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Working on my book (steady progress lately...) — one graph I'm fairly pleased with at the moment: a combined cost and personnel graph for the entire Manhattan Project (1942-1946). Really lets you see how "big" it was at any given point, by a variety of metrics.pic.twitter.com/pupn8PMR7G
One little thing that blows my mind: on average, the Manhattan Project lost about 19% of its constructional personnel and 7% of its operations & research personnel per month because people quit, got fired, etc. So those big monthly gains are even larger than they look...
No real dollars? A hundred million is about 1.4 billion in 2018 dollars.
It depends on how you convert it (which is tricky for big wartime projects) but yeah, it's about 15X. But we are much more used to dropping $30BN on a weapon project (cheap compared to the F-35) than they were in 1945. I am more interested in magnitudes.http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/05/17/the-price-of-the-manhattan-project/ …
When I want to help people today to understand the size of the project, I tend to emphasize the number of people. It's about 500,000 total over the war; that's almost 1% of the entire US civilian labor force during WWII. A hard thing to keep secret!http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/11/01/many-people-worked-manhattan-project/ …
That's a great point regarding the percent of the population! Seems like keeping it secret in modern times would be impossible today with the proliferation of cell phones, the internet, etc...
It wasn't easy to do then, either. (Which is what a big chunk of this chapter is about.) They arguably *didn't* keep it secret by a number of measures, though on some of the ones that matters (e.g., the Germans, the Japanese) they were, somewhat miraculously, successful.
But information and stories about it did leak into the press, did circulate in a variety of circles during the war, and so on. They spent almost all of their security work trying to keep leaks and "indiscretions" from getting out — a far larger problem than the spies.
Do you think something on that scale could be kept secret today? (Or is being kept secret)
Not for a long period of time, not in the sense of "the fact that there is a secret is the secret." It's different if you can acknowledge the general outline of things, e.g., "what the NSA does is secret" is different than the entire NSA and its mission being a secret.
Seems to confirm Niels Bohr's "if a bomb were physically possible, it would require a factory the size of a country", in that Denmark's GDP pre-WWII was ~$2B...
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