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A comment on Should America Have Entered World War I?. Parent comment

Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by gozur88 on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:28PM (#14053185)
The effort to develop nuclear weapons was ruinously expensive. I doubt we would have undertaken it in peacetime, so we may not have seen nuclear weapons until the early 1960s if not for the war. We almost certainly would have been at war with the Soviets before that.
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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by astrodust on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:35PM (#14053253)
It was expensive, but not ruinously expensive. As pointed out recently, the Norden bombsight program cost nearly half as much and people don't think of that as ruinously expensive. The US interstate highway program cost vastly more as well.

Russia developed nuclear weapons in peace-time as well, if you consider the cold war peaceful.

South Africa also produced some nuclear capability despite not being at war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_ma... Naturally a country rich in uranium would be tempted to see what applications there were.

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by gozur88 on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:55PM (#14053462)
The entire US economy had be reworked to a wartime footing in WW II. The government was far smaller and poorer and would have stayed that way but for the war. And frankly it's difficult for me to believe the Norden gunsight cost that much.

The Russians developed nuclear weapons because they didn't have a choice given the US had already done so, and it's not clear when they would have been successful without the US project.

The reason I picked the early 1960s for peacetime development is nuclear weapons development became much easier with the introduction of nuclear power. At that point it became much easier for any motivated government, so it's not surprising the South Africans were able to do it in the '70s. And still they needed US help to do it on that timeline.

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by avar on Thursday April 06, 2017 @03:03PM (#14053542)
I have no idea what's true in this, but I've heard exactly the opposite economic theories about WWII as it pertains to the US.

I.e. that untold amounts of capital was spent on making equipment that was just sent overseas to get blown up, if the US wasn't in the war it's not like it wouldn't have had a giant export market, and all that workforce could still be mobilized to manufacture goods, except some of the working-age people wouldn't have been sent overseas to die & get maimed.

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by gozur88 on Thursday April 06, 2017 @03:12PM (#14053628)
That's the Broken Windows Fallacy writ large. The US economy grew tremendously throughout the 19th century without making things and then destroying them.
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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by astrodust on Thursday April 06, 2017 @04:09PM (#14054141)
Yes, the 19th very same century where America went to war with Britain and later itself.
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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by gozur88 on Thursday April 06, 2017 @04:17PM (#14054192)
That's seven years out of a hundred, though you missed a few.

The point was we were never on a wartime economic footing in the same way were were in WW II.

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by astrodust on Friday April 07, 2017 @12:42AM (#14057179)
Don't forget the Mexican/American war, the Spanish/American war, the unending "Indian Wars", and various other military expeditions during that period.

It's probable that the War of 1812 showed America how unprepared it was for conflict with a serious power.

The civil war from 1861 to 1865 required the complete commitment of both sides, with the Union in particular developing massive industrial capacity to help the cause.

This rapid and urgent industrialization was further developed during the Reconstruction phase when a large chunk of the country had to be built back up from ruin.

If these two conflicts never happened there wouldn't have been the same urgency to develop industry. It would be much more of an agricultural economy like the southern states and not like Ohio, New York or Pennsylvania with their enormous appetite for large-scale manufacturing.

If that was the case the US would be utterly unprepared for any conflict in Europe. As it was the US military was in really rough shape prior to the outbreak of war in Europe. There was no pressing need for a large, well-equipped standing military since Mexic

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by dragonwriter on Sunday April 09, 2017 @12:32AM (#14070476)
> Russia developed nuclear weapons in peace-time as well, if you consider the cold war peaceful.

Parts of the Cold War were peaceful for some countries (including the USSR), but the period in which the Soviets developed nuclear weapons (1943-1949) was a period during which the USSR was constantly involved in international armed conflict, and was absolutely not peacetime for the USSR.

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by WalterBright on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:42PM (#14053319)
> the Norden bombsight program cost nearly half as much

That's very difficult to believe.

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by nostrademons on Thursday April 06, 2017 @03:00PM (#14053509)
His source is probably a Malcolm Gladwell tech talk [1] It is corroborated by other sites on the Internet [2], though Gladwell frequently gets his information from secondary sources so who knows if these are independent? Based on the history of the project though [3], it seems plausible - the Norden bombsight is basically an analog computer whose development started during WW1, and building a computer with WW1-era technology seems like it could easily cost half as much as building an atom bomb with WW2 technology.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell/transcript?langua...

[2] http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/the-norden-bombs...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by astrodust on Thursday April 06, 2017 @02:48PM (#14053387)
Research and development, manufacturing, training, it ended up being fantastically expensive. Remember, this was a highly capable analog computer that had to operate in a difficult environment and even included a self-destruct feature.

http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/the-norden-bombs...

> ...the cost of the entire program came to more than $1 billion.

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by 24gttghh on Thursday April 06, 2017 @03:09PM (#14053592)
So the Norden cost $1B (~$12-14B now), the Atom bomb cost $2B (~$25-27B now), and the F-35 today is ~$150B over budget. How's that strike you?
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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by LordKano on Friday April 07, 2017 @08:39AM (#14059129)
Russia developed nuclear weapons in peace-time as well, if you consider the cold war peaceful.

Much of their advancement on that front was due to espionage against the US.

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Re:Should America Have Entered World War I? by gozur88 on Sunday April 09, 2017 @12:23AM (#14070451)
Hard to say for sure. The way the Russians tell it, their program was already too far along to benefit from successful espionage beyond confirming they were on the right track.
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