It's worth noting in this context that, based on the Manhattan Project
experience, the "waste anything but time" mode was later employed in
Apollo as well, which was the existence proof that created the culture
that has made it almost impossible for NASA to do anything in a
cost-effective manner since.
On 2019-05-13 21:39, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Mon, 13 May 2019, Christopher Manteuffel wrote:
the entire V-2 project cost less than just the K-25 (Gaseous Barrier
Diffusion) plant alone...
Well, to put that in context, the gaseous-diffusion work and the K-25
plant in particular are estimated to have cost around half the entire
budget of the Manhattan Project. Uranium isotope separation is hard,
especially when it's done using UF6.
The Manhattan Project operated at an economic scale that is difficult to comprehend, and it is impossible for me to envision the Nazis meeting that challenge.
Bear in mind that a serious German atom-bomb project wouldn't have had
to follow the Manhattan Project's blank-check-emergency "if there are
three ways to do it and we don't know which one will work, do *all* of
them!" approach. The M.P. was driven, above all else, by fears of a
German bomb, so success ASAP was imperative and cost very much
secondary. Whereas the Germans simply didn't take the possibility of
competition seriously -- the interned German physicists were
flabbergasted when they heard about Hiroshima -- so they would not
have felt such panic, and would have focused on the most promising
options.
And indeed, what little there was of a German bomb project had quickly
written off uranium isotope separation as hopelessly difficult, and
focused on building reactors to (among other things) breed plutonium.
That alone would have cut the serious project's budget requirement by
a factor of two or more.
(The Germans would have told you that the difference was much larger,
but they were underestimating the difficulties of plutonium chemistry.
Nobody then realized that the actinides are a separate subsection of
the periodic table, analogous to the rare earths, all with very
similar chemistry -- they thought of plutonium as being in the same
column as rhenium, with enough chemical differences from uranium etc.
to make plutonium separation a relatively modest problem. Jeremy
Bernstein's book "Plutonium" has a good discussion of this, and is
generally well worth reading for its comments on the technical history
of the bomb projects -- turns out that on this topic, it really makes
a difference when the book is written by a physicist rather than a
historian or journalist.)
You might find a German atomic bomb impossible to envision, but I'd
say it's noteworthy that *nobody* on the Manhattan Project seems to
have agreed with you.
Henry
