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Re:The price of the Manhattan Project (2013) by simplicio on Sunday December 09, 2018 @10:35AM (#18641290)
I'd be interested in that as well. The US program was expensive in part because they were trying to do it as quickly as possible, didn't know exactly what a finished bomb would look like and basically pursued every possible method for isotope separation at massive scale all at once.

A program that just pursued plutonium production and separation to produce implosion devices would presumably be a lot cheaper (though still massively expensive in absolute terms, obv).

Re:The price of the Manhattan Project (2013) by michaelcampbell on Sunday December 09, 2018 @12:20PM (#18641975)
> The US program was expensive in part because they were trying to do it as quickly as possible,

The US also was trying to just do it, whereas the USSR had the benefit of stolen research.