What was the date that The Smyth Report was first released?
The first copies were delivered to bookstores on September 10. Many were wary of it, due to its technical nature, and feared that sales would be low. An exception was Scribner's Bookstores, which placed large early orders. At Oak Ridge, the Manhattan Project's major production site, 8,000 copies were sold through the employee welfare organization. Similar arrangements were made for Los Alamos and Richland, which were located in areas where bookstores were scarce.The Smyth Report was on The New York Times bestseller list from October 14, 1945, until January 20, 1946. Between 1946 and when the Smyth Report went out of print in 1973, it went through eight printings, and Princeton University Press sold 62,612 paperback and 64,129 hardback copies.Groves did not intend the Smyth Report to be the last word on the project. It formed an addendum to the Manhattan District History, the official history of the project. This eventually consisted of 35 volumes with 39 appendices or supplements. It was written in the immediate postwar years by the chemists, metallurgists, physicists, and administrators who had worked on the project. Since there were no security restrictions, it covered every aspect of the Manhattan Project, but was itself classified. Most of it was declassified in the 1960s and 1970s and became available to scholars, except for some technical details on the construction of the bombs.In her 2008 PhD dissertation, Rebecca Schwartz argued that Smyth's academic background and the Smyth Report's security-driven focus on physics at the expense of chemistry, metallurgy, and ordnance promoted a public perception of the Manhattan Project as primarily the achievement of physics and physicists. According to Schwartz, postwar histories and popular writing tended to follow the Smyth report in this regard, creating a lasting historiographical legacy. "Ever since", wrote Jon Agar, "the atomic bomb has been seen as an achievement of physics." In particular, the prominence given to Einstein's mass–energy equivalence equation indelibly associated it with the Manhattan Project. The Smyth Report, wrote Robert P. Crease, "more than any other single document made E = mc2 an emblem of atomic energy and weaponry."Groves felt that:
on the whole, and considering the rather difficult conditions under which it was prepared, the Smyth Report was extraordinarily successful in its efforts to distribute credit fairly and accurately. It would have been impossible to have prepared any document for publication covering the work of the Manhattan District that every reader would have found to his liking. But the fact is that all those who had the greatest knowledge of the subject were nearly unanimous in approving its publication as it was finally written. And there can be no question that it excellently served its purpose as an essential source of accurate information, particularly for a news-hungry America in the early days after Nagasaki.
September 10