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I guess the Manhattan project represents a feasible limit of the budget of a large cost strategic weapon in a war-strained economy.
by kpil 11y ago
I guess the Manhattan project represents a feasible limit of the budget of a large cost strategic weapon in a war-strained economy.
- twoodfin 11y agoI don't think that's true: Wikipedia tells me the entire multi-year budget of the Manhattan Project ended up at around $26B in 2015 dollars. Not chump change, but certainly if they'd needed more money, more could have been found. I'd bet at least 10x that was spent on the US Navy every year of the war. Reminds me of Feynman's stories about testing the limits of what they could actually requisition. A 10" gold hemisphere ended up as a doorstop after its experimental use was complete[1]. I also remember reading somewhere about a (somewhat fanciful) request for some quantity of a rare earth element, to which the response was that it was more than the entire known global supply. [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&pg=PA135#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=7papZR4oVssC&pg=PA135#v=on...