The title and the premise invokes mental imagery of a renegade band of Hungarian scientists working assiduously in secrecy to retaliate against their Nazi tormentors/bullies–a sort of ‘revenge of the nerds’ archetype. Similar to Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, Scott, to great success, uses a combination of imagery and generalizations to tell a story that almost confirms the preexisting biases of the reader. It’s not a bad essay, and storytelling is an essential component of writing, but in the process the truth may be embellished.

…

Far from being a insular classroom of Hungarian scientists, in reality, the Manhattan Protect was a massive bureaucratic undertaking, costing $27 billion in 2016 dollars and employing 130,000 people from all over the world.

For example: From 1942 to 1946, the Manhattan Project was directed by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The nuclear division of Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory was led by theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, born in NY and arguably the most important person of the project. Nuclear fission was discovered by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, in 1938. Otto Robert Frisch, an Austrian-British physicist, and Lise Meitner, an Austrian-Swedish physicist, developed the theoretical implementation of a nuclear bomb. The Chief of Engineers, Major General Eugene Reybold and Colonel James C. Marshall, were both Americans. Enrico Fermi, the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, was from Italy. Rudolf Ernst Peierls, a German-born British physicist, in 1939 made a breakthrough investigating the critical mass of uranium-235, and Ernest Lawrence, an American nuclear scientist, in 1939 developed the cyclotron. Of all the major theoretical physicists involved in the development of the hydrogen bomb–the much more powerful successor to the atomic bomb–Hans Bethe (Germany), John Van Vleck (America), Edward Teller (Hungary), Emil Konopinski (Poland), Robert Serber (America), Stan Frankel (America), and Eldred C. Nelson (America), and experimental physicists Emilio Segrè (Italy), Felix Bloch (Switzerland), Franco Rasetti (Italy), John Henry Manley (America), and Edwin McMillan (America)–Edward Teller is the lone Hungarian Jew. And on and on… as it turns out, very few of the important people involved were Hungarian Jews.

Are the Nobel Prizes awarded by angels who are devoid of conflicts of interest, or are they awarded by fallible, corruptible humans who might give their friends unfair advantages in the competition?

Jews born in the United States too very instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer # 1. Of course too the Israeli began around 1950 [?] for their own a-bomb project and succeeded in about a decade or so beyond all expectations at least as can be determined.

There were 26 Jewish scientists of note involved in some way with the Manhattan Project. 13 were US-born, 13 were foreign born. Hans Bethe was also half-Jewish, but he is usually omitted because he was raised Protestant. These 26 men did not make up the near-entirety of the scientific personnel of the project; one of the “scientists” listed was not even a scientist, but an engineer still in college. Not only did these 26 “Jewish scientists” not make up the majority of the 6,000 scientists involved in the project, they didn’t even make up the majority of physicists involved.

It is true that Jewish scientists, both US- and foreign-born, made vital contributions to the Manhattan Project. It is unlikely that the atomic bomb would have been completed in 1945 without them; it probably would have taken another year or three and therefore would never have been dropped in war. But to claim that Jewish scientists were “almost exclusively” responsible for it is utterly false and a tremendous insult to literally thousands of American scientists and engineers, to say nothing of the six British and Australian members of the vital MAUD Committee, without which the Manhattan Project would probably not have been created in time to factor into the history of WWII.