>>3923753 PB
Re: Vannevar Bush
Found the book, but not the quantity of material specifically related to him as I recalled. The big takeaway is how incredibly entangled everything to do with WWII, the MIC, and science/tech are. It all feeds off itself.
"Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America" (Jacobsen, Annie, 2014)
Exhaustively researched - 79 pages of notes, dozens of first person interviews, site visits to gov't/military archives, personal papers/unpublished manuscripts, enormous bibliography, overwhelming volume of research material. Recommended to anons.
p. 224
"The Joint Intelligence Committee also stated, incorrectly, that German nuclear physicists were helping the Russians develop a nuclear bomb and that "their assistance had already cut, substantially, probably by several years, the time needed for the USSR to achieve practical results." In reality the Soviets had gotten to where they were in atomic bomb development not because of any German rare minds but by stealing information from American scientists at Los Alamos. Not until 1949 would the CIA learn that the Russian mole was a British scientist named Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project."
p. 231
(discussion of German most-wanted scientist Dr. Kurt Blome)
"Almost no one in America had any idea that the US Army had been developing biological weapons until January 3, 1946, when the War Dept released a slim, sanitized government monograph called the Merck Report. That is when the American public learned for the first time that the government's Top Secret program had been 'clocked in the deepest wartime secrecy, matched only by the Manhattan Project for developing the Atomic Bomb.' The rationale behind developing these kinds of weapons, the public was told, was the same as it had been with America's wartime chemical weapons program. If the Nazis had used biological agents to kill Allied soldiers, the US military would have been prepared to retaliate in kind. Yes, the war was over, Americans were now told, but unfortunately there was a new and emerging threat out there, the Merck Report warned, an invisible and insidious evil capable of killing millions on a vast, unknowable scale. America's bioweapons program needed to continue, the Merck Report made clear… The Merck Report was written by George W. Merck, a 48 year old chemist and the owner of Merck & Co., a pharmaceutical manufacturer in New Jersey. Merck had served Presidents Roosevelt and Truman as civilian head of the US biological warfare effort during the war. Merck & Co. made and sold vaccines, notably the first commercial U.S. smallpox vaccine, in 1898 and i 1942, it manufactured penicillin G, among the first general antibiotics. The man diagnosing the bioweapons threat, George Merck, was also the man whose company might sell the government the solution to combat the threat. In 1946 this was not looked upon with the same kind of scrutiny as it might have been decades later, because American's military-industrial complex had yet to be broadly revealed.
Vannevar Bush bios:
Brief: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIsPFWSYf3c
In his own words: The Atlantic, July 1945:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Excellent exploration: https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/the-rise-and-fall-of-vannevar-bush (" The Rise and Fall of Vannevar Bush:
One war made him the most powerful man in science; the war that followed took that power away.")
Fascinating rabbit hole for a cold winter night.