The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

I have a strange take-away from this, in that the article proposes that The Manhattan Project’s underlying goal was to model the first group of prototypes as master copies for an assembly line, and that the true cost of the project was the production line, and not the first group of weapons used to test the scientific principle and ultimately bring the war to an end.

That makes sense, especially seeing the arsenal and industry grow as it did in the wake of the war.

The thing that leaves me curious is that despite the massive spending on the space program, we never see the same assembly line, or perhaps transit system, emerge from the spending.

With the space program, it would seem that all of the effort and financing really did get consumed by each moonshot, with no investment to back it up, and formulate repeatable process and the ready facility to continiously grow the number of people in orbit, and cycle rockets through their trajectories.

The nuclear energy/weapons complex and the space program seem to be comparable endeavors, but one paved the way for sustainable operations while the other produced a series of events and little else. It doesn’t seem plausible to just wave one’s hands and say that rockets are that expensive, so what gives?

> For example, one of the questions that people ask me again and again is how close the Germans were to getting an atomic bomb. The answer is, more or less, not very close at all. Why not? Because even if their scientific understanding was not too far away — which it was not, even though they were wrong about several things and behind on several others — they never came close to the stage that would be necessary to turn it into an industrial production program, as opposed to just a laboratory understanding. That sheer fact is much more important than whether Heisenberg fully understood the nature of chain reactions or anything like that.

I found this article to be very interesting. The point above in particular, for example, has parallels with the allied code-breaking efforts, which were similarly organized primarily as an industrial operation. (The Bletchley Park data base lists more that 10,000 people who were associated with work there during the war). As with the Manhattan project, much is written about key figures, like Turing and Flowers, whose contributions were of course crucial, but the true genius of the effort was the fact that the British, and later the Americans, created a large industrial organization for code breaking.

That most obvious savings generated by the Manhattan Project was probably the displacement of perceived need to invade Japan. It would be nice to see an estimate of the cost of that invasion as a comparison. But the primary cost of an invasion would have been the lives of Americans and Japanese, and it would be difficult to arrive at a consensus value for that. As part of that wider comparison the cost of the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki should also be included on the Manhattan Project's side of the ledger.

I find it curious that if you add up the very first column of figures in the article -- cost in current dollars -- you find that it comes to way over 40 billion dollars, not 30.

Points taken about industrial might, and Germany's increasing industrial output throughout the war, despite all the (apparently ineffectual) bombing, though. Maybe leave off the sums?

It'd be interesting to see a cost comparison to the USSR's program around the same time, leading up to the development of the first Soviet nuclear bomb.

This is known by everybody who's read about the Manhattan Project. The hard problem was separating uranium isotopes. The Hiroshima bomb was a nuclear IED. It could be built today by a good auto racing shop if they had the enriched uranium. Even machining uranium isn't that hard. There's a how-to guide from Union Carbide's tools unit. It takes some precautions, but not remote manipulators or anything like what's needed for plutonium.

I think the Manhattan Project is the exclamation point of what really decided the ultimate victors of WWII:

Industrial capacity and efficiency.

What’s interesting is that German industrial capacity, despite being bombed 24/7(US daylight and British nighttime raids often in excess of 1,000 bombers) were able to continue producing warfighting equipment in increasing record numbers often with the use of slave labour.

Despite increased German industrial production of warfighting equipment despite being bombed, the US strategic industrial depth ensured ultimate victory rather than tactical prowess.

What’s interesting in Stan McChrystal’s recent book “Team of Teams” is his mention that while 20th century conventional conflicts were about industrial capacity and efficiency, the 21st century will likely be about adaptability.

To put things into perspective, the B-29 bomber project cost around $3.2 billion dollars in 1945 dollars, half as much again as the $1.9 billion atomic weapon.

The bomb project was expensive because they were accelerating perhaps 30 years of normal research and development into 4 years. They did not know what would work, so they made two different types of separation plants, and two different types of bombs. All the clean room technology needed for the factories needed to be developed from scratch.

With the wisdom of hindsight, the "race to the bomb" was a waste, but at the time it seemed prudent. Then again war is waste, war is about laying waste.