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The reason it was only a few years was because Truman decided to drop two of them on Japan and announce it to the entire world. If the US government had decided it was in their strategic interest to not use them on Japan and keep it a secret, it could have very well been decades. You’d probably have a handful of scientists leak about it over the years, but the government and skeptics would declare those scientists to be obvious schitzos and bullshit artists. The “adults in the room” would industriously gaslight everyone about how the weaponization of fusion is scientifically preposterous.
No, it wouldn't have been. the science was already public. That's how the US government became aware of it in the first place. Scientists were studying radiation since Curie discovered it, and they would have continued to do so, within America or without it. In fairly short order, they would have broken the science wide open.
Sure, if you’re a physicist you might quietly believe that there’s something fishy about the denial. Plenty of virologists found the claim that COVID was a natural phenomenon fishy, but they mostly kept their mouths shut and went with the party line. The ones that didn’t were mocked and their work was suppressed. John Q. Public who’s a machinist in Iowa would just believe what he’s told.
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