A reporter's journey into how the U.S. funded the bomb | Hacker News Reader

A reporter's journey into how the U.S. funded the bomb

nytimes.com

I'm surprised that the cost of development was only $800 million — the equivalent of $13.6 billion today. That's minuscule by the standards of congressional spending.

Compare it to another engineering project of national importance: the Apollo mission to land man on the moon. It cost $25.8 billion between 1960 and 1973, or $257 billion in 2020 dollars[1].

Both were massive and urgent projects, but the atomic bomb cost 5% of what Apollo cost. An unexpected bargain.

[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo

Wasn’t the U.S. total GDP lower back then though? Percentage of GDP would be a better comparison.

E.g. in 2023, the U.S. GDP was approximately $25 trillion. 1% of that is about $250 billion.

The Manhattan Project wasn't even the most expensive US development project of the war - the B29 cost about $2 billion.

Wow, developing an airplane, when there were already other airplanes cost twice as much as creating a bomb that hadn’t existed before.

What comes to mind is that it’s pretty important to keep an airplane in the air, which must require a lot of careful engineering. Also that you have to make a lot of them. A bomb doesn’t really have either engineering requirements. (Only has to work once, they only made a few)

I also wonder to what degree cost was saved by getting all those highly talented and motivated refugees from europe

I believe there was a back-up plan to use UK Lancaster heavy bombers to drop atomic bombs if the B-29 didn't work out.

The B-29 was the first bomber with a pressure cabin. This allowed it operate at a high altitude for a longer time than other bombers of the era, staying out of flak range, etc. I imagine that was part of the reason for the high development cost.

Prior to that bomber crews operated using electrically heated flight suites, gloves and used oxygen masks, when reaching those altitudes.

http://www.303rdbg.com/uniforms-gear3.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress#Pres...

What all is included in these costs? Is the price shown the R&D to produce the first one, or does it include the cost of the production run as well?

After Fat Man & Little Boy, it's obvious we didn't just stop building bombs. The Manhattan Project's main development was the proof that the bomb was possible. Much more money followed making new versions that were even more powerful.

Public space programs in the US have always been a job creation program that gets chopped up and subcontracted across the country, so many senators can campaign on how they are bringing space jobs to their state. The cost is intentional. And this unnecessary cross country subcontracting was an organizational cause of the Challenger explosion.

I can't read the article but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Groves book "Now It Can Be Told: The Story Of The Manhattan Project" documents it well

The Oppenheimer movie was a much more personal biopic, rather than about the project itself, unlike some other older movies.

Well, the movie was titled Oopenheimer and not "Atomic Bomb" or "Manhattan Project" for a reason.

Some of my favorite parts of "the story" like the details of all the factory build outs for enrichment or the sabotage of the Nordic heavy water plants were completely skipped over but that's okay I think.

That was a movie about a man, not a bomb.

The movie was based in large part on the book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer"

Which is a life of the man, as you say.

The main difference from the movie is that, aside from being much more lengthy, as book vs. movie always is, it dwells more on pre-WW2 California leftist politics. Whereas the downfall of Lewis Strauss gets only a brief mention.

And of course it covers the life of J R Oppenheimer from birth to death in detail, in parts exhaustive detail.

Oh interesting, thanks. I missed Oppenheimer in IMAX the first time around but saw it finally a month or two ago when it was re-released.

I had originally been reading Rhodes's "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" leading up to the release - I timed it to where I stopped reading right at the part Trinity went off at, saw the movie, and just recently finished. So thanks for the rec.

TBH there were parts of that book where I felt I had had my fill long before the book let go - (e.g. the above-mentioned pre-WW2 California leftist politics) but YMMV, and it's a true history book, not a novel designed to thrill.

And there were fascinating engineering problem-solving details that were entirely absent e.g. the lengths gone to to get the shaped charges for the implosion device correct, and to run the punched-card computing for that. See Feynman's anecdotes on it instead.

But on the whole, it's a fascinating book if you're into that sort of thing.

In addition, 430 million troy ounces (of Silver) were used for the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge. But this was just on-loan from the US Treasury. According to this Wikipedia article, 0.036% was lost when all was returned to the treasury, some 155 thousand troy ounces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron#Construction

(of silver, as a substitute for copper which was in short supply at the time)

Thanks for the correction.

That sounds suspiciously low, my naive expectation would be more than that would stick to dies/molds or oxidize, turn into dust, and escape.

No surprise, since it's how U.S. military spending has worked for our entire lives. Military: "We need $x to build something so secret we can't tell you what it is." Lawmaker: "Add a few more zeros, put at least $y of it into my state, and I'll sign whatever you want."

The real life version of Radar covering the clipboard with his hands while Col. Blake signs something that is "top secret".

". . . to create a weapon of mass destruction that would soon kill and maim more than 200,000 people, ushering in the atomic age."

The use of the bomb ended the war in the Pacific early and saved untold lives, both military and civilian.

See https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

There are deep complexities to the war with Japan. The willingness of Japanese pilots to use kamikaze tactics provides evidence that they'd fight until the end costing, as you said, untold lives in the conflict.

But we also cannot escape the fact that the majority of the people affected by Little Boy and Fat Man were civilians.

I believe that we could have chosen targets which properly demonstrated the futility of continued military resistance, without the need for the civilian deaths which we incurred by bombing cities.

Read "Japan's Longest Day", by Kazutoshi Hando and the Pacific War Research Society, which goes into great detail about how the decision to surrender was made. Many of the key players were still alive when this was written in the 1960s, and many were interviewed. The surrender almost didn't happen. A sizable fraction of the Army leadership wanted to fight on, and tried hard, in a near-coup, to block the Emperor from issuing the surrender proclamation.

The US plan for invasion, "Operation Downfall" [1], called for what planners expected to be an invasion with a million casualties on the American side alone. It was scheduled for 1 November 1945. On the Japanese side, "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" was a slogan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall

There is a movie version of "Japan's Longest Day".(1967). It's from Toho, and the Internet Archive has a subtitled version. This is a reasonably accurate account of the decision to surrender and the infighting around it, entirely from the Japanese side. Parts of the Army desperately wanted to continue the war. The war faction attacked the Imperial Palace, killed people there, tried to kill the Prime Minister but couldn't find him, and burned his house.

The senior Army leadership's thinking was not insane. They realized ultimate defeat was inevitable. If the Allies invaded and suffered high casualties, Japan might be able to negotiate better terms than unconditional surrender. The Emperor rejected that plan. The Minister of War and the Army chief accepted that decision. Some junior Army leaders still wanted to take that path and revolted. The revolt was violent but unsuccessful. It was a close thing.

All this was after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Before that, surrender was not seriously considered.

[1] https://archive.org/details/japans-longest-day-1967

I am listening to the Oppenheimer biography and was surprised to learn we were much closer to a surrender than I had known.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-a...

The thing that blows a hole in this alternative view of history is that it took two bombs to get Japan to surrender.

The militarists who controlled the government were bombed on Aug 6, 1945. Within 24 hours it was understood the magnitude of the destruction (they had their own atomic program) and loss of life. Then they sat down and asked "Is it time to surrender now?" and the answer was "no".

Indeed even after the 2nd bombing on August 9, 1945 and the news of the Soviet Invasion, the War Council met and the decision was "senior leadership of the Japanese Army took the news in stride, grossly underestimating the scale of the attack. With the support of Minister of War Anami, they started preparing to impose martial law on the nation, to stop anyone attempting to make peace." It was only after other intercede with the Emperor was capitulation seriously discussed.

I'm not sure how anyone could look at that and think "Yeah, Japan was on the cusp of surrendering before the atomic bombs".

And the alternatives to the atomic weapons were no less grisly. A potential invasion by the USSR and US, with how many loss in lives? Iwo Jima alone cost 25,000 American and Japanese lives. And even if we decided to just blockade, how many Japanese civilians would have starved to death before the government capitulated?

There were no good options, only "least worst", and the atomic bombs would at least bring the war to quick end.

There's a strong argument for the fact that Japan was effectively on its last legs by the time the bombs dropped. Indeed, the fire bombings that preceded dealt far more damage to Japan than both bombs, in real terms. Nuclear intervention wasn't a requirement for ending the war, the war was effectively over, and a sustained bombing campaign could have seen the end without the atomic bomb.

Now, the argument I find the most interesting in the case for using the bomb is public, and national and international political opinion. It is arguable that Truman saw very little options other than use the bomb at the time. They had spent millions on the project, politicians knew that something was being developed, and the Cold War was already on the horizon. Further if not used, and the existence of the bomb post war would come to light for the public, there might well be questions as to why it wasn't dropped, and, exactly the line you used, if it could have ended the war early.

Ultimately, I think a combination of international clout spun into national pride in total victory sealed the decision (although this conclusion was probably made by FDR before him as well). I will say, that the post-Hiroshima speech by Truman is also one of the most powerful speeches by a US president ever made.

> It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

This is a material argument that is totally undercut by the fact that the bomb gave japan an excuse to surrender that they needed and otherwise would not have had. The bomb was directly referenced in Hirohito's surrender speech:

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

It gave them an excuse to save face.

Correct. The incentives for individuals rarely align with the incentives of polities (and it can be argued those entities only exist in history books).

The bombs and their awesome power served to align the incentives of individuals in decision making positions with the incentives ascribed to the polity named Japan to issue surrender.

> Indeed, the fire bombings that preceded dealt far more damage to Japan than both bombs, in real terms.

That is a better anti-fire-bomb argument than an anti-nuclear one. But I suspect the feeling in Japanese command would have been something like "agh, we're becoming a weapons testing range and we don't like that" and that surely contributed to a quick surrnder.

American Prometheus revealed the most compelling reason for using both bombs I’ve seen to date:

  Truman had extracted a promise from Stalin that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan by August 15—an event that he and many of his military planners thought would be decisive. “He’ll [Stalin] be in the Jap war on August 15,” Truman wrote in his diary on July 17. “Fini Japs when that comes about.”

Even more than avoiding a bloody island-hopping invasion of Japan, Truman wanted to avoid having to divide East Asia with the USSR as they had done Europe. The Soviets declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria on August 7, one day after Hiroshima and two days before Nagasaki. By August 15, the Japanese had surrendered, largely limiting the Soviet sphere of influence to mainland Asia.

The German had just shown that they would fight to the last minute, enrolling cripples, children and old men in the Volkssturm. It was perfectly rational and reasonable for the US leadership to believe the Japanese were going to be just as stubborn and fanatical. In fact it would have been simply naive for them to believe otherwise.

After WW2 we call it a war crime (or terrorism) to mass kill civilians to save military casualties. Though the US did this already before the use of nuclear weapons through mass bombing cities with conventional weapons.

The Japanese were killing more civilians in China and other occupied territories in two weeks than a single nuclear bomb did. If the bombs shortened the war by just a month, and that's a perfectly reasonable estimate, they were morally justified.

Read up on Japanese atrocities. They were just as bad as Nazi concentration camp.

Was this really the motivation, or a post war found justification? Regardless, we'd then need to consider what were the military options to defend chinese civilians (eg bombing (nuking?) Japanese military assets there).

Atrocities committed by Japan in China were very much a concern in the US (and even in Germany for that matter!) already before the war, and were incontrovertibly the reason for the US foreign policy towards Japan then, and thus arguably a distant cause for Pearl Harbor.

You'd have to argue that the US had forgotten about it, and then not gotten the memo on the atrocities committed since then.

Does it have to be the motivation? It's true in either case.

See Fog of War, the Erroll Morris's interview with Robert McNamara, who was US Secretary of Defense during Vietnam and helped manage the bombing of Japan in WWII. McNamara says he and compatriots would have been convicted as war criminals if the US had lost, and IIRC says they were war criminals.

I mean it got to the point where we had to "save" Japanese cities to make them enticing targets for the nuke. If we had let our bombers go full force then there literally wouldn't have been a target left.

> After WW2 we call it a war crime (or terrorism) to mass kill civilians to save military casualties.

We did? Where?

The laws of war have always made allowances for civilian deaths as long as "military necessity" is justified. And they would have to be - there is no way to conduct a war without civilian casualties.

It is true that mass killing civilians for no military purpose is a war crime. So at the extreme ends the answer is simple. But not in the middle.

One can quibble at the margins - how much destruction of military capabilities are justified in exchange for the loss of X civilian lives, but that can never be answered since it's not an objective measure. There is significant overlap between civilians and military when answering such questions - are workers in a factory producing weapons civilians or means to wage war? The answer is both.

> We did? Where?

The Geneva Conventions were updated partly in response to the Japan bombings. You can quibble how exactly the criteria my casual summary of "mass kill civilians to save military casualties" but broadly the Japan style bombing of cities full of civilians was made illegal.

See eg: https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/why-atomic-bombing-hiroshima-w...

That’s an opinion piece. It attempts to “infer” the purpose of bombing from select statements like a Presidential speech.

It’s not all that convincing.

But regardless the point stands. Proportionality is a subjective rather than objective measure.

The paper claims that “less than 10% of the individuals killed were military personnel”. Ok, so what percentage makes the bombing legal? 50%? 90%? What if based on all available information the death toll was estimated at 90% but it turns out to be 70%? Is it still illegal? And could you even reliably determine the number? Is someone in the military a civilian because they took their uniform off and went home for the night?

> The use of the bomb ended the war...

Yes, although the situation is now understood quite differently. The atom bomb gave Japan's leaders a critically necessary (due to their culture) way to both save face and surrender.

Their need for a way out was desperate. Not particularly because of the US (& UK), whose invasion of southern Japan they felt well-prepared to fight. (Inch-by-inch, and to the death.) But because of the Soviets, who the Japanese had assumed would say neutral, per the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact (signed 13 April 1941, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_Neutra...).

Unfortunately, the Soviets declared war against Japan on 7 August 1945. Two days later, they invaded Japanese-held Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, northern Korea, etc. The Red Army, with 1.5 million men, quickly inflicted massive defeats on the Japanese army - and parts of the latter were retreating in panic. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Manchuria_Operation_map-e... for some sense of the speed and scale of this offensive.)

Hence Japan's decision, on 15 August, to surrender. Neither their ability to hold off the US in the south, nor their willingness to absorb hits from the new American bomb, would matter one bit if the Red Army quickly conquered Japan from the north and west.

It wasn't the only way out.

We were the ones that backed them into a corner with the "unconditional" qualification while behind closed doors it really wasn't unconditional - so why not just make that public? That America would accept a non-unconditonal surrender?

Or did we not want to embarrass Roosevelt and Churchill?

If we were willing to make concessions and allow the Emperor to remain in position, why not just disclose this?

It's a complicated time and nearing 100 years ago. I don't think we will ever have a solid answer to this.

There's a lot of "after the fact" discussion about the dropping of the two nuclear weapons.

It was always a given that they would be dropped - developed for use on Germany, completed after the German surrender .. where else could the then DoD live field test the two "actual bomb" designs that resulted from the single most expensive R&D program in the world to date?

The US President was only recently made President and prior to that had no knowledge of the programme not being on the need to know list .. Japan was being carpet bombed, with 72 cities already completely destroyed there was a looming shortage of "clean" untouched test sites .. that were going to be destroyed with or without atomic weapons.

It's a subject with a wealth of viewpoints, you might, if you've not seen it already, like a historians helicopter view of the range of positions taken and the movement toward a post factum consensus view many years later (2013 IIRC)

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-u...

Interesting read, thanks.

I would say I definitely lean closer towards the revisionist take and while I do see the middle ground Walker is trying to state exists, I feel like its just a toned down version of the revisionist argument for the traditionalists stake.

I do believe part of Japan leadership wanted to surrender and would have if we did not require it "unconditionally". We definitely kept the bomb secret in order to show off our power to the Soviet Union - we hid as much as we could and only alluded to our new weapon in passing.

"Defeat is not surrender" is such a cop out. Now wars can only end in surrender? Says who? Why can't we draw up a truce and just end-it-now instead of this invade-or-bomb nonsense? Why did it have to be one or the other?

I do agree it was Total War and the morality of a lot of these things were not on the mind of many, espically Truman after inheriting the situation.

> We definitely kept the bomb secret in order to show off our power to the Soviet Union

Err, the British, Australians, and Soviets "in the loop" knew about the bomb development programme - the British and Australians talked the US into starting it after they equivicated for some time, not even taking Einstein seriously about the supposed "need" to develop it.

The Soviets were closely in touch with the progress of the Manhatten Project thanks to Klaus Fuchs who tackled the thorny problem of imploding the fissionable core of the plutonium bomb and was present at the Trinity test.

Which does pose the question, secret from whom?

Certainly from the US Vice President and general US public, the general Commonwealth and Axis public, etc.

Not so much from Allied high command nor even Axis command suspicions - both the Germans and Japanese had their own nascent atomic programs which had promise but lacked resource commitment.

Thank you for the details. There really is so much at play here not even bringing in the spying.

I've had a question maybe you would know ever since finishing the Rhodes book relating to the initiator. Maybe its a sign of the times the book was written, or maybe purposfully leaving details out, but I had some confusion.

At one point its talks about the gun-style design and how it needed to be a certain size in order to accelerate the bullet up to enough speed so that it does not become critical before the bullet makes complete contact with the target. There was what felt like an entire chapter to speccing out the gun and how fast the bullet would need to travel etc.

Then later it talks about needing to design a foil initiator which would provide an additional source of neurtons to set it off, which would be sandwiched between the bullet and target.

Then what was the worry about the gun size / bullet speed?

This was seperate from the initiator that was needed for the implosion type bomb and what I presume Fuchs helped with.

I am almost positive this is what I read but the book I feel is unclear or states different things at different times about this topic. Its 1200+ pages and I haven't gone back to look, but just wondering if anyone knows the details here.

Did the gun-type bomb need an additional initator or was just shooting the two parts together enough?

I'm getting kind of old, forty years ago I was across much of this and collaborated on a book about some physics of this nature after interviewing Oliphant.

The crux of many of the issues with either design was getting a sufficiently high number of neutrons being created within a dense enough source of further neutrons to ensure a full (as full as possible) fission reaction of all the fissile material.

Not quickly enough, or with too few neutrons and a "damp squib" would result - a fission reaction that starts, expands, and blows apart the source material with far less than the desired "full fission" release.

A fully symmetric spherical implosion compressing inwards all about a sub critical sphere (perhaps formed by bring halves together earlier) was one approach, another was rapidly bring together an excess and to compress a richer source | generator of neutrons for the extra boost to be sure.

There's more on that here:

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Scien...

and I'm more or less loathe to go on beyond what I can readily find online - although I doubt I can add much beyond what is on public record, I ultimately spent much of my career detecting radiation, environmental and weapons by products, rather than creating bursts of energy.

> It wasn't the only way out...

Um, true? But it's rather rare in human affairs for the side that is obviously & quickly winning a brutal war to make much in the way of concessions.

> ...embarrass Roosevelt and Churchill.

Recall that President Roosevelt had died back on 12 April, and former Prime Minster Churchill had suffered a crushing defeat in the UK General Election of 6 July. That defeat was very widely foreseen, so "Churchill will soon be gone" was baked into everyone's plans.

> - so why not just make that public? [...] why not just disclose this?

You sound unfamiliar with WWII-era security practices, and likewise with how easy it is to shoot yourself in the foot by talking about secret peace negotiations. Those are a very complex game, played for very high stakes. To the extent that you tell the public the truth, you are revealing a lot about your priorities and strategy to the enemy, who is busy killing your people every day. To the extent that you tell the public lies...so long as the public eventually concludes that (1) it was sadly necessary, as part of the negotiating process, and (2) you did negotiate a good deal for them...those lies will pretty much be forgiven.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ufo/comments/1ajdm6c/a_reporters_jo... (old.reddit.com/r/ufo/comments/1ajdm6c/a_reporters_journey_into_how_the_us_funded_the/kp0bsrc/)

What is this Reddit comment you linked to? It seems to contain a list of links to Reddit comments on posts of vaguely similar topics, each of which itself follows the same format. It's a seemingly bottomless pit of "sources" for something, vaguely conspiratorial but not stating what the main theme is supposed to be.

"expediting production" indeed

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