: "no one would do this work voluntarily" (or "all the smart people have to be tricked because they're so smart they obviously agree with me").

As though people don't just go and work at Boeing or Lockheed Martin.

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gzread 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It was posted on HN by the husband of the person involved. Find it yourself.

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jiggawatts 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> "no one would do this work voluntarily"

The much more common reason is compartmentalisation. Employees are told as much as they need to know, no more.

If someone can design a glide bomb without knowing that it has an explosive payload, then they're not told.

The fear is not so much the employees themselves (they might be quite patriotic!) but that the information will leak out to the enemy, giving them a chance to counter the weapon or copy it.

	▲	XorNot 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's a very different proposition to what the various parent posters are implying though. Like if you work for a defense contractor, you know what your work is for even if you wouldn't know exactly what the product or application was.