Alex WellersteinVerified account

This subject interests me a lot because it gets at how we conceive of R&D programs, and the extent to which matters of time and money are crucial (if you're the one who wants to get moving, inaction feels intolerable, but to what extent is that just bellyaching?) ...

In '39 Szilard is upset the gov't isn't ponying up for his and Fermi's tabletop experiments at Columbia (plus maybe a couple similarly small-scale programs at Carnegie Institute, etc.), but by '41-'42 the investment utterly dwarfs those initial experiments...

So, did it really matter the gov't took some extra months to get into gear, and its investment came in below initial expectations, when it caught up so quickly soon enough through the action of the more mainstream NDRC? ...

...Or were Fermi's Columbia experiments a small but crucial early step that had to happen before larger-scale work could occur? If it hadn't happened in '40, would the whole enterprise have been set back, such that the Chicago pile would have succeeded significantly later?

Also, if you study R&D separately from the history of the bomb, the notion you would go to *the president* on something like this is pretty nuts, but with NDRC still almost a year off, I guess that was the alternative to trying get yourself into military R&D spheres.