The core is as follows:
First let's look at a description of one of the universally acclaimed great Presidents. We'll call him X:As you've certainly figured out by now, X was Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Y was Albert Einstein.But Einstein "mislead" FDR:X was also an outstanding example of a leader who, although not in any full sense an intellectual (he was a book collector rather than a book reader, and his Harvard grades were of a mediocrity that suggest that today he might have had difficulty in gaining entry to that august institution), ...
Sounds a lot like W's story at Yale, no? So he was easily duped by someone of clearly superior intelligence -- call him Y -- into spending massively to counter a threat that turned out to be nearly non-existant. X was duped so badly that he spent somewhere north of $25 billion on the fiasco.Folks, this is easy for anyone who has even basic Google skills and understands the rudiments of inflation adjustment.
Can you tell me who X and Y were?
Can you tell me what he (and his successor) did that was the direct result of what was actually the greatest intelligence failure of all time?
And for another hint as well as extra bonus points: Was there a genzai bakudan? Or not? Was that an intelligence failure too? Do you think we'll ever know for sure?
With the 1938 discovery of nuclear fission, Germany had a two-year head start on developing nuclear energy; the Americans' fear was that the Nazis would shape it into a weapon of mass destruction. Germany also had in its grasp two materials critical to its development -- heavy water and uranium. They were available in abundance only in Norway and Czechoslovakia, both under Nazi control.But in the end, the Alsos project determined that they might have spent more looking for German nukes than Hitler had spent on developing them:
In August 1939, Leo Szilard and fellow Hungarian physicists Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller urged Albert Einstein to sign a letter they had drafted for President Roosevelt. Einstein's letter noted that the work of Fermi and Szilard "leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the near future." President Roosevelt responded by appointing an Advisory Committee on Uranium. The Office of Scientific Research and Development was established on June 28, 1941, under the direction of Vannevar Bush, to develop atomic energy.
In the end, ALSOS concluded that the Allies had surpassed the German atomic bomb effort monumentally by 1942. Compared to the Manhattan Project, one of the largest scientific endeavors of all time, the German project was considerably underfunded and understaffed, and it is questionable whether Germany would have had the resources or isolation which were required for the Allies to produce such a weapon. Goudsmit, in a monograph published two years after the end of the war, further concluded that a principal reason for the failure of the German project was that science could not flourish under totalitarianism -- an argument seemingly rebutted by the Soviet Union's development of a nuclear weapon by 1949. The Soviets, however, benefited from Stalin's extensive spy network, which included many top scientists in Los Alamos working to prevent the United States from holding a nuclear monopoly over the world.And this provides our initial insight into intelligence failure.
And the genzai bakudan? It's possible that the Japanese may have been closer to nuclear weapons than the Germans were! In fact there's a report of unclear reliability that they actually exploded a bomb -- just a little too late...
So was Roosevelt a dimwit like W who screwed up royally and should have focused the war effort on Japan? Or one of the great Presidents?
Everything you know may well be wrong.
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