How can a government keep one of the greatest secrets in history while still claiming to govern by the consent of the people? That question lies at the heart of the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime effort in which hundreds of thousands of Americans worked to build an atomic weapon before Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Warned by physicist Albert Einstein that Germany might be pursuing such a weapon, the federal government launched one of the largest and most secret undertakings in American history. Yet it did so as a nation founded on the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive ‘their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ The Manhattan Project demonstrates that in a constitutional republic, popular consent does not require every governmental action to be publicly known as it occurs.

The Framers never intended to create a direct democracy in which every decision would be submitted to a vote of the people. Instead, they established a representative republic. In Federalist No. 39, James Madison explained that a republic is a government that ‘derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people.’ The Constitution entrusted elected representatives with the responsibility to make difficult decisions on behalf of the nation while remaining accountable through elections, separated powers, and the rule of law. Alexander Hamilton likewise argued in Federalist No. 70 that an energetic executive is essential to protecting the nation, particularly during times of crisis. That energy, Hamilton observed, often depended on secrecy and dispatch, qualities a numerous assembly like Congress could not supply, but a single, unified executive could.

READ MORE