I am reading the excellent book "The good war", by Studs Terkel. In the book he interviews Joe Marcus, who was quote "appointed in 1940 head of civilian requirements division". From what I can gather, he was involved in allocating the resources required to power the industry of war production.
Marcus said " There were two important secret projects. They had code names. One was the Manhattan Project. We all know what that is now. The other was the Arctic Circle Project. I didn't know what the hell it was. Certain kinds of industrial chains were needed by the Russians for pulleys on ships or something like that. I was supposed to worry about these things. Seems like a simple thing. it had White House priority. Top. The decision was made to build a factory to make that chain. I don't recall it ever being built."
The fact that it was put on par with the Manhattan project immediately intrigued me, but surprisingly google didn't provide any immediate answers. Does anyone have information on it?
I mean, I have no idea. I've never heard of it. But what he's probably referring to is the priority rating that projects were assigned. The top "normal" rating, which is what the Manhattan Project had, was AA-1. But lots of boring projects had AA-1 as well; e.g., the effort to produce several tens of thousands of aircraft was given AA-1, and then the effort to produce more beyond that was given AA-2 (a lower rating), and so on. This priority system was used to determine which projects got scarce resources first. Certain projects could be temporarily given a higher rating (AAA) on an emergency need.
The Manhattan Project is interesting not so much because it had a high rating (though it likely would not have been successful without one), but because very few people knew what it was doing. So it was a massive project (at its height it was consuming 50% of the Army's construction resources, and employed around 1% of the entire US civilian labor force, and used about 1% of the US's electrical output!) with a very high priority rating that as far as Congress and most of the military knew was producing nothing. This raised a lot of eyebrows as you can imagine.
Anyway. I don't know what this guy is talking about. But I think a generous interpretation is he's talking about a few projects he had something to do with, and that he was amused as the banality of the other high-priority project he worked on, compared to the infamy of one of them.