The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)

Re:The price of the Manhattan Project (2013) by epberry on Sunday December 09, 2018 @11:38AM (#18641696)

The industrial base, and the fact that production could continue unabated by bombings on the American continent for years, was a deciding factor in the war. As were the Russians repelling Hitler. My historical perspective on this has shifted massively since first learning about the war in school. It wasn't D-Day or the Battle of Britain or Midway. All of those battles were key wins but the war overall was really organized and executed by tens of thousands of typists and mid-level managers.

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Re:The price of the Manhattan Project (2013) by Animats on Sunday December 09, 2018 @01:27PM (#18642368)

Yes. Eisenhower was a logistics guy. D-Day was a triumph of logistics. The Allies built up enough resources to force a win before attempting the invasion. They were willing to wait because of the failures of Dunkirk and Dieppe. Those operations didn't have enough resources behind them.

We're under fire! Yeah - under fire!! Those five thousand ships the Allies couldn't possibly have, as you say - they've got 'em! Yeah, they've got 'em!! - Major Werner Pluskat, June 6, 1944.

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Re:The price of the Manhattan Project (2013) by joe_the_user on Sunday December 09, 2018 @07:23PM (#18644264)

The thing about the bomb in particular, that stands out in this discussion, is that it was/is a fairly simple physical device. It had to be constructed to some very exact standards but the main thing was that getting uranium 238 was extremely difficult. Most of the ingredients were relatively simple - the major single, cost overall was K-25/Oakridge.

The process used was very crude, simple and inefficient so they needed to do it on a huge industrial scale. And only the US could do it on that scale.

You could call it "the dumb luck of nature" that something like an atomic bomb couldn't have been produced with, say, 19th century technology but that it could, barely, be produced by the full industrial might of a mid-20th century nation.

Which is to say that start-up producing amazing things in basements now certainly rely on the sum-total of previous industrial achievements, we don't how much some interesting bit of knowledge compared to those achievements could be leveraged.

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Re:The price of the Manhattan Project (2013) by herodotus on Sunday December 09, 2018 @11:46AM (#18641748)

I wish I could remember the exact quote, but in the diary of a German soldier fighting on in France he said something like "For every Krupp shell we sent to the Americans, they sent a hundred Detroit shells back."

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Re:The price of the Manhattan Project (2013) by avn2109 on Sunday December 09, 2018 @05:24PM (#18643675)

In "The Rommel Papers," (which is incidentally a really splendid book that you should definitely read if you have any interest in tactics at all), Rommel himself claims that the ratio was in practice closer to 500:1 in the African theater.

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Re:The price of the Manhattan Project (2013) by ethbro on Sunday December 09, 2018 @11:56PM (#18645331)

Extend to many things.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, the US produced more M4 chassis (all vehicle types) in 1943-alone (21,231, admittedly a huge surge in yoy production) [1] than Germany produced of any single chassis type during the whole war (most numerous: Pz III at 15,747 total) [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_armored_fighting_ve...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_armored_fighting_vehi...

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