The price of the Manhattan Project (2013) • Hacker News Board

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#71

Post by iguy » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

Tsubasachan wrote: post #68

iguy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia thinks that the V2 project cost 50% more than the Manhattan project. If this is credible (and it roughly matches what I remember) then the Germans' problem wasn't that they were unable to (afford to) build factories fast enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket#Assessment I think what the article is saying is that there was an awful lot of technical knowledge between the scientific understanding (e.…

Keep in mind that the Germans didn't have access to many resources. The allies had Africa, the Middle East and South America to supply them with all they needed.

Indeed, there could have been some other critical shortage barring the way. (IIRC the soviet bomb-makers mined half their uranium in germany, but something else maybe.) But aggregate industrial capacity wasn't obviously a show-stopper, if they were able to fund another very high-tech high-cost project.

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#72

Post by boomboomsubban » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #70

boomboomsubban wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you have a cite that the ambiguity was intended to reduce the chance the Japanese would surrender? I don't know the history well. If fairly clearly shows that they were not listening to the requests made in the Szilard petition, which is what I am claiming. They did not publicly offer the terms of surrender or wait for a refusal.

Oh, OK, sure. It sounds like the Szilard petition wanted to incentivize Japan to surrender by conceding to them some post-war self-determination. The US would not accept this -- which, I as I said, might have been immoral -- so, to me, the ambiguity of the surrender terms in the Potsdam Declaration is not really surprising or damning. If we can trust Wikipedia, Japan declined surrender even after the first bomb on Hi…

>It sounds like the Szilard petition wanted to incentivize Japan to surrender by conceding to them some post-war self-determination.

This is not the case, the petition was to prevent the US from dropping a bomb unless Japan had been given the terms of surrender and refused them. This did not happen, and thus the situation can't be boiled down to "nuke or invasion" as there was a third option was not tried. I'm not making any further arguments, my positions on them are extreme and I don't want to try to convince others of them.

Re: The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

#73

Post by dTal » Mon, Dec 10, 2018, 7:58 PM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #62

dTal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 han…

Yearly US defense budget is increasing to 750 billion (2018 dollars). https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/09/politics/trump-mattis-def...

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.