I have to give a lecture tomorrow on the end of WW2, and I have two textbooks that give a figure for the number of people who worked on the bomb–at Columbia, at Chicago, at Oak Ridge, at Hanford, at Los Alamos. One book says 120,000; the other says 600,000. Anyone know what it is?
Both of those numbers seem really high to me. About 8000 people work for the labs at Los Alamos now and they do a lot more than work on project. Over the course of the 3 years or so if you count every body that did something for the project maybe depending on where you draw the line.
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x22/xr2276.html
http://www.accesscomm.ca/users/kmactaggart/rgnns2.htm
Well, I’m finding both figures quoted on the Web. So I look at the websites involved.
The first link, from wiesenthal.com, says it’s “based on Time-Life Books”. The second is from an anti-nukes website. Don’t suppose they’d have any reason to quote the higher figure, would you? 
I’d go with the 120,000 figure. You can always point to Time-Life Books.
The introduction to Peter Bacon Hales’ book Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project gives the figure of 125,000 for peak employment at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford alone.
Here’s a link:
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/atomicspaces/intro
Cheers,
[bragging]
My grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project, developing the radio controls.
[/bragging]
Let’s do some math. Suppose the Manhattan Project cost two billion dollars and employed 600,000 people. Suppose that half of the budget was for wages (which is fairly typical for such projects, I think). Suppose that these people each worked for three years (which is about the length of the project). Then they would be paid less than $1700 for those three years, too little even for wages in the early '40’s. Unless “at its height” means that those 600,000 people were only in the project for a month or so, there’s no way for this to be true.
Most of the employees were military and might have been paid pretty low wages, especially since they got room and board.
The 600,000 figure that Duck Duck Goose so kindly provided the link for says “at its height…” so probably at some point in time there were that many employed or involved, but not for the whole time period during which that $2B was spent. Thanks, one and all, for the help.
As a former Los Alamos National Lab employee, I can guarantee you that, when I started working there (1992), there had been slightly more than 112,000 employees in the HISTORY of Los Alamos.
I have no idea how they arrive at numbers that high for estimates of Manhattan Project personnel, unless they’re also counting guards, uninvolved family members, Bob Hope and his whole crew, everyone in the town of Los Alamos, and most of the local insect population.
Just two. Mom and Dad.
Following completion of the project, the number increased as a result of the complexity and difficulty of the outcome.
This won’t exactly answer the question, but it’s related and authorative. In The New World 1939/1946 (Penn State, 1962, p2), the first volume of their official history of the AEC, Hewlett and Anderson say this about the size of the project on January 2nd, 1947, the day the Army handed everything over to the AEC:
“The Army’s transfer list ran to thirty-seven installations in nineteen states and Canada. With the facilities the Army would transfer 254 military officers, 1,688 enlisted men, 3,950 Government workers, and about 37,800 contractor employees.”
Given the sharp fall in employees after VJ Day, this is of course little more than a lower bound for wartime figures. They go on to quote the 2.2 billion dollar wartime cost and note that the 1947 fiscal year spending was 300 million dollars. The latter’s only about half the former when that’s spread over four years.
Elsewhere, they also mention assorted figures for the sizes of different parts of the organisation at different times, but nothing that sheds any great light on the total size.
Quoth Wendell Wagner:
How do you figure? 100% of the budget was for wages. Yes, there were also costs for raw materials, and lab equipment, and such, but those are wages too: When you buy uranium, say, you’re paying the salary of the uranium miners. Now, it’s true that they weren’t directly employed in the Project, but just how much demand would there have been for uranium before Manhattan?
Chronos writes:
> Yes, there were also costs for raw materials, and lab
> equipment, and such, but those are wages too . . .
Geez, are we going to start a silly argument over this? Look, when a business calculates what its expenses are in a given year, they total up their wages, their raw materials used, their office supplies and furniture bought, the cost of the delivery trucks bought, the cost of the gas for those trucks, their rental costs, etc. They don’t put this all into a single figure called “wages” because it would be possible to go back and calculate what it cost in wages for another company who, years before, built the buildings they’re renting, or figure the cost of wages for the company who built their trucks, or the cost of wages for the company that manufactured their pencils, etc.
Look at it this way: It cost two billion dollars for the Manhattan Project. I was guessing that 50% of that was counted as wages, but suppose all of it was. Suppose that 600,000 people worked for the Manhattan Project for three years. (Again, I’m assuming this term “at its height” isn’t just being absurd, so that these 600,000 people were employed just for one peak month.) Then given that somewhere between 50% and 100% of the expenses are spent on wages, each person makes something like $1667 to $3333 over three years or about $556 to $1111 annually. That strikes me as too small. If it were 120,000 people, that would be $2778 to $55556 annually, which is closer to what salaries were then. If you have a citation showing what the average wages were in the mid-'40’s, give it. (No anecdotes about your grandfather’s wages, please.)
I wrote:
> $55556
I meant to write “$5556”.
From the horse’s mouth (The DOE’s own website)
The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb
“During the war, the Manhattan Project employed approximately 200,000 people and expended some $2.2 billion. New production facilities, towns, and research laboratories were set up at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Scores of contractors across the nation contributed to an effort that was unprecedented in size, scope, and sense of urgency. The results were the plutonium implosion bombs tested at the Trinity shot near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945 and used at Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945, and the uranium gun bomb dropped three days earlier on Hiroshima, Japan.”
More cost analysis
The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project
The Costs of the Manhattan Project
Where Did The Money Go?
(estimated cumulative costs through December 31, 1945)
Site/Project Then-year Dollars
OAK RIDGE
—K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant $512,166,000
—Y-12 Electromagnetic Plant $477,631,000
—Clinton Engineer Works, HQ and central utilities $155,951,000
—Clinton Laboratories $26,932,000
—S-50 Thermal Diffusion Plant $15,672,000
(Total) $1,188,352,000
HANFORD ENGINEER WORKS $390,124,000
SPECIAL OPERATING MATERIALS $103,369,000
LOS ALAMOS PROJECT $74,055,000
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT $69,681,000
GOVERNMENT OVERHEAD $37,255,000
HEAVY WATER PLANTS1 $26,768,000
Grand Total $1,889,604,000
I think I may have an origin for the 600,000 figure: towards the end of Now It Can Be Told (Harper, 1962;Da Capo, 1983), Leslie Groves pays tribute as follows:
“That we were sucessful was due entirely to the hard work and dedication of the more than 600,000 Americans who comprised and directly supported the Manhattan Project.” (p414)
Now Groves never knowingly understated the magnitude of the achievement involved, so it wouldn’t surprise me if “directly supported” has been cast fairly wide here. The statement’s also more consistent with an integrated total than an instantaneous “at height” figure.
Groves’ account also sheds some light on the salaries of the scientists involved. From p150 of the same:
“One other major handicap was that we could not hold out any financial inducement to the people we wanted. It had been decided, after consultation with the Military Policy Committee, that, in keeping with the general policies of the OSRD, we should not offer any increase in pay to people recruited for the Manhattan Project. However, academic personnel who had formerly been paid on the basis of a nine-months work year were given increases whereby they were paid for the full twelve months of work, at the original monthly rate.”
He then notes that this meant that Oppenheimer was receiving less than some subordinates and so an exception was eventually made in his case, with his salary being brought into line for a professor at a “large Eastern school.” To put that in context, when Bethe recommended Feynman to Cornell in 1943 that was on an assistant professor’s salary of 3000 dollars (Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum, Oxford, 1994, p161) and in 1945 Robert Bacher could estimate a professor’s salary at the same university to be 4-5000 dollars (Gleick, Genius, Pantheon, 1992, p210). I don’t know how wages for the scientific “talent” compared to the rest of the employees, but it seems possible that Oppenheimer’s salary would not have been much higher than 5000 dollars.
Despite having raised him precisely because he was unlikely to be the typical case, I may as well shed a little extra light on Oppenheimer’s wartime salary. According to a letter dated 18th Sept.1943 from him to President Sproul of the University of Califonia and reprinted in Robert Oppenheimer, ed. by Smith and Weiner (Harvard, 1980, p135), his salary was 10,000 dollars a year. However, he’s actually asking for it to be reduced to 7,600 dollars, to bring it back into line with his peacetime salary. That’s what he felt was a reasonable wage for running Los Alamos.
Incidentally, the letter seems slightly at odds with the impression from Groves’ account: the salary as Director appears to being paid by the university rather than the Project (though set “in consultation with representatives of the War Department”) and Smith and Weiner go on to quote Groves commending Oppenheimer for volunteering the reduction. Don’t know what the outcome actually was.