If you liked Sherlock Holmes' observation of the curious incident of a dog not barking, you might also enjoy: the curious incident of nuclear scientists not publishing fission research.
By February 1939 news had reached Soviet physicists of the discovery of nuclear fission in the West. The military implications of such a discovery were immediately apparent, but Soviet research was brought to a halt by the German invasion in June 1941. In early 1942 Soviet physicist Georgy N. Flerov noticed that articles on nuclear fission were no longer appearing in Western journals—an indication that research on the subject had become classified. In response, Flerov wrote to, among others, Premier Joseph Stalin, insisting that “we must build the uranium bomb without delay.” In 1943 Stalin ordered the commencement of a research project under the supervision of Igor V. Kurchatov, who had been director of the nuclear physics laboratory at the Physico-Technical Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad. Under Kurchatov’s direction, Laboratory No. 2 was established in April to conduct the new program.
What might the current world be like if Groves had read Sherlock Holmes stories, and arranged for occasional fission research article to become published, perhaps together with complaining of how hard it is to do physics research under war conditions?
(Source: https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/The-Soviet-Union#ref521147.)
