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The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

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Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#51

Post by avn2109 »

herodotus wrote: post #29
epberry wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 orga…

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."

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.

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#52

Post by mikeash »

moon_shots wrote: post #50
mikeash wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Why are you “quoting” something I didn’t write and then claiming it means I find the outcome acceptable?

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#53

Post by lisper »

cee_el1234 wrote: post #6
mabbo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If this is as true as it sounds - holy cow that's so sad !

As someone who worked for NASA for 15 years I can tell you this is absolutely true.

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#54

Post by Retric »

derangedHorse wrote: post #34
Retric wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The economy isn’t “out 50k of labor”, the government is saving 50k that it could use to pay someone else who wants to work at wherever their headquarter is.

I am referring to the opportunity cost.

Assume Bob could do something and get paid 50k per year, government pays Bob 50k/year to stay at home. Bob makes 50k either way.

But, if Bob does not work for a year then the economy loses 50k/year worth of labor, that’s true if bob makes 40k staying at home or 200k staying at home. It’s also true if the government pays Bob to do something that creates zero value.

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#55

Post by RachelF »

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.

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#56

Post by dTal »

modelRocketry wrote: post #2

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 an…

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?

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#57

Post by killjoywashere »

iguy wrote: post #45
eru wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] 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.

There's also a strategic purpose: it's easier to hire ICBM designers if designing ICBMs isn't the sole career path for them.

Yeah, similar story for nuclear power. I don't think people understand that very few competent STEM undergrads would choose to go into the submarine force if they saw no job on the other side of the suffering necessary to get through prototype and multiple deployments. As it is I've heard something like 30 out of 190 per year group make it to command some 20 years later. So that's 160 people a year who have at least some thought that their skills can transfer to a civilian job.

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#58

Post by joe_the_user »

epberry wrote: post #28
herodotus wrote: post #19

> 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 t…

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 orga…

The thing about the bomb in particular, that stands out in this discussion, is that it was/is a fairly simple physical device. It had to be constructed to some very exact standards but the main thing was that getting uranium 238 was extremely difficult. Most of the ingredients were relatively simple - the major single, cost overall was K-25/Oakridge.

The process used was very crude, simple and inefficient so they needed to do it on a huge industrial scale. And only the US could do it on that scale.

You could call it "the dumb luck of nature" that something like an atomic bomb couldn't have been produced with, say, 19th century technology but that it could, barely, be produced by the full industrial might of a mid-20th century nation.

Which is to say that start-up producing amazing things in basements now certainly rely on the sum-total of previous industrial achievements, we don't how much some interesting bit of knowledge compared to those achievements could be leveraged.

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#59

Post by InclinedPlane »

RachelF wrote: post #55

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…

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.

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#60

Post by killjoywashere »

ianai wrote: post #27
Retric wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> Without it, my home state would be severely affected.

New Mexico?

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...

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