Cost
| Site | Cost (1945 USD) | Cost (2012 USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Oak Ridge | $1,188,352,000 | $15.3 billion |
| Hanford | $390,124,000 | $5.04 billion |
| Special operating materials | $103,369,000 | $1.33 billion |
| Los Alamos | $74,055,000 | $956 million |
| Research and development | $69,681,000 | $900 million |
| Government overhead | $37,255,000 | $481 million |
| Heavy water plants | $26,768,000 | $346 million |
| Total | $1,889,604,000 | $24.4 billion |
The project expenditure through 1 October 1945 was $1.845 billion, equivalent to less than nine days of wartime spending, and was $2.191 billion when the AEC assumed control on 1 January 1947. Total allocation was $2.4 billion. Over 90% of the cost was for building plants and producing the fissionable materials, and less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.
A total of four weapons (the Trinity gadget, Little Boy, Fat Man, and an unused bomb) were produced by the end of 1945, making the average cost per bomb around $500 million in 1945 dollars. By comparison, the project's total cost by the end of 1945 was about 90% of the total spent on the production of US small arms (not including ammunition) and 34% of the total spent on US tanks during the same period.
Read more about this topic: Manhattan Project
Famous quotes containing the word cost:
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
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“It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.”
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