Alex WellersteinVerified account

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.

On a similar note, the bomb-centric literature kind of takes it as obvious you would expect the military to just hand a new R&D program over to a couple of guys who had arrived in the US a year or two earlier. Which, again, is not at all obvious.

Anyway, thanks for your indulgence. This is really interesting to me, having studied the British military R&D organization pretty closely, which was reworking itself to get novel technologies ready for war years ahead of the US organization.

I think the really interesting historical hypothetical is, "if the UK doesn't send Oliphant to convey the MAUD results to V. Bush et al. in person in the summer of 1942, does the US end up with an atomic bomb ready to use by August 1945?" I think "no"

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