“The Astounding Investigation: The Manhattan Project’s Confrontation With Science Fiction, Published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact”, 1984-09-01 (; backlinks; similar):
In the spring of 1944, agents from the Manhattan Project’s security division interviewed Cleve Cartmill and John Campbell in the wake of Campbell’s publication of Cartmill’s short story “Deadline” in the March, 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, in which U-235 had been separated from non-fissionable isotopes and was ready to be detonated in a functional bomb, whose details were described. As described, Cartmill’s bomb would not work; and it did not resemble the uranium bomb being built by the Manhattan Project. However, suspecting a leak from the Project (whose most difficult engineering problem with uranium was its separation into fissionable and non-fissionable isotopes), agents interviewed both author and editor. “Where did you get this idea?”
The incident has become part of science fiction folklore. Campbell spoke of it often before his death, and it is often referred to by members of the Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact science fiction community, usually in the context of discussing the genre’s anticipation of actual scientific and technological developments. However, the military intelligence agents kept records of the investigation, records which have just been released in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Seven separate documents, comprising some 39 pages of reports and memoranda filed under Cleve Cartmill’s name, show just how the people who were guarding the building of the real atomic bomb responded to the news that a disreputable pulp fiction magazine was apparently keeping pace with this recent and most secret research. Coincidentally, they shed light on Astounding’s fabled editorial practices just as World War II was disrupting the “stable” of famous science fiction writers John Campbell had assembled there 1937–4194183ya.
The Manhattan Project sought to provide internal security through compartmentalization. Only at the very top, and on a need-to-know basis, were the participants supposed to know what they were working on. Campbell and Cartmill had created a problem by naming what was intended to be unnameable: the near-term practical possibility of an atomic bomb. Campbell seems to have known something was up: “I’m stating fact, not theory”, he had written to Cartmill. Cartmill was afraid before he began writing that “Deadline” would do exactly what it did do: inadvertently call attention to a real bomb project. As contemptuous as Project security and the censor were of science fiction, they were also little afraid of precisely what Campbell’s science fiction did best: putting scattered bits of scientific knowledge together into a specific, concrete idea or device, and speculating on what that idea or device’s impact might be on the world at large. That kind of speculation represents a way of thinking distinctly at odds with those of bureaucracies like the Manhattan Project. The latter are often perfectly aware that two and two add up to four, but they equally often want to control the distribution of that news, for legitimate (as in this case perhaps) as frequently as for disreputable reasons.
So the affair represents more than just the anecdote which it has become. Cartmill’s letters reveal many of the constraints under which Campbell labored during the war; the affair as a whole shows the extremely casual way in which Campbell regarded so-called “voluntary censorship”. But that casualness, juxtaposed with the grim concern for control and fear of undue speculation on the part of the Project, marks an early and quite concrete example of the tension between the imagination engendered by science fiction and the concerns of the giant bureaucracies (governmental or private) which have so dominated scientific research and technological development since the end of World War II. It is probably belaboring Analog readers to remind them that this tension has furnished themes for more than a generation of science fiction stories.