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The press release following the bombing of Hiroshima specifically stated which method of refining Uranium was used. The U.S. spent a great deal of time, effort, and money on researching and testing four different enrichment systems. Just that one detail saved the Soviets 3/4s of a sizeable chunk of the A-bomb effort. Sometimes you don't need to leak much detail to give away a great deal.




Do you have the press release in question? I'd be very curious to see it. All I found at a glance was Truman's well-known one (https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/hiroshima-...) which was followed by the Secretary of War's (https://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1945/450806b.html) and neither seem to mention anything about enrichment methods or even the concept of isotope separation.

Hmm, it was not quite a press release, but it's in the Smyth report from August 12, 1945: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/publi... (search for diffusion).



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