Manhattan Project Funding
Manhattan Project Funding
Would the bomb exist today if America did not build it in WWII?
Washington DC 18 JAN 2024
Would the bomb exist today if America did not build it in WWII?
This unanswerable imponderable has plagued UNW for years. The premise of the question is 6-fold. Given the required scientific complexity, industrial / human scale, cost, national will, national focus and unity of effort required; could nuclear weapons ever be produced outside of a crisis on the scale of a total global war by any other country other than the US?1
To accept the question as legitimate, knowledge of the various premises is required. Put another way, it was such a profound undertaking on so many levels, that it would have been impossible to accomplish under any other conditions for any country (including the US). Every one of the 6 factors had to be present to make it work.
Next to the scientific achievement, is the industrial scale of the project. It was not just some magical thing that happened in New Mexico. The map above illustrates all the sites involved. In a number of cases, entire secret cities had to be created from green field sites. The images below are from just three sites out of the total system to give readers a sense of the scale of the Manhattan Project at the local level and as a national enterprise. The first image depicts just one of three enrichment facilities at Oak Ride. Below that is housing at Hanford, in Richland WA that was the site of three reactors. Below that is Los Alamos in 1944.
Industrial scale
National Will and Unity of Effort
The only force capable of generating sufficient and prolonged national will and unity of effort in the United States was the fear that the Germans might beat the allies in creating an operational weapon. There was no question that Hitler would use a bomb at the first possible opportunity. Despite the pre-war scientific brain drain, Germany still had some key scientific minds at its disposal. It was not possible to know at the time that the bomb was out of Nazi reach. As the scale and intensity of the American experience suggests, such an undertaking was well outside the industrial capacity of resource-poor Germany struggling to keep pace with conventional weapons and munitions production.
Arguably, without the war impetus it would have been beyond American political will. Congress has always been notorious for its management of the power of the purse. It is designed for mutual fiscal accomodation. Aka… pork barreling. Had civilizational survival not been at stake, it is almost certain that Congress’s better angels would not have prevailed.
Historical Find
With this in mind, a story in the NYT’s caught UNW’s eye. Catie Edmondson, A Reporter’s Journey Into How the U.S. Funded the Bomb, New York Times, 17 Jan 2024. The link is to a “gift article” and a PDF is attached below in case the link goes bad into the future.
Catie was interested to explore how such a huge program got funded in secret. She does a great job explaining what she found. Note, the lid is often blown off the top of national security secrets by journalists scouring thousands of pages of bland and mundane appropriations, regulations, and contracts, to find that needle in the haystack secret program. This is true today and in WWII. Catie’s story is a great read. I recommend it to you.
She also does us all a solid by discussing and highlighting the interesting sources that she finds along the way.
Of particular interests was an historical project commissioned by General Leslie Groves, known as the Manhattan District History.
This multi-volume work, once unavailable to the general public, was produced with the intent, “…to describe, in simple terms, easily understood by the average reader, just what the Manhattan District did, and how, when, and where.”
The entire collection is available HERE.
This collection provides historians and analysts with a treasure trove of information and analysis from which to draw and UNW felt obligated to share it as soon as he found it.
Conclusion
Looking this over, could America ever do a Manhattan Project ever again given how dysfunctional we have turned out as a polity and society? Can you imagine secrets like these, spending like this, and a secret program on this national scale, being kept off Twitter by radical members of Congress seeking to score a point in a ridiculous attempt to “own the other side” for a few moments in a 24hr news cycle?
At least those member of congress that currently support Russia’s war of genocide in Ukraine might follow Manhattan Project spies in justifying their treason because the Soviets were our allies in WWII.
We did not know it as the time but the Germans did not have a hope. They had some key personnel, but they went off on the wrong tangents and as an already resource starved country putting all its efforts into regular war materiel production the added burden of a Manhattan Project was completely out of the question. Under Speer, production increased spectacularly, but that remarkable achievement has to be considered in the light of Germany’s lack of resources. Recall, they depended on resources in conquered territories and slave labour to achieve what they did.
All subsequent bomb programs relied on the Manhattan project to come to fruition via espionage.