I’m pretty sure I have read here, as an argument against conspiracy theories, that those theories are untenable because too many people would have had to know the truth.
e.g. if the Moon landing was a hoax, too many people at NASA would have had to be involved to make that a tenable theory.
or for 9/11 to be “fake”, too many people would be “in the know” and disputing the official story.
However, I read right now in GQ that the use of atomic bombs in World War II came as a complete surprise to people in the US even though “more than 130,000” people worked on the atom bomb project.
Assuming all the above to be true, does this mean that the argument against conspiracy theories (impossible because “too many people would have known about it”) is invalid?
The bomb may have been a complete surprise to much of the public, but not necessarily because it was a well kept secret. Warp drive would be a big surprise to those of us who are not Star Trek fans.
And you’ve picked a poor example - some of the 130,000 people who worked on the Manhattan Project were spies. The Soviets got a great deal of information and used it to make their own bombs more quickly than we thought possible.
How long was the Manhattan Project kept a secret? It looks to me as though it started in 1942, so it was successfully kept a secret for three years, during a time that people were highly aware of the need for state secrets, and during a time when there would be a high motivation on the part of most Americans to keep this secret.
If someone were talking about a similar secret (one kept during a small number of years during wartime and that wouldn’t make the US look bad to just about everybody), I’d agree that it might just be possible for the conspiracy to be real. But when we’re talking about supposed conspiracies kept for decades, during peacetime, about which people wouldn’t be compelled to keep mum for fear of unleashing an unrighteous Holocaust on the US–in such cases, I’m still pretty skeptical that the secret will keep.
In the Moon landing hoax, the number of people who would have to keep the secret would include the scientists and engineers of every spacefaring nation on the planet, including our great rivals in the Moon Race, the Soviets, who would certainly have been able to tell if those TV broadcast signals were really coming from a soundstage in California instead of the surface of the Moon. And, as mentioned, the secret would have had to have been kept for much longer than the secret of the Manhattan Project, and with the aim of dishonorably fooling the American public and the rest of the world, as opposed to beating the Axis, winning the war, and bringing the boys home safe and sound.
Again, those keeping the “secret” of the 9/11 attacks, rather than patriotically keeping the military secrets of a nation at war for a period of a few years, would have to be complicit in covering up some sort of treasonous plot against the U.S., and continue doing so for going on ten years now. (And, as noted, the secret of the Manhattan Project was leaked to an ambiguously hostile power in the form of the Soviet Union.)
There is also plenty of verifiable evidence in favor of the “official stories” on Apollo and 9/11 (laser reflectors on the Moon, widely distributed samples of Moon rock, huge numbers of eyewitnesses and video tapes and live TV broadcasts, etc., etc.).
The Search For the Manchurian Candidate
This might be science fiction also. However, it is astounding that there could be a secret within a secret; that the OSS would approach the Manhattan Project with this experiment.
So everyone “in the know” - at the Manhattan Project - would be given literally a secret too hard to keep, and keep it.
Excellent point: it’s one thing to hide something entirely, and it’s another to continue to hide it while a bunch of people are actively scrutinizing it trying to determine the truth.
Very few.
The vast majority of them were working on the task of refining materials (mainly uranium), with no particular idea what it was to be used for.
It’s pretty easy to not tell a secret when you don’t even know it yourself.
Honestly, it’s a weak counter-argument to a conspiracy theory, but CTs are usually so full of holes that “it couldn’t be kept secret” isn’t even a major counter-argument anyway. Pretty large things have been kept secret for a long time. The fact that the Allies had broken both Germany and Japan’s radio encryptions during World War 2 (Ultra/Magic) remained hidden from public knowledge until the 1970s. There was a lot of speculation about the US Air Force experimenting with stealth technologies in the 1970s and '80s with various speculative drawings of the F-19 being made. The USAF didn’t acknowledge the reality behind the speculation until 1988 when the F-117 was revealed. Not only did it look nothing like the speculative F-19 at all, the F-117 wasn’t a prototype but was in active service in 2 fighter wings when its existence was officially acknowledged. The disaster at Slapton Sands where ~749 died when German torpedo boats showed up in a pre D-Day invasion exercise remained largely buried until the 1980s.
To add to your examples, weren’t the US Gov’s LSD experiments kept secret for quite a long time? Some were fairly sinister. My favorite was the LSD dosing of a french village’s bread supply
I would say that it isn’t a good counterargument as a general rule. As much as I hate the batshit insane conspiracy theories like the 9/11 ones, there have been plenty of large-scale conspiracies over time. Some of the real ones like the Iran-Contra Affair sound almost as insane as the made up ones if there weren’t proof that they were real. It is true that some of those eventually were revealed but there are probably others that never were and the general public simply doesn’t know about them. There is proof that large-scale operations can be kept secret even within the U.S. for quite a long time. There are military bases and emergency government relocation centers on the U.S. mainland with thousands of people involved that the public doesn’t much about. Whispers and rumors spread around but the extent of what is going on is pretty well hidden.
I would say that it isn’t a good counterargument as a general rule. As much as I hate the batshit insane conspiracy theories like the 9/11 ones, there have been plenty of large-scale conspiracies over time. Some of the real ones like the Iran-Contra Affair sound almost as insane as the made up ones if there weren’t proof that they were real. It is true that some of those eventually were revealed but there are probably others that never were and the general public simply doesn’t know about them. There is proof that large-scale operations can be kept secret even within the U.S. for quite a long time. There are military bases and emergency government relocation centers on the U.S. mainland with thousands of people involved that the public doesn’t much about. Whispers and rumors spread around but the extent of what is going on is pretty well hidden.
There is a methodology to making keeping large-scale projects secret through keeping duties and knowledge tightly compartmentalized so that the people working on it don’t even understand what they are contributing to. Financial conspiracies have involved thousands of ordinary professionals who were just doing their job without knowing the big picture.
I think the point is generally how many types of people would have to keep the secret, rather than simple numbers. Ie multiple organisations rather than the military alone etc.
And the other point is that people would have to be keeping a secret that at least some people would view as a threat to their own countries welfare, eg 9/11 involved killing thousands of thier own citizens.
Combined with the ability to post things more widely and anonymously than ever before, it is less credible as an argument than it used to be during the cold war for instance.
I’ve never liked this counterargument, because it sort of assumes that the “whistleblower” would be believed. If a group of people came out today and said “hey, we helped fake the moon landing, and here’s a bunch of evidence,” then Neil Armstrong held a press conference saying they were lying and their evidence was all a hoax, I think the vast majority of people would believe Armstrong.
The thing is those things WERE NOT SECRETS. People DID know about atomic weapons, but the idea those things would be workable and ready to use was a secret. There were lots of rumours of “Superweapons,” constantly in the papers.
The Japanese KNEW their codes were broken. The Germans told them this. The Germans KNEW their enigma was compromised and they changed it, instead of abandoning it. They added more roters, the made other changes, but it wasn’t the machine but the way the Germans were using it that was allowing Allies to break the code.
You also have to remember the press was complicit in keeping secrets in the past. They wouldn’t print something that could hurt the nation. The public would simply stop buying the papers if they felt the press was unpatriotic.
There’s a huge difference between people not knowing and people knowing and not believing it.
Look at crimes 99% of the time eventually someone talks. But you do have crimes like Lizzie Borden, with too many holes and ruined evidence where if the principal didn’t do it, then no one did talk or the guilty party was also silenced.
Most of the so called successful cover-ups are brought about by slicing up the project into many pieces so no one overall sees the big picture.
Part of the reason cover-ups last is no one bothers to look. If you do this on a small scale, look at candy heiress Helen Brach. She vanished and it was a mystery but one detective using some nous and a determained effort managed to get to the bottom of it.
And it wasn’t that complex, it’s just no one bothered before. Helen Brach was gone and while she had friends, she had no one to really push for anyone to look into it. So no one really cared to solve it. Since the clues weren’t easy the police gave up quickly. Once someone took the time to follow up leads it was solved in a year.
My GOD! There’s such a thing as the atom bomb??!?!?
Then everything the atom bomb conspiracy theorists have been telling us over the years is true, and there was a gigantic government coverup that only those brave determined CTers’ persistence caused to unravel, and…
There’s what makes this a poor example, like “MK Ultra”, syphilis experiments and other secret government projects that CTers like to hold up as reasons why we should believe their crazy-ass shit.
It is vanishingly rare for any conspiracy theory pushed over many years to be vindicated (the Dreyfus Affair, for example), and none of the loonbar ones (the moon landings, 9/11 etc.) embraced despite logical, expert refutation have been borne out.
I would sooner expect homeopathy to be proven true than any mass conspiracy theory. Don’t hold your breath on either count.
I think it can be an OK argument, but not a great one. It’s not quantifiable. While some might agree that something like 9/11 would require too many people to keep their mouth shut, where could you draw the line? Something like a UFO sighting could be done with significantly fewer people, and those people might not see it as a huge deal to keep secret. It’s one thing to have the death of thousands on your conscience, but scaring some people might not cause you to lose as much sleep.
This may seem obvious, but I think we should also consider the difference between something that is public and something that is not. 9/11, the moon landing, and the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were public. Iran-contra dealings (pre-Ollie North hearings), Manhattan project R&D, stealth fighter/bomber flights were NOT. There is a big difference between maintaining a conspiracy and secrets about something that goes on mostly out of public view, and maintaining that conspiracy in the face of overwhelming public attention. The latter seems to wither quickly.
