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Freezer
Since: Jan, 2001

Recently I've been fleshing out the page for The Manhattan Project film with John Lithgow. I used the trope Blatant Lies, possibly incorrectly. I guess I'm looking for a trope which might be named "Government Half Truth" or something. A case where someone is lying, but puts just enough truth into it so that someone won't look deeply enough to find the lie.
Maybe like Embarrassing Cover-Up, but without the embarrassing part?
Case in point: In the film, a lab is purifying plutonium for use in weapons. While this specific work is top secret, the name of the lab "Medatomics" and the tour that a scientist gives inside the lab shows that they're not hiding the fact that they're working with nuclear material.
It would be as if the people in the lab would be willing to say, "Yes, we do nuclear research, and yes we have some pretty nasty stuff in there, but no, we are not enriching plutonium for atomic bombs."
Now, if they went ahead and openly denied it without anyone asking, then I understand it might fall under Suspiciously Specific Denial, but that's not what happens here. More like, "What's that green stuff?"
The truthful answer would be "extremely enriched weapons-grade plutonium."
The actual answer given is "That's Americium-241, just one of the things we make around here." Americium-241 is a common isotope in many types of nuclear waste.
A comparable example might be the old conspiracy theory of the US Air Force reverse-engineering alien spacecraft and testing them out in the Nevada desert. "Yes, we do test top-secret highly experimental aircraft out there, and some of their designs are rather unorthodox to say the least. But crashed alien spacecraft? That's just crazy."
Would this even be considered a trope at all outside of Blatant Lies?
Edited by blueceva