* President Roosevelt authorized the Manhattan Project to go full steam 26 days after Fermi’s success, on 28 December 1942
* The U.S. would end up spending $2 billion on it. (about $22 billion in 2018 dollars)
* Do you know why it cost so much?
* 130,000 people
* When I thought of the Manhattan Project, I used to imagine it was a handful of guys sitting around a blackboard scribbling equations in chalk.
* Over 90% of the cost was for building factories to produce fissile material, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.
* Remember that you couldn’t just go to Amazon and buy pure uranium-235 or plutonium.
* It had to be made. A LOT of it had to be made.
* And they still didn’t even know how to make it.
* So they ran up parallel factories trying various methods.
* Out of that 130,000 people, do you know how many knew they were working on developing an atomic bomb?
* Probably not many.
* It was one of the best kept secrets in military history.
* Imagine - 130,000 people working on a project that didn’t know what it was for!
* And I’m not just talking about the worker bees - the management didn’t know either.
* And of course in December 1942, nobody knew how long the war would last or how long it would take to build a bomb.
* So it was highly likely they the war would be over before they figure it out.
* But they did it anyway.
* While Bush was seeking approval from the president, Oppenheimer had suggested that a bomb laboratory be set up in an isolated area.
* It would operate secretly but allow a free exchange of ideas between theoreticians and experimentalists who would work side by side.
* The site chosen was the Los Alamos Boys Ranch School in New Mexico.
* Which, BTW, used to be called just Mexico.
* The owners of the boys’ school occupying the site was eager to sell, and Groves was equally eager to buy.
* it was easy enough to get to Santa Fe by train, Los Alamos itself was virtually inaccessible, located on a mesa, or flat-topped hill, about 30 miles northwest.
* a private ranch school for boys, modeled after the Boy Scouts
* Famous graduates of the school include William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal
* The official name for the site during the war was Project Y.
* It was only after the war, when it’s existence became public, that it was referred to as Los Alamos.
* Oppenheimer was put in charge, despite him being a leftie and the fact he didn’t have a Noble Prize when many of the people working in the team did.
* But he was apparently a great leader.
* According to some of the other scientists who worked there, nobody else in that laboratory even came close to him in his knowledge.
* There was human warmth as well.
* Everybody certainly had the impression that Oppenheimer cared what each particular person was doing.
* In talking to someone he made it clear that that person’s work was important for the success of the whole project.
* He seems to have the ability to walk into a room where a major scientific debate was going on, listen, sum up everyone’s points, and then when he left, everyone knew what the right answer was.
* He insisted that everyone at Los Alamos could know everything about the project - they weren’t relegated to their particular piece of the puzzle.
* He created a spirit where everyone felt important and involved.
* Meanwhile, on the production side of things, they still had challenges.
* Huge amounts of material had to be obtained.
* But that’s just the start of their problems.
* More than three million board cubic feet of timber were required, for instance, and the magnets needed so much copper for windings that the Army had to substitute silver, borrowing almost 15,000 tons of silver bullion from the US Treasury.
* They couldn’t get
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