Manhattan Project--stealing scarce resources
Lisa
raise the question again.
During World War II, the Manhattan Engineering District, developers of
the atomic bomb, and top priority on critical raw materials and labor.
They took full advantage of that priority.
I wonder if the MED took needed resources from other war projects. Now
others here said the U.S. had sufficient industrial capacity to
accomodate MED and quoted some percentages. Aggregate capacity
percentages aren't necessarily meaningful because an average represents
a combined total over time and distance, and doesn't take into real
account spot shortages and delays.
I just found a work on the Hanford Engineering Works (plutonium mfr) and
was surprised at how much labor and material was required. The labor
pool was enormous---they needed _skilled_ labor since the reactor and
processing units required extremely tight tolerances never before built.
Labor was very scarce during the war, and those people were taken away
from other projects. Indeed, Gen Groves reported he searched army files
for soldiers with needed skills and took them out of the army. And
let's not forget all the extra construction to house the workers and
gasoline and trains packed to transport workers back and forth out
there, and the gasoline and tires used in the site.
Also, Hanford used tremendous materials. Again, critical purity was
demanded. This meant MED officials had to work with mfrs to develop
super pure products (ie graphite, aluminum, and steel) never before
done. This was done when all manufacturers were loaded to gills with
regular war work. MED required rare metals for special processes.
DuPont, who actually built and ran Hanford, was a major war contractor.
I wonder what duPont could have done instead if not diverted.
Remember, Hanford was not a little factory, but a humongous
manufacturing complex of many giant buildings.
The rest of MED was big, too. They had Los Alamos labs, Oak Ridge, and
Argonne, plus many smaller research and sub-contractors. The books I've
read explain that one simply doesn't dig raw uranium out of the ground
and shove it into a bomb---the ore must be converted to metal, the metal
purified for either a reactor or isotope extraction. The processes are
actually very wasteful, so tons of material are consumed to generate
grams of final product.
Most Manhattan Project books deal with Los Alamos and Chicago where the
drama was. Very few deal specifically with the massive scale of Oak
Ridge and Hanford in terms of what it took to build them.
Comments?
Carey Sublette
In article <DM5F3...@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>, hanc...@cpcn.com (Lisa) wrote:
> We discussed this earlier, but I read some more material and I'd like to
> raise the question again.
> During World War II, the Manhattan Engineering District, developers of
> the atomic bomb, and top priority on critical raw materials and labor.
....
> I wonder if the MED took needed resources from other war projects.
....
> Comments?
Absolutely it did. The material, financial, and technical resources it
absorbed would have advanced other wartime projects considerably. Some key
individuals refused to work at Los Alamos for this reason, for example
I.I. Rabi worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory (a code name) because
felt radar development was a more urgent priority (and it is difficult to
say that he was wrong).
In a very real sense the investment in the MED was costing lives. This is
an important part of why Groves, and the Washington leadership, felt it
essential to use the atomic bomb in combat. It was only this that could
justify the enormous expenditure. I suspect that many of the scientists
that had reservations about its use in warfare did not think about what
the project had cost in other ways.
Carey Sublette
Donald Phillipson
Lisa (hanc...@cpcn.com) writes:
> We discussed this earlier, but I read some more material and I'd like to
> raise the question again.
>
> During World War II, the Manhattan Engineering District, developers of
> the atomic bomb, and top priority on critical raw materials and labor.
>
Associated Canadian action concerning atomic energy included the secret
purchase by the government of Eldorado Mining Co., proprietor of the only
radium/uranium refinery in North America(?), to support the British atom
bomb project (Tube Alloys.) This led the British to expect Canada was "on
side:" so that the British got very angry in 1942, when they discovered
the US had already placed firm commercial orders at the refinery which
pre-empted all output for XX months. Strenuous political efforts were
needed to convince the British the Canadians had not turned "disloyal."
None of this mattered in the long run, because the US decided in Jan. 1942
to run the Manhattan Project aside from any prior agreements to share
research, and the British accepted American hegemony in the (secret)
Quebec Agreement of late 1943. But it confirmed to the Canadians that the
American project was more energetic and businesslike than the British.
--
| Donald Phillipson, 4180 Boundary Road, Carlsbad Springs, |
| Ontario, Canada, K0A 1K0, tel. 613 822 0734 |
Dan Ford
The U.S. spent more money on the B-29 than on the atomic bomb, suggesting
that there was money and to spare for the Manhattan Project. See Jacob
Vander Meulen, Building the B-29, from Smithsonian Institution Press. A
thin book but interesting because Vander Meulen is a Canadian professor of
economic history and provides a rather different perspective than you
usually get on WWII warbirds, for example this tidbit:
For every ton of explosives dropped by a B-29 on Japan, an American
worked 3.4 years to get it there, and a Japanese worked 50 years to
repair the damage. (The last raid, Aug 14-15, dropped 6,000 tons. Each
atomic bomb was the equivalent of 12,000 tons by the most reasonable
estimate I have seen. There was at least one conventional raid that was
bigger than the thousand-plane raid of the war's last day.)
I haven't followed this thread, but my impression is that the United
States finished the war dazed by the discovery of how many resources it
had. We went from paralyzing depression to being the world's greatest
power in five years. It was pretty heady stuff.
-- Dan
Find the Brewster Buffalo Archives at http://wilmot.unh.edu/~df/buff.html
Mark Brandt
In article <4evmiu$8...@portal.gmu.edu> Carey Sublette,
dov...@primenet.com writes:
>
>Absolutely it did. The material, financial, and technical resources it
>absorbed would have advanced other wartime projects considerably. Some key
>individuals refused to work at Los Alamos for this reason, for example
>I.I. Rabi worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory (a code name) because
>felt radar development was a more urgent priority (and it is difficult to
>say that he was wrong).
>
>In a very real sense the investment in the MED was costing lives.
Perhaps the investment in the MED cost lives. However, the cost was
probably minimal -- the MED started off fairly slowly, and was only
consuming large amounts of material and effort in the later years. The US
war production was scaled down in late 1943, since it was judged that to
continue production at those levels would result in excessive amounts of
unused equipment.
Rabi, and a few others made their decision in the early part of the war,
and in fact Rabi played a small role in the MED toward the end (I think
that he was present at Trinity).
Which projects do you think were hindered by the effort expended on the
MED?
Mark
Carey Sublette
....
>
> Perhaps the investment in the MED cost lives. However, the cost was
> probably minimal
The actual cost in lives was probably not very large. After having made
the investment, the decision NOT to use the bomb would probably have
raised it higher. It is true though that in any case the number would have
been a fairly small proportion of total war casualties.
> -- the MED started off fairly slowly, and was only
> consuming large amounts of material and effort in the later years.
We are not talking about all that many years. From US entry into the war
until its conclusion only 32 months (or so) elapsed. In September 1942,
immediately after it was founded, the MED spent $24,000. In December when
war was declared it spend close to $1 million. 6 months later this had
climbed to $23 million/month and $68 million/month 5 months after that. It
consumed large amounts of resources from the first year of the war on. The
use of highly skilled scientists and technicians was dispropotionate to
the dollars spent, making its impact on R&D even greater.
> The US
> war production was scaled down in late 1943, since it was judged that to
> continue production at those levels would result in excessive amounts of
> unused equipment.
I have never before heard it said that US war production peaked in 1943
(within months of US entry into the war) and declined thereafter.
Certainly many classes of equipment did not even enter large scale
production until after this. Can you provide more background on this
contention?
>
> Rabi, and a few others made their decision in the early part of the war,
> and in fact Rabi played a small role in the MED toward the end (I think
> that he was present at Trinity).
>
Rabi played a small consulting role near the end of the project after it
became clear that the project would succeed. As I said, his talents were
devoted almost entirely to radar work during the war.
>
> Which projects do you think were hindered by the effort expended on the
> MED?
>
The impact was of course diffuse. For example, effort expended by DuPont
engineers would have been devoted to other programs in which DuPont was
involved.
Carey
Lisa
Per Mark's post...
I disagree that regular war production wasn't interfered with by MED
production. Mark says production peaked by 1943--in 1942 MED began
construction Hanford and Oakridge and was speed on them in 1943--so they
were indeed competing with war production.
In one writing, a MED physicist noted their demands for "carbon black"
contributed to a US tire shortage.
In virtually every writing about MED's Oak Ridge and Hanford, the MED
had to fight for its high priority to get materials and workmen from
other projects. There was only so much materiel and labor to go around
in 1943-44, and MED consumed incredible amounts of both.
I can think of several critical war time technology projects that woul
d have benefited if MED scientists would have been available. Radar was
crude and high maintenance. MED scientists could have continued
refining it, improving screen resolution and reliability. The ENIAC
computer was developed but not finished to prepare firing tables--MED
mathmeticians (like John Von Neuman) developed powerful tools to speed
repetitive computations which would have been vital in aviation and
artillery.
Carey Sublette
Yes! Yes! I know what year Japan attacked Pearl Harbor! Look at the time
on the post, it was 4 a.m. The correct figure for the duration of the war
from that point is of course 44 months, and the Manhattan project consumed
large amounts of resources from the SECOND year of the war on.
Nonetheless the point remains, the peak expenditures occured at a time of
peak of maximum resource competition, which was why its priority had to be
bumped up to the highest level that existed. Throughout 1943 and 1944 when
most of MED's funding was spent, many critical production programs were in
high gear.
Carey Sublette