Where did Manhattan Project take place?

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 (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 1945 dollars 2012 dollars OAK RIDGE (Total) $1, 188, 352, 000 $18, 900, 000, 000 63% —K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant $512, 166, 000 $8, 150, 000, 000 27% —Y-12 Electromagnetic Plant $477, 631, 000 $7, 600, 000, 000 25% —Clinton Engineer Works, HQ and central utilities $155, 951, 000 $2, 480, 000, 000 8% —Clinton Laboratories $26, 932, 000 $430, 000, 000 1% —S-50 Thermal Diffusion Plant $15, 672, 000 $250, 000, 000 1% HANFORD ENGINEER WORKS $390, 124, 000 $6, 200, 000, 000 21% SPECIAL OPERATING MATERIALS $103, 369, 000 $1, 640, 000, 000 5% LOS ALAMOS PROJECT $74, 055, 000 $1, 180, 000, 000 4% RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT $69, 681, 000 $1, 110, 000, 000 4% GOVERNMENT OVERHEAD $37, 255, 000 $590, 000, 000 2% HEAVY WATER PLANTS $26, 768, 000 $430, 000, 000 1% Grand Total $1, 889, 604, 000 $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).