PP Nuclear Arms Race P2

This is where the two paths diverge. With the discovery of nuclear fission both countries started nuclear programs, but the amount of resources dedicated to them varied greatly. In the US, the program started slowly. At the start of the program the idea of a nuclear weapon was a distant thought. In a letter written to Winston Churchill by Bohr in 1944, he recalls that a few years prior the idea of a complete and functioning bomb was a “fantastic dream” (Bohr Letter). Allied British scientists thought that the bomb wouldn’t be a weapon of this war, but one for the future due to the vast amount of resources needed to produce it. The American’s estimated the costs of the project to be much lower than they actually were when the project was complete. This misplaced optimism may have played a part in their decision to put what is now equivalent to $30 billion dollars into the creation of these weapons. This project was never guaranteed to pay off, and putting this enormous of an effort into something during wartime is a big risk. The German nuclear project was run differently. Instead of focusing only on a nuclear weapon, the Germans set out to harness all facets of nuclear power, including nuclear energy. This meant that the already limited resources of a country at war were to be spread even thinner, making the bomb even less of a priority for Germany (Walker 24-25).