11 ms·

The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

103 points by sytelus 8y ago

modelRocketry 8y ago
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?
- mabbo 8y ago
  The government program rockets aren't designed to be cost efficient, they're designed to buy as many votes as possible. To do that, they spread everything out a thin as possible, all the work across as many states as possible so that the elected officials from each of those states will vote for it. This is why SpaceX, with their single factory, are something like an order of magnitude cheaper.
  - cee_el1234 8y ago
    If this is as true as it sounds - holy cow that's so sad !
    - bluedino 8y ago
      Not really - lots of great, high paying engineering and manufacturing jobs came out of that program. Plus all the support that goes with it.
      - eru 8y ago
        > [...] lots of great, high paying engineering and manufacturing jobs came out of that program. That's a pretty bad excuse: leaving the same money with the taxpayers would have funded jobs that actually did something people wanted enough to pay with their own money.
        Retric 8y ago
        It’s not purely an excuse. If somone makes 100k on one of these projects but would have made 50k if they did not exist then the economy is out 50k worth of labor. But, some of that delta between 50k>100k is payed back in additional taxes. There is plenty of waste, but it’s significantly smaller than the direct costs suggest. Especially when such programs reduce unemployment as the economy is not out useful labor, and taxes collect a significant portion of the outlay back.
        ianai 8y ago
        I think of it as the governmental make work program. It’s only been digestible, politically, when it’s tied to this sort of project. Without it, my home state would be severely affected.
        killjoywashere 8y ago
        > Without it, my home state would be severely affected. New Mexico? https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...
        derangedHorse 8y ago
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I think NASA spent a lot of money on figuring out what works and what doesn't work. They probably could have done it much cheaper but SpaceX certainly had a very good blueprint to start from and didn't have to figure out everything from scratch.
- mikeash 8y ago
  A handful of prototype atomic bombs isn’t enough to beat the Soviet Union in a war, but one rocket to the moon is enough to beat them in space.
  - moon_shots 8y ago
    As long as it worked, who cares? That statement is a declaration of assent that you find the outcome acceptable. It doesn’t examine the manner of resource usage, and the returned benefits for each cost. In one case, they built a car and a garage to fix many cars in. In the other case, they built a car off some value and drove it off a cliff. For the price, could we not have also obtained a matching garage?
    - mikeash 8y ago
      Why are you “quoting” something I didn’t write and then claiming it means I find the outcome acceptable?
- matthewdgreen 8y ago
  These programs did lead to an assembly line that created thousands of very powerful rockets and the infrastructure to launch them. They just weren’t used for space flight.
- mtreis86 8y ago
  Those two projects were directly intertwined. The Titan missile is what took people into space in Project Gemini. The space program was, in my opinion, a front for the intercontinental ballistic missile program.
  - iguy 8y ago
    Not even a front, I'd say, that implies this was somewhat hidden. The first thing anyone thought about Sputnik was that it could as well be a bomb. Rockets reliable enough to fly celebrities to orbit were pretty direct advertising of each nation's capabilities. (By celebrities I just mean that they were famous before they flew, and thus losing one would have been impossible to cover up, thus increasing the signal.)
- dTal 8y ago
  My takeaway is that people don't have a very good sense of scale on government spending. Manhattan project: 30 billion (2012 dollars) Apollo program: 83 billion (2005 dollars) Shuttle program: 196 billion (2011 dollars) 2008 bailouts: 700 billion (2008 dollars) Iraq war: over 1 trillion dollars That's right, both the Iraq war and the 2008 bailouts each dwarf the entire space program. Yet which thing attracts more hand wringing about costs? Which things require years of tiresome political wrangling, and which happened at the snap of a finger?
  - latchkey 8y ago
    Yearly US defense budget is increasing to 750 billion (2018 dollars). https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/09/politics/trump-mattis-defense-spending/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/09/politics/trump-mattis-def...
    - dTal 8y ago
      Another good one: total money spent by the US on fusion research, ever: 37.6 billion (2005 dollars). It really puts into perspective how many things commonly held to be incredibly difficult, or expensive, are in fact simply not a priority. Almost any pie-in-the-sky technological project or public works project you can think of utterly pales next to the money that is casually spent on dubious causes like propping up broken financial systems and destabilizing foreign countries. Maybe we should stop using "Manhattan Project" or "moonshot" to refer to huge, ambitious practically unfundable government works, when they're so cheap in the scheme of things. Maybe we should speak of "bailouts" instead.
  - mac01021 8y ago
    Anecdotally, I hear a lot more complaints about the bailouts and the war than I do about anything related to NASA.
sleavey 8y ago
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.
- KineticLensman 8y ago
  It would be an apples and oranges comparison to some extent. The Soviets were able to skip some expensive research and production steps that the Americans went through by exploiting intelligence gained from espionage [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project
- simplicio 8y ago
  I'd be interested in that as well. The US program was expensive in part because they were trying to do it as quickly as possible, didn't know exactly what a finished bomb would look like and basically pursued every possible method for isotope separation at massive scale all at once. A program that just pursued plutonium production and separation to produce implosion devices would presumably be a lot cheaper (though still massively expensive in absolute terms, obv).
  - michaelcampbell 8y ago
    > The US program was expensive in part because they were trying to do it as quickly as possible, The US also was trying to just do it, whereas the USSR had the benefit of stolen research.
- canada_dry 8y ago
  Well, thanks to the likes of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg the Russians were no doubt able to save a helluva lot of time and money.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hirundo 8y ago
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.
- deogeo 8y ago
  'Perceived' is correct, as the other option was conditional surrender of Japan. But it sounds much nicer, and is better for morale, to say the bombs or an invasion were the only possibilities. Sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-atomic-bomb/2015/07/31/32dbc15c-3620-11e5-b673-1df005a0fb28_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the... https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/debate-over-japanese-surrender https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/debate-over-japanese-... https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  In July of 1945, Szilard and a number of other scientists involved with the Manhattan Project, signed a petition asking that Japan be publicly informed of the terms of surrender and refused then before the bomb was dropped. Not only was that simple request ignored, the US Government tried to blacklist the scientists who signed that petition. Arguing that the bombs were necessary to prevent an invasion pretends that any other option was tried. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1rd_petition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1rd_petition
  - hirundo 8y ago
    In accounting for the costs of counterfactuals I think the question is less what is possible and more what is likely. The outsized response you describe to the simple request is evidence of the strong political will for more aggressive options.
herodotus 8y ago
> 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.
- epberry 8y ago
  The industrial base, and the fact that production could continue unabated by bombings on the American continent for years, was a deciding factor in the war. As were the Russians repelling Hitler. My historical perspective on this has shifted massively since first learning about the war in school. It wasn't D-Day or the Battle of Britain or Midway. All of those battles were key wins but the war overall was really organized and executed by tens of thousands of typists and mid-level managers.
  - herodotus 8y ago
    I wish I could remember the exact quote, but in the diary of a German soldier fighting on in France he said something like "For every Krupp shell we sent to the Americans, they sent a hundred Detroit shells back."
    - avn2109 8y ago
      In "The Rommel Papers," (which is incidentally a really splendid book that you should definitely read if you have any interest in tactics at all), Rommel himself claims that the ratio was in practice closer to 500:1 in the African theater.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
chriselles 8y ago
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.
- lwansbrough 8y ago
  You may be interested in reading about the offset strategies employed by the US DOD. In the 60s the US military conducted a still classified analysis called Project Oregon Trail. Included (apparently) was a wargames exercise which completely undermined Eisenhower's doctrine of tactical nuclear weapons to fight a land war. Oregon Trail supposedly concluded that 20,000 tactical nukes would be required to win in Europe. The result of Oregon Trail appears to be what led to the second offset strategy, which emphasizes intel, stealth, and precision guidance tech. But it also provided information by way of a two part study by a panel of historians. The historians studied 100 asymmetric wars throughout history, which lead to this key insight: if a government can figure out the reason people support the insurgents, and offer an alternative, then they would likely win. If they cannot find the reason, or are unable to win the hearts and minds of the people, they will likely lose. The more military force is substituted for politics, the less likely the government would be to win. We saw this outcome in Vietnam (and have to a certain degree seen the same in the Middle East). I believe this insight is what has lead to the US' third offset strategy, which is deterrence of war through overwhelming technological advantage. The point to all this being that industrial capacity and efficiency is just one cog in the machine. The bomb was a technological advantage. You don't need much industrial capacity or efficiency to make one. Inevitably, the best way to win a war is to convince the other side of your cause, and then they'll just stop fighting.
Animats 8y ago
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.
ncmncm 8y ago
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?
- Lapsed 8y ago
  The entries on the table for K-25 through S-50 are included in the Oak ridge total.
Pica_soO 8y ago
We had 73 years of peace- three generations of men, who where not send en mass to Gettysburg, Verdun, Stalingrad - we do not even have such places with that whisper of horror attached to it. The Manhattan project, and its spread to other major forces has brought this world peace- definitely not some idealistic hippies. I dread the day, the worser angels of our nature- our psychopathic leaders, would agree on using the slaughtering grounds again- to measure out who gets to paint what color to what field in the maps of the great game. Nothing but the fear for there own, feeble life's have kept the likes of Putin, Mao and others at bay ever since the start of the cold war.
RachelF 8y ago
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.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  They tried four different types of separation: centrifugation, thermal diffusion, gaseous diffusion, and electromagnetic separation. Centrifugation proved unworkable at the time and the remaining processes were used in concert (taking the slightly enriched products of one into the feed of another) to produce HEU. The Manhattan Project was so expensive largely because it was a shotgun approach to development. They tried 6 different ways to produce 3 different possible bomb fuels and two different bomb designs. Ultimately the most promising methods didn't work (centrifugation) but this didn't cause the program to halt or have to rethink things, it kept chugging on everything else running in parallel and ultimately succeeded with producing 3 different ways of making HEU and one for making Plutonium plus a bomb design that worked for each of the two fuels.

103 points by sytelus 8y ago

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?

mabbo 8y ago
The government program rockets aren't designed to be cost efficient, they're designed to buy as many votes as possible. To do that, they spread everything out a thin as possible, all the work across as many states as possible so that the elected officials from each of those states will vote for it. This is why SpaceX, with their single factory, are something like an order of magnitude cheaper.
- cee_el1234 8y ago
  If this is as true as it sounds - holy cow that's so sad !
  - bluedino 8y ago
    Not really - lots of great, high paying engineering and manufacturing jobs came out of that program. Plus all the support that goes with it.
    - eru 8y ago
      > [...] lots of great, high paying engineering and manufacturing jobs came out of that program. That's a pretty bad excuse: leaving the same money with the taxpayers would have funded jobs that actually did something people wanted enough to pay with their own money.
      - Retric 8y ago
        It’s not purely an excuse. If somone makes 100k on one of these projects but would have made 50k if they did not exist then the economy is out 50k worth of labor. But, some of that delta between 50k>100k is payed back in additional taxes. There is plenty of waste, but it’s significantly smaller than the direct costs suggest. Especially when such programs reduce unemployment as the economy is not out useful labor, and taxes collect a significant portion of the outlay back.
        ianai 8y ago
        I think of it as the governmental make work program. It’s only been digestible, politically, when it’s tied to this sort of project. Without it, my home state would be severely affected.
        killjoywashere 8y ago
        > Without it, my home state would be severely affected. New Mexico? https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...
        derangedHorse 8y ago
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I think NASA spent a lot of money on figuring out what works and what doesn't work. They probably could have done it much cheaper but SpaceX certainly had a very good blueprint to start from and didn't have to figure out everything from scratch.
mikeash 8y ago
A handful of prototype atomic bombs isn’t enough to beat the Soviet Union in a war, but one rocket to the moon is enough to beat them in space.
- moon_shots 8y ago
  As long as it worked, who cares? That statement is a declaration of assent that you find the outcome acceptable. It doesn’t examine the manner of resource usage, and the returned benefits for each cost. In one case, they built a car and a garage to fix many cars in. In the other case, they built a car off some value and drove it off a cliff. For the price, could we not have also obtained a matching garage?
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Why are you “quoting” something I didn’t write and then claiming it means I find the outcome acceptable?
matthewdgreen 8y ago
These programs did lead to an assembly line that created thousands of very powerful rockets and the infrastructure to launch them. They just weren’t used for space flight.
mtreis86 8y ago
Those two projects were directly intertwined. The Titan missile is what took people into space in Project Gemini. The space program was, in my opinion, a front for the intercontinental ballistic missile program.
- iguy 8y ago
  Not even a front, I'd say, that implies this was somewhat hidden. The first thing anyone thought about Sputnik was that it could as well be a bomb. Rockets reliable enough to fly celebrities to orbit were pretty direct advertising of each nation's capabilities. (By celebrities I just mean that they were famous before they flew, and thus losing one would have been impossible to cover up, thus increasing the signal.)
dTal 8y ago
My takeaway is that people don't have a very good sense of scale on government spending. Manhattan project: 30 billion (2012 dollars) Apollo program: 83 billion (2005 dollars) Shuttle program: 196 billion (2011 dollars) 2008 bailouts: 700 billion (2008 dollars) Iraq war: over 1 trillion dollars That's right, both the Iraq war and the 2008 bailouts each dwarf the entire space program. Yet which thing attracts more hand wringing about costs? Which things require years of tiresome political wrangling, and which happened at the snap of a finger?
- latchkey 8y ago
  Yearly US defense budget is increasing to 750 billion (2018 dollars). https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/09/politics/trump-mattis-defense-spending/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/09/politics/trump-mattis-def...
  - dTal 8y ago
    Another good one: total money spent by the US on fusion research, ever: 37.6 billion (2005 dollars). It really puts into perspective how many things commonly held to be incredibly difficult, or expensive, are in fact simply not a priority. Almost any pie-in-the-sky technological project or public works project you can think of utterly pales next to the money that is casually spent on dubious causes like propping up broken financial systems and destabilizing foreign countries. Maybe we should stop using "Manhattan Project" or "moonshot" to refer to huge, ambitious practically unfundable government works, when they're so cheap in the scheme of things. Maybe we should speak of "bailouts" instead.
- mac01021 8y ago
  Anecdotally, I hear a lot more complaints about the bailouts and the war than I do about anything related to NASA.

sleavey 8y ago

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.

KineticLensman 8y ago
It would be an apples and oranges comparison to some extent. The Soviets were able to skip some expensive research and production steps that the Americans went through by exploiting intelligence gained from espionage [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project
simplicio 8y ago
I'd be interested in that as well. The US program was expensive in part because they were trying to do it as quickly as possible, didn't know exactly what a finished bomb would look like and basically pursued every possible method for isotope separation at massive scale all at once. A program that just pursued plutonium production and separation to produce implosion devices would presumably be a lot cheaper (though still massively expensive in absolute terms, obv).
- michaelcampbell 8y ago
  > The US program was expensive in part because they were trying to do it as quickly as possible, The US also was trying to just do it, whereas the USSR had the benefit of stolen research.
canada_dry 8y ago
Well, thanks to the likes of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg the Russians were no doubt able to save a helluva lot of time and money.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

hirundo 8y ago

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.

deogeo 8y ago
'Perceived' is correct, as the other option was conditional surrender of Japan. But it sounds much nicer, and is better for morale, to say the bombs or an invasion were the only possibilities. Sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-atomic-bomb/2015/07/31/32dbc15c-3620-11e5-b673-1df005a0fb28_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the... https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/debate-over-japanese-surrender https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/debate-over-japanese-... https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth
boomboomsubban 8y ago
In July of 1945, Szilard and a number of other scientists involved with the Manhattan Project, signed a petition asking that Japan be publicly informed of the terms of surrender and refused then before the bomb was dropped. Not only was that simple request ignored, the US Government tried to blacklist the scientists who signed that petition. Arguing that the bombs were necessary to prevent an invasion pretends that any other option was tried. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1rd_petition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1rd_petition
- hirundo 8y ago
  In accounting for the costs of counterfactuals I think the question is less what is possible and more what is likely. The outsized response you describe to the simple request is evidence of the strong political will for more aggressive options.

herodotus 8y ago

> 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.

epberry 8y ago
The industrial base, and the fact that production could continue unabated by bombings on the American continent for years, was a deciding factor in the war. As were the Russians repelling Hitler. My historical perspective on this has shifted massively since first learning about the war in school. It wasn't D-Day or the Battle of Britain or Midway. All of those battles were key wins but the war overall was really organized and executed by tens of thousands of typists and mid-level managers.
- herodotus 8y ago
  I wish I could remember the exact quote, but in the diary of a German soldier fighting on in France he said something like "For every Krupp shell we sent to the Americans, they sent a hundred Detroit shells back."
  - avn2109 8y ago
    In "The Rommel Papers," (which is incidentally a really splendid book that you should definitely read if you have any interest in tactics at all), Rommel himself claims that the ratio was in practice closer to 500:1 in the African theater.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

chriselles 8y ago

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.

lwansbrough 8y ago
You may be interested in reading about the offset strategies employed by the US DOD. In the 60s the US military conducted a still classified analysis called Project Oregon Trail. Included (apparently) was a wargames exercise which completely undermined Eisenhower's doctrine of tactical nuclear weapons to fight a land war. Oregon Trail supposedly concluded that 20,000 tactical nukes would be required to win in Europe. The result of Oregon Trail appears to be what led to the second offset strategy, which emphasizes intel, stealth, and precision guidance tech. But it also provided information by way of a two part study by a panel of historians. The historians studied 100 asymmetric wars throughout history, which lead to this key insight: if a government can figure out the reason people support the insurgents, and offer an alternative, then they would likely win. If they cannot find the reason, or are unable to win the hearts and minds of the people, they will likely lose. The more military force is substituted for politics, the less likely the government would be to win. We saw this outcome in Vietnam (and have to a certain degree seen the same in the Middle East). I believe this insight is what has lead to the US' third offset strategy, which is deterrence of war through overwhelming technological advantage. The point to all this being that industrial capacity and efficiency is just one cog in the machine. The bomb was a technological advantage. You don't need much industrial capacity or efficiency to make one. Inevitably, the best way to win a war is to convince the other side of your cause, and then they'll just stop fighting.

Animats 8y ago

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.

ncmncm 8y ago

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?

Lapsed 8y ago
The entries on the table for K-25 through S-50 are included in the Oak ridge total.

Pica_soO 8y ago

We had 73 years of peace- three generations of men, who where not send en mass to Gettysburg, Verdun, Stalingrad - we do not even have such places with that whisper of horror attached to it. The Manhattan project, and its spread to other major forces has brought this world peace- definitely not some idealistic hippies. I dread the day, the worser angels of our nature- our psychopathic leaders, would agree on using the slaughtering grounds again- to measure out who gets to paint what color to what field in the maps of the great game. Nothing but the fear for there own, feeble life's have kept the likes of Putin, Mao and others at bay ever since the start of the cold war.

RachelF 8y ago

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.

InclinedPlane 8y ago
They tried four different types of separation: centrifugation, thermal diffusion, gaseous diffusion, and electromagnetic separation. Centrifugation proved unworkable at the time and the remaining processes were used in concert (taking the slightly enriched products of one into the feed of another) to produce HEU. The Manhattan Project was so expensive largely because it was a shotgun approach to development. They tried 6 different ways to produce 3 different possible bomb fuels and two different bomb designs. Ultimately the most promising methods didn't work (centrifugation) but this didn't cause the program to halt or have to rethink things, it kept chugging on everything else running in parallel and ultimately succeeded with producing 3 different ways of making HEU and one for making Plutonium plus a bomb design that worked for each of the two fuels.