The Manhattan Project didn’t look like America. Undertaken today, it would be criticized for failing to meet diversity and inclusion guidelines.

Today’s human resources department professionals would be triggered if they looked at the list of physicists hired to produce what President Franklin Roosevelt was told could be a uranium-based bomb “with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known.” They would be astounded that the president, in his haste to develop such a weapon, as he put it, “before Hitler got it,” authorized the hiring of scientists without any attempt to match the diversity of the country’s population.