[QUOTE=RickJay]
- The resources devoted to the Manhattan Project are not perfectly liquid things that could have been turned into B-29s or howtizers. It’s not like you’re spending shields and gold in a game of “Civlization IV,” where you can just switch a city from making Bombers to making Missiles or vice versa. It’s true that SOME of the effort in one could have been put into the other, but there’s efficiencies of scale involved and the simple fact that people like Robert Oppenheimer would not have been used at their maximum efficiency doing arc welding on assembly lines.
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I utterly disagree. The manhattan project had well over 100,000 people working directly on it, not to mention all the ancilliary construction and logistics resources. Whole towns were built around it, and not everyone had doctorates in nuclear physics. Take a look at the last picture and caption on this page. Most of the workers could just as well have been working an assembly line, and if you are constructing an industrial facility like this in empty farmland, as part of a single complex that will use 1/6 of the entire US electricity production, there is considerable flexibility as to what its for, whether it be a tank factory or a nuke factory. The US defense budget in 1944 (the peak) was $97 billion, so the $2 billion for the Manhattan project wasn’t that big a deal, but it would still have bought a lot of useful materiel.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
The fact is that by 1944 the United States was probably pumping out as many planes and tanks as was humanly possible for it to produce and use.
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You seem to be disagreeing with yourself. Either there were not enough people to produce more (in which case you free up production resource by not bothering with the Manhattan project), or there were not enough soldiers to use what was already being produced (in which case you send everyone to the front or to free up eligible males from other industries, or you focus resources on building better materiel to get the most out of your limited combat manpower). In either instance the Manhattan Project never figures on the list of solutions, only as a problem. If you found yourself transported back in time to 1941, what would you tell Roosevelt? I’d tell him not to worry, the axis will never get their bomb to work, so forget about it. If he really wants to push the technology envelope, go for jets, radar, or even something as prosaic as getting 20mm cannon fitted to fighters.
I don’t believe US armed forces in WW2 (or in any other war) ever said “we have as much stuff as we can use, no need for more X or better Y”. Even if it was just to give every GI an ampoule of penicillin in his bandage pack, there’s ALWAYS a need for more stuff, and more trucks and ships and planes to carry it.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
- You’re speaking with the benefit of hindsight. Obviously, at the time the Manhattan Project was conceived, the outcome of the war was NOT clear, no matter what anyone in the thread is saying.
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Yes, I said as much in my previous post. But the Manhattan project started in 1941, and the large-scale industrial stuff didn’t really kick in until mid-1943 or later, when they might perhaps have known better. Aside from that minor quibble, I have no issue with the decisions they took at the time given the information available, particularly since it wasn’t exactly a subject they could have a wide-ranging debate on. But I’m not at all convinced it had any effect on the war other than perhaps to lengthen it.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
If D-Day fails, the Western Allies would not have been in a position to mount another invasion of France until 1945, and if Bagration had not been the wild success it was, Germany’s hold on Europe would have been secure through 1945 and possibly 1946. Given that the success of both operations hinged heavily on outright deception of German intelligence, and that that deception was successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, it’s simple fact that a few different rolls of the dice here or there could have had the U.S. in 1945 sitting in Britain, smarting after a crushing defeat at Normandy. And wouldn’t that shiny new bomb have been a wonderful thing to come up with.
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Even by early 1944 it was abundantly clear that Germany was going to lose. The only question was whether it was going to be before the end of 1944, or the end of 1945. The war running into 1946 was not really a likely scenario. And even if Overlord and Bagration had gone pear-shaped, would a handful of nukes come in more useful than e.g. doubling (or perhaps even trebling) the output of B-17s and B-29s? Boeing built 8,200 four-engined bombers with about 35,000 staff at two plants. Diverting all those Manhattan people and materials to tanks, ships, aircraft etc. would have made those imponderables you mention far more certain. Bagration with an extra 10,000 lend-lease tanks? Or perhaps Overlord with three or four mulberry harbours and a few thousand extra landing craft, or with Operation Dragoon mounted simultaneously? Pretty much as safe a bet as you will ever get in warfare. The sole justification for the Manhattan Project is that at the time they were ignorant of the enemy’s nuclear capabilities and the challenges involved in building a weapon, and so had to take out an expensive insurance policy just as they did with the production and transportation to operational theatres of chemical weapons - but in a hypothetical informed time-traveller scenario it would be pointless unless you felt it would be needed to face down the soviets later and easier to carry out during the war rather than afterwards.
But to return to the OP, which I never really adressed properly - I’d say it was all over as soon as Germany got embroiled in a two-front war. They could conceivably have taken down the British, and (even more implausibly) then done a number on the Soviets, but both at once was just never going to happen.