#manhattan project

Comment from Facebook (R.G. on Radio War Nerd)

The game presents us like he was one of the Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project BUT

while the codename Perseus (and others like Mlad, Pers, Youngster, FOGEL and Mr. X) indeed was used, it wasn't the codename of a person, but of a character.

Perseus was made to protect one of their spies, Theodore Hall (who was the youngest scientist of the Manhattan Project, being only 18 years old), and probably others as well.

Chikov admitted openly in 1996 that he and other KGB officers he worked with had combined Mlad and another spy code-named “Pers” into a single spy, Perseus. “The main goal was to make the story unclear, so when the intelligence of other countries began to analyze this, it would not reveal the forms and methods of the work of Soviet intelligence”

source: Nuclear Secrets - The Perseus Papers

Theodore Hall and Perseus had some similarities like:

Both visited their parents in New York at the same time, with Perseus being recruited by the GRU there after the visit.

Same codenames (Mlad and Youngster)

And something really cool they made with Black Ops Cold War Perseus is that both the real life Perseus and the COD one aren't just one person.

The real life one was just a character made by the Soviets to spread misinformation and protect their Manhattan Project spies while the BOCW one is a whole spy network/an ideal like Viktor "Stitch" Kuzmin says in the Season 6 Outro

"Perseus was never one man, it's an ideal, bigger than any of us."

I really feel it should be talked about more often like Bell with Pavlov dogs experiment or Adler with Alfred Adler and that whole superiority/inferiority complex to be honest.

As we celebrate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, let’s take a moment to appreciate Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, a physicist who made considerable contributions to nuclear physics and worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II.

Early Life and Education

Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu was born on May 31, 1912, in a small town near Shanghai, China. Her father was big on education, especially for girls, which was uncommon at the time. Wu went to National Central University in Nanjing to study physics and later moved to the United States for further studies. She got her Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940.

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/28883982

Big Contributions to Physics

During World War II, Wu joined the Manhattan Project. She helped develop the atomic bomb by figuring out how to enrich uranium and study radioactive isotopes. Her most famous work was in 1956, when she proved that the law of parity conservation doesn’t hold in weak nuclear interactions. This was an important advancement for physics and earned her colleagues, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957. Sadly, Wu didn’t get the Nobel recognition even though her experiment was crucial.

Legacy and Recognition

Dr. Wu’s work earned her the nickname "The First Lady of Physics." She received many awards, including the Comstock Prize in Physics and the National Medal of Science in 1990. Besides her scientific work, Wu was a big advocate for women in science and education, encouraging young women to pursue STEM careers. During her career Dr. Wu also taught at Princeton and Columbia Universities. She received the National Medal of Science from President Ford on October 18, 1976, “for her ingenious experiments that led to new and surprising understanding of the decay of the radioactive nucleus.“

Explore More About Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu

To learn more about Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu’s life and work, check out these resources from the National Archives:

The Manhattan Project

Women in STEM

Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month