The price of the Manhattan Project | Restricted Data
Restricted Data
A Nuclear History Blog
by Alex Wellerstein
Meditations<br>The price of the Manhattan Project
by Alex Wellerstein , published May 17th, 2013
There’s been a little radio silence over here last week; the truth is, I’ve been very absorbed in NUKEMAP-related work. It is going very well; I’ve found some things that I thought were going to be difficult to be not so difficult, after all, and I’ve found myself to be more mathematically capable than I usually would presume, once I really started drilling down in technical minutiae. The only down-side of the work is that it is mostly coding, mostly technical, not terribly conducive to having deep or original historical thoughts, and, of course, I’ve gotten completely obsessed with it. But I’m almost over the hump of the hard stuff.
Two weeks ago, I made a trip out to the West Coast to hang out with the various wonks that congregate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. This was at the behest of Stephen Schwartz , who teaches a class over there and had me come out to talk to them about nuclear secrecy, and to give a general colloquium talk.
Stephen became known to me early on in my interest in nuclear things for his work in editing the book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Brookings Institute, 1998). This is one of these all-time useful reference books; it is the only book I’ve read, for example, that has anything like a good description of the development of US nuclear secrecy policies. And the list of contributors is a who’s-who of late 1990s nuclear scholarship. The book includes really detailed discussions about how difficult it is to put a price tag on nuclear weapons spending in the United States, for reasons relating both to the obvious secrecy issue, but also the fact that these expenses have not really been disentangled from a lot of other spending.
I’ve had a copy of the book for over a decade now, and it has come in handy again and again. I’m not a numbers-guy (NUKEMAP work being the exception), but looking at these kind of aggregate figures helps me wrap my head around the "big picture " of something like, say, the Manhattan Project, in a way that is often lost by the standard historical approach of tight biographical narratives . Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?
Here is a breakdown of cost expenditures for the Manhattan Project sites, through the end of 1945:
Site/Project<br>1945 dollars<br>2012 dollars
OAK RIDGE (Total)<br>$1,188,352,000<br>$18,900,000,000<br>63%
—K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant<br>$512,166,000<br>$8,150,000,000<br>27%
—Y-12 Electromagnetic Plant<br>$477,631,000<br>$7,600,000,000<br>25%
—Clinton Engineer Works, HQ and central utilities<br>$155,951,000<br>$2,480,000,000<br>8%
—Clinton Laboratories<br>$26,932,000<br>$430,000,000<br>1%
—S-50 Thermal Diffusion Plant<br>$15,672,000<br>$250,000,000<br>1%
HANFORD ENGINEER WORKS<br>$390,124,000<br>$6,200,000,000<br>21%
SPECIAL OPERATING MATERIALS<br>$103,369,000<br>$1,640,000,000<br>5%
LOS ALAMOS PROJECT<br>$74,055,000<br>$1,180,000,000<br>4%
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT<br>$69,681,000<br>$1,110,000,000<br>4%
GOVERNMENT OVERHEAD<br>$37,255,000<br>$590,000,000<br>2%
HEAVY WATER PLANTS<br>$26,768,000<br>$430,000,000<br>1%
Grand Total<br>$1,889,604,000<br>$30,060,000,000
I’ve taken this chart from here. The "current dollars" are 2012 dollars, with a "production line" labor deflator used (out of all of the options here, it seemed like the most appropriate to the kind of work we’re talking about, most of which was construction).
To break the numbers down a bit more, K-25, Y-12, and S-50 were all uranium enrichment plants. Hanford was for plutonium production. "Special operating materials" refers to the raw materials necessary for the entire project, most of which was uranium, but also highly-refined graphite and fluorine, among other things. Los Alamos was of course the design laboratory. The heavy water plants were constructed in Trail, British Columbia, Morgantown, West Virginia, Montgomery, Alabama, and Dana, Indiana. Their product was not used on a large scale during the war; it was produced as a back-up in case graphite proved to be a bad moderator for the Hanford reactors.
I’m a visual guy, so I of course immediately start looking at these numbers like this:
Which puts things a little more into proportion. The main take-away of these numbers for me is to be pretty impressed by the fact that some 80% of the money was spent on the plants necessary producing fissile materials. Only 4% went towards Los Alamos. And yet, in terms of how we talk about nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project, we spend a huge amount of the time talking about the work at Los Alamos, often with only token gestures to the work at Hanford and Oak Ridge as the "next step" after the theory had been worked out.
We can also break those numbers...