Oppenheimer was the star of the 81st Academy Awards recently. Oppenheimer is a biopic and adaptation of the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005) by Kai Byrd and Martin J. Sherwin about Robert Oppenheimer, who was called the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”.

Behind the feature film is the real story of the Manhattan Project, and here we look at the “economics” of creating the atomic bomb.

How much did it cost to make the bomb?

The whole process cost at that time about 2 billion dollars (at the then value of the dollar). Today, this money would be equivalent to approximately 30 billion dollars, writes the Brooking Institute.

Most of the budget allocated to the Manhattan Project was used for research, and only a small portion of the money was used for the actual creation of the atomic bomb.

Of the $1,188,352,000 spent, two-thirds went to equipment and tools for the production of enriched uranium.

In total, during the five years of financing the Manhattan Project, the US GDP amounted to 1.049 trillion dollars. Knowing that the total cost of the Manhattan Project was $1.889 billion, this means that it cost 0.18% of US GDP over the five-year period between 1942 and 1946.

Oppenheimer’s real salary

According to correspondence between J. R. Oppenheimer and UC Berkeley president Dr. R. G. Sproul, published in the Los Alamos Scientific Journal (p. 14), the father of the atomic bomb was paid $10,000 a year to manage the Manhattan Project (the value of money at the time ). He asked for a reduction in his salary, which he considered huge, but was refused.

That’s four times the $2,500 a year he earned as a physics professor at the University of California and the Cal Institute of Technology. By comparison, during the war, a soldier in the US Army was paid $50 a month. A technician in Los Alamos was paid six times the salary without risking being shot.

Today, Oppenheimer’s salary would be about $300,000 a year, or $25,000 a month.

For comparison, on the 10th page of the magazine I was talking about, there is a list of salaries of “Persons who do not hold a scientific position, but were engaged in scientific activity”, where the maximum salary (allegedly monthly) of a doctor is indicated. with an additional 4 years of experience is set at $400 or $4,800 per year. Consequently, Oppenheimer’s salary was more than double the salary of an experienced researcher outside academia.

Four reasons why people rushed to work on the project

Money

According to some estimates, more than 600,000 people worked on the Manhattan Project. Workers joined the project for very different reasons. The vast majority of Manhattan Project workers were unaware of what was to be achieved there.

Many joined the Manhattan Project simply because it paid well. Jerry Saucier, a former employee, recalls, “The pay was above average. It was cheap to live. People came from everywhere. There were people who were illiterate, could not read, could not write.”

The Manhattan Project also created many job opportunities for African Americans. However, many African Americans experienced segregation and discrimination there. Kathy Strickland was part of the cleaners. She was forbidden to share a house with a man who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Patriotism

For other Manhattan Project workers, patriotism was a motivating factor in joining the effort. Herman Snyder, a member of the Special Engineer Squad (SED), said that young people his age, “when their country is destroyed like it was at Pearl Harbor, we get angry. We want to fight. I was in my freshman year on varsity, but a lot of guys graduated that semester and went on to wrestle.” Snyder recalled that while working on the Manhattan Project, “I felt like I was doing what my country wanted. I was fit and proud of it.”

For many workers, the Manhattan Project was simply a way to help the United States win the war.

Scientific curiosity

Although ordinary workers were unaware of the project’s purpose, for many scientists the secrets of the atom were reason enough to attract them. Physicist John Wheeler recalled: “There was a sense of adventure. I associate it with pioneering. It’s like when the first steamship appeared, or the first airplane, or the first locomotive”

Another physicist recalls: “I found this job more interesting than teaching twelve hours a week at Illinois Tech. That’s why I joined the project. When Oppenheimer asked if I would join him at Los Alamos, I told him that I would be glad because, like most of his students, I would follow him to the ends of the earth. I was very glad that I could help him.”

Fear of Germany

For scientists who were aware of the powerful German scientific community, the fear that Germany might develop an atomic bomb before the United States was also a determining factor. Although the Alsos mission later revealed that the German atomic bomb project had not made significant progress, most of the Manhattan Project participants did not learn this until after the war. Leona Marshall Libby, the most influential female scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, recalled the atmosphere at the time:

I think everyone was afraid that the Germans had overtaken us. It was a long and constant fear, which of course was fueled by the fact that our leaders knew these people in Germany. If the Germans had done it before us, I don’t know what would have happened to the world. Germany was the leader in physics, by all accounts, when the war began. It was a very scary time.”