The sad thing being how much harassment essentially went on and how pointless it was given that the soviets detonated a bomb just a few years after it was inven

The sad thing being how much harassment essentially went on and how pointless it was given that the soviets detonated a bomb just a few years after it was invented. I don't know what else you can do, there must I assume be some security measures but it only seems to make things marginally harder for proper Russian intelligence agents and informants to get information out. I guess it does increase the barrier-to-entry so that not just any 3rd world intelligence agency can steal nuclear secrets. By cyber-security standards the physical and information security measures taken during the Manhattan project were pretty amazingly pointless. They did a good job of keeping the process of enriching uranium secret from the regular folks that worked on it, but that just kept them from going home and talking to their friends. The scientists working at Los Alamos knew an incredible amount about what was going on and therefore represented single points of failure. If a spy had been able to infiltrate Oak Ridge, granted they wouldn't have gotten to see many steps of the process but the fact that lay-people didn't know what they were working on didn't mean much. The main security for the project probably lay in the fact that economically no other nations involved in WW2 could have attempted such a program, even with day-by-day updates of exactly what we were doing. By the time the kinks were worked out it would have been way too late for any other entities to attempt to copy it.