The principal thing was to obtain money from the government for their own researches, pretending that they might be of value to the war effort. One genuine selling point which they used extensively was that pure research in Germany in many fields was far behind the United States.

They sure had lots of very competent people wasting their time on obviously stupid mega-projects (like Dora and Maus) designed to wow Herr Neurosyphilis and his pal Herr Morphine with daydreams of the next wunderwaffe.

But this may be a projection. The German flavour for make-work would be more of “I don’t want to be on the Eastern Front or in Africa, thus do something that looks important. I am quite confident my friends and colleagues will agree it’s important, since they feel the same way”.

Bruce says:

Although D-FDR’s pork expansion was so heavily Stalinist that we were never going to keep atomic secrets, the French and British Communists look important.

Well, yeah. They may have missed the big picture, but at very least they should have read the papers and see who these people are and how many of them are too close to that supposed client?

Besides, with or without pork, at that point US had more of security theater than security. Like when FDR was moving around totally incognito and very very hush hush… but just had to travel with his dog. So he would not show himself, but the Secret Service dudes happen to “inconspicuously” walk this rather famous dog right over there.

Although D-FDR’s pork expansion was so heavily Stalinist that we were never going to keep atomic secrets, the French and British Communists look important.