I think the first one, in the Manhattan Project, was built in 18 months and nobody was pissed at the cost by any means. In fact that's when they first started

I think the first one, in the Manhattan Project, was built in 18 months and nobody was pissed at the cost by any means. In fact that's when they first started doing the whole "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?" which is the whole science of doing estimates and budgets. Really the question, credited to Enrico Fermi. The real question, which he himself answered quite satisfactorily, was "based on these flying scraps of paper [and a world-class education, and being well-read and a strong physicist] how powerful was the Trinity bomb in kilotons of dynamite?" And he got it to within a factor of 2. Same goes for the Manhattan Project's counterpart, the aviation industry's development of the B-29 Superfortress, which was $6 billion compared to the Manhattan Project's $2 Billion. Wright brothers nailed a lot of estimates of the power output of their engines, weight, lift, very exact a lot of the time. And those $8 billion were considered very well spent by the Department of War. I think some went way under the quoted price, I think the squash court pile, the first man-made real nuclear reaction, was totally McGyvered (hence the squash court). But we're talking totally, it was insultingly cheap to make. And only then could they impress Einstein--from my limited visibility on the subject--and only then could the three of them write that letter to Roosevelt, and then the whole thing got started. It also was a super cheap way of finishing World War Two. Germany and Italy had to be flattened and invaded, occupied completely. Japanese were hunkering down, the were going to fight to the last cartridge, they hadn't been invaded in the Mongol Invasion. The had stood up to a lot, that's why there's all these 800 or 1200 year old companies there, no genocide. So that would have meant...just wretchedness, as if that word were better than any other, no poetry would spare anyone a second of suffering. As if burns or bullets were materially that different than irradiation, they're really not. Radiation is just really weird, poorly understood, and it's effectively totally under GOD's control. So you get some people exposed to crazy amounts of it, like the guy who took the selfie with the corium (molten uranium mixed with other parts of a nuclear core, like maybe some halfnium control rods, the cement, idk the other stuff, maybe some tungsten I think they use that), why is that guy still alive as of a few years back? Also, I believe Russians, Rosatom specifically, can stick to budgets for real. They were selling boats recently that delivered power off-ship, if they're selling them they have a budget they're sticking to.