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The Rush To Patent the Atomic Bomb
dooling writes "In case you were thinking of building your own atom bomb, you may want to weigh your intellectual property liability. It seems there are over 2000 patents covering the atom bomb. To avoid publishing the patents, a central tenet of the patent system, "the project made use of an obscure law whereby patent applications could be filed but no one would actually look at them or evaluate them. They would just be stamped secret and stored in a vault at the patent office." The irony here is that while all the patents were essentially stored in the same place at the patent office and written to be understandable by any engineer, the Manhattan Project worked diligently to compartmentalize knowledge, using code names for just about all aspects of the project and keeping tight security on all information. It seems the patents were filed to give the U.S. government an essential monopoly on the burgeoning nuclear industry and protect it against others who might patent similar technologies later."
Another reason why there might be patents would be simply for the benefit of the researchers involved.
The members of the Manhattan Project were all research scientists and engineers. Technically, what they accomplished was nothing short of amazing. They went from brand new basic physics and science discoveries to deployable weapons in just a few years. And while the principal players were already working in the physics world, they weren't able to publish the results of their work because it was top secret stuff.
It is only speculation, but it could be that the scientists and engineers were allowed to publish their work through patents that wouldn't see the light of day and could be kept under lock and key. They get to add numerous patents to their CVs and account for their years of work without revealing the inner workings of the weapons to the world. At least that could have been the intent. A few spies managed to compromise a lot of the information and the USSR exploded their own, copycat weapon shortly after the end of WWII.