Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot more).
In my opinion, the main reason for success of the Manhattan Project wasn't the budget, but getting people such as Feynman, Fermi, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Szilard and Wheeler to work on the project together with a sense of urgency.
25 billion USD buys a lot of necessary stuff, but one Feynman doing his best to crack a secret of nature is priceless.
That budget was essential. A hundred Feymans would have been useless without those thousands of engineers and workers who built and operated the plants Kringle Washington and Tennessee that produced fissionable enough fissionable material.
The US medical system wastes enough each year ($950B) to start an LHC sized project (~$10B), fully funded, in each US state every year and have enough left over to fully fund three new Apollo scale set of missions ($150B). You can't recover all that, but still, it's hard to picture just how big some of these figures are until you compare to other large costs.
I originally started thinking about "how do we understand large numbers" when I saw the article as I think I had roughly the same emotional reaction as I would have done if the number was $70B. Most "big number" comparisons go to things like "dollar bills up to the moon" or "swimming pool full of X" which only gets across "this is a big number". I found comparing it to other enormous projects was hard even as if you take out the US contribution to the LHC you don't move the needle, so you need to then cover all countries costs, then the full project budget for all years and you're still left with almost the entire figure left.
It's common knowledge that the US spends much more per capita on Healthcare, however the commonly offered explanation for this is that the private healthcare system in the US is less efficient than the public systems in Europe. But the graph in the provided link shows that US costs are split evenly between private spending and public spending.
This is confusing because the private system in the US covers twice as many people as the public system. Per the US Census Bureau: "in 2018, private health insurance coverage continued to be more prevalent than public coverage, covering 67.3 percent of the population and 34.4 percent of the population, respectively."[0] If the provided data are correct, this would indicate that US private spending is nearly twice as efficient as public spending.
The current laws restrict the government healthcare programs from negotiating on e.g. drug prices, so the manufacturers name whatever absurd prices they want and the US Gov just pays it. Just another corrupt government giveaway to the private sector.
Interestingly enough, the most expensive program was The B-29 bomber program, which cost 50% more than the Manhattan project.
Then one B-29 had an emergency landing in Sovjet and the soviets reversed engineered it into the TU-4. Tu-94 which is still flying is a newer scaled up version of this.
It's amazing how much of the innovation the U.S did in the 1940s ended up in others hands(the bomb, B-29).
The world would probably be very different if it hadn't happened.
The physicists knew an atomic bomb was possible the US just did it fist. I am sure secrets got out that helped the Soviets create one but I think they would've created one regardless.
History says that that's not true and the Soviets relied on extensive networks of spies to get tech secrets, be it the bomb or so many other military projects.
Aren't you implying, intentionally or not, that a "Manhattan Project" level of expenditure, $25 billion, is enough to make meaningful progress towards commercial fusion energy production? I don't think that is a given.
According to David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old, Brigadier-General Leslie Groves had previously overseen the construction of several munitions plants costing much more than the entire cost of the Manhattan Engineering District project.
1. Chapter 8, "Invention", p198 in my paperback edition.
Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot more).