The government isn’t that great at secrets.
They disclosed their stealth bombers after a time - and those were also seen before disclosure.
There’s being capable of a thing and the fear that instills in people it’s used against. There’s also displaying a large sword deliberately. Governments in general love having moments where they wow their adversaries.
Given the nature of the US government I think it is unreasonable to anthropomorphisize it as something that can "enjoy displaying a large sword," for example.
This is one of the reasons that many military historians remain confused to this day why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Everyone involved in the decision had to have known that dropping the bombs in unpopulated woodland near the cities would have actually been MORE effective at accomplishing the goals (mostly intimidating the USSR, as it was known from decrypted military communications of the Japanese that they were already defeated and ready to surrender on terms amenable to the Allies).
We know through OSINT that the government has kept plenty of secrets and they have done so very very well for decades, before leakage or disclosure. Finally, with such a poor SnR these days due to information overload and psyops, even if the government isn't that great at secrets, you still have the herculean task of sorting through the information haystack looking for the needles.
I'm going to make a leap of faith, and say you're an adult in the US.
The fact that there are some US adults not aware of the massive scale secrecy, of the Manhattan Project, is genuinely embarrassing.
For a more recent example, see the NSA circa-Snowden.
Do you really mean this? Are you saying that the government is incapable of keeping a certain fact secret, if exposing it will compromise national security?
Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
> The operation was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967, and officially halted in 1973.
and
> Project MKUltra was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the Church Committee of the United States Congress...
22 years they kept that from the public. Seems like they did a pretty good job keeping that secret.
MKUltra was wide in scope but no earth-shattering new information was revealed, and I suspect most of those involved didn’t really know the big picture (and the ones that did were likely either too ashamed or too patriotic to talk about it).
That’s a very different type of “big” than, e.g., “we found an alien spaceship in the desert”.
Again, our little argument was asking if such information would ever be revealed to the public if it was found. So including this particular argument is no possible..