[2] Campbell liked the idea and supplied Cartmill with considerable background information gleaned from unclassified scientific journals, on the use of Uranium-235 to make a nuclear fission device.
Gregory Benford describes the incident as told to him by Edward Teller in his autobiographical essay "Old Legends": Coming three years later in the same magazine, Cleve Cartmill's "Deadline" provoked astonishment in the lunch table discussions at Los Alamos.
It really did describe isotope separation and the bomb itself in detail, and raised as its principal plot pivot the issue the physicists were then debating among themselves: should the Allies use it?
To the physicists from many countries clustered in the high mountain strangeness of New Mexico, cut off from their familiar sources of humanist learning, it must have seemed particularly striking that Cartmill described an allied effort, a joint responsibility laid upon many nations.
"[3]Fearing a security breach, the FBI began an investigation into Cartmill, Campbell, and some of their acquaintances including Isaac Asimov and Robert A.
Joseph Olander, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Frederik Pohl), The Golden Age of Science Fiction (1980; ed.