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If you're interested in atomic history and the Manhattan Project, a great book is Richard Rhodes' The making of the atomic bomb (ISBN: 1451677618). It's ~900 pages of history, from the personalities of the scientists involved, to the sites of Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford, and the first uses. I enjoyed reading it while interning at ORNL and Sandia in the summers during undergrad. The weapons are horrifying in their destructive power, but the Project is a testament to what we can accomplish in science and engineering if we apply virtually unlimited resources toward R&D to solve a problem. Beyond the obvious product of the Project, it led to the creation of the DOE national laboratory system, which has since served as a means of maintaining an able technical workforce in the US, with physicists, mathematicians, chemists, biologists, and computer scientists, among others, all working in the public interest (and on things beyond weapons). Investing in science can pay dividends well into the future. For some perspective, the cost of the Manhattan Project was on the same order of magnitude as the Apollo Program in terms of inflation-adjusted cost, about $22-26 billion in 2016 dollars. Of course that amount does not include the environmental cost still being felt in Hanford and elsewhere, or the human cost. Knowing the cost of those two programs really makes you question some other efforts, like the program to develop the F-35 aircraft, estimated to cost $380 billion before even considering the additional $1.1 trillion in operational cost. For comparison there, the Interstate Highway system cost about $500 billion to construct. |