Can every successful nuclear weapon and/or energy program be linked back to the Manhattan Project or did some countries develop their nuclear potential entirely without it?

by tipttt284

For example, the Chinese nuclear program was initially assisted by the Soviets, who spied on the Manhattan Project, so that's a no. But did anyone else do the entire groundwork or did they all work from runoffs?

restricteddata

It depends at some level what means by "linking." There are direct connections (Soviet espionage, British cooperation), and there are more indirect connections. The French program, for example, had very little Manhattan Project input, even though several of the French scientists were on the Manhattan Project, as part of the British program in Canada. They just weren't privy to a lot of American information; their interaction was mostly one-way (the French scientists were allowed to work on their own research and it was shared with the Americans, but the American work wasn't shared back the other way in most cases; the postwar French nuclear energy program had a lot indebted to their wartime work for the British, understandably). The Chinese connection is at best once-removed (the Soviets), and at worst literally-removed — the Soviets withdrew their assistance during the Sino-Soviet split, and the Chinese did basically have to figure it all out again from scratch (and published materials, etc.). The Indians had very indirect assistance in the way of the French reactor technology, but they of course were part of the Cold War research establishment that took advantage of many Manhattan Project declassified publications (in the 1950s, many of the early ways of generating fissile material were declassified). The Pakistani program was derived from Dutch centrifuge work (which had no Manhattan Project origin whatsoever — it was derived from original German-Austrian work that had been done in the Soviet Union), as well as some Chinese assistance later on. The Israelis had help from the French, so at best indirect. The North Koreans had help from the Pakistanis, so fairly well-removed.

But at some level one has to ask what it means to be "linked back," again. I would really not consider any programs other than the Soviet, British, and maybe aspects of the French to have direct connections to the Manhattan Project. The rest are so indirect as to be a very tenuous claim. "Runoffs" in this case can also simply mean "published information about the science and technology of nuclear weapons production," and the idea that any country making nuclear weapons would forego such information seems rather strange to me. The first major "runoff" of the Manhattan Project was the Smyth Report, published only days after the Nagasaki bombing, and it gives a fairly good "blueprint" for how you ought to arrange your own Manhattan Project, so at some level we're all "runoffs."