The Manhattan II Project: Kleiner's EEStor Keiretsu?

Back in the late 1930s, when it became apparent that Nazi Germany was approaching the completion of a nuclear weapon, a US project involving over 130,000 people and the equivalent of $24Bil of today's dollars was carried out to develop nuclear weapons. Distributed at sites around the USA (and world), pockets of several thousand people would come to worksites knowing only enough to get their own particular job done each day and no one else's. Such was the secrecy of the project.

Toward the tail end of the project, when success was in sight, the project's leader, Gen. Leslie Groves, who also oversaw the rapid construction of the Pentagon (the largest office building of it's day), approached the New York Times to appoint a science writer, William L. Laurence, to work on a major wartime story involving science. Laurence had a track record of writing on the relevant areas of atomic research and was allowed access several top secret events including the testing at Trinity site along with the bombing of Japan, with two production line prototypes. Spies infiltrated the project ensuring that the United States would always have nuclear rivals.

Comparing EEStor's work to a Manhattan project is in many ways much more than a stretch, but it's something EEStor's leader appears to have no problem doing. In addition to statements Dick Weir made to Tyler Hamilton in this regard, I can confirm that Weir made a similar statement to me (one of multiple interviews I subsequently chose not to publish...yet) showing not only that the words were chosen deliberately but via repetition, underscored as if to advance a message. But a message to whom and for what?. What I can say is that ever since he said it, my radar has been locked onto any reference to Manhattan Project in the context of alternative energy, not so much because I believe the US Government is funding secret research in this area but more to the point, the use of an odd phrase like that is a linguistic clue that occasionally implies a community of closely related persons with a common set of experiences. Phrases sometimes are constituent to shared histories.

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