The effort to develop nuclear weapons was ruinously expensive. I doubt we would have undertaken it in peacetime, so we may not have seen nuclear weapons until the early 1960s if not for the war. We almost certainly would have been at war with the Soviets before that.
It was expensive, but not ruinously expensive. As pointed out recently, the Norden bombsight program cost nearly half as much and people don't think of that as ruinously expensive. The US interstate highway program cost vastly more as well.
Russia developed nuclear weapons in peace-time as well, if you consider the cold war peaceful.
The entire US economy had be reworked to a wartime footing in WW II. The government was far smaller and poorer and would have stayed that way but for the war. And frankly it's difficult for me to believe the Norden gunsight cost that much.
The Russians developed nuclear weapons because they didn't have a choice given the US had already done so, and it's not clear when they would have been successful without the US project.
The reason I picked the early 1960s for peacetime development is nuclear weapons development became much easier with the introduction of nuclear power. At that point it became much easier for any motivated government, so it's not surprising the South Africans were able to do it in the '70s. And still they needed US help to do it on that timeline.
I have no idea what's true in this, but I've heard exactly the opposite economic theories about WWII as it pertains to the US.
I.e. that untold amounts of capital was spent on making equipment that was just sent overseas to get blown up, if the US wasn't in the war it's not like it wouldn't have had a giant export market, and all that workforce could still be mobilized to manufacture goods, except some of the working-age people wouldn't have been sent overseas to die & get maimed.
That's the Broken Windows Fallacy writ large. The US economy grew tremendously throughout the 19th century without making things and then destroying them.
Don't forget the Mexican/American war, the Spanish/American war, the unending "Indian Wars", and various other military expeditions during that period.
It's probable that the War of 1812 showed America how unprepared it was for conflict with a serious power.
The civil war from 1861 to 1865 required the complete commitment of both sides, with the Union in particular developing massive industrial capacity to help the cause.
This rapid and urgent industrialization was further developed during the Reconstruction phase when a large chunk of the country had to be built back up from ruin.
If these two conflicts never happened there wouldn't have been the same urgency to develop industry. It would be much more of an agricultural economy like the southern states and not like Ohio, New York or Pennsylvania with their enormous appetite for large-scale manufacturing.
If that was the case the US would be utterly unprepared for any conflict in Europe. As it was the US military was in really rough shape prior to the outbreak of war in Europe. There was no pressing need for a large, well-equipped standing military since Mexic
> Russia developed nuclear weapons in peace-time as well, if you consider the cold war peaceful.
Parts of the Cold War were peaceful for some countries (including the USSR), but the period in which the Soviets developed nuclear weapons (1943-1949) was a period during which the USSR was constantly involved in international armed conflict, and was absolutely not peacetime for the USSR.
His source is probably a Malcolm Gladwell tech talk [1] It is corroborated by other sites on the Internet [2], though Gladwell frequently gets his information from secondary sources so who knows if these are independent? Based on the history of the project though [3], it seems plausible - the Norden bombsight is basically an analog computer whose development started during WW1, and building a computer with WW1-era technology seems like it could easily cost half as much as building an atom bomb with WW2 technology.
Research and development, manufacturing, training, it ended up being fantastically expensive. Remember, this was a highly capable analog computer that had to operate in a difficult environment and even included a self-destruct feature.
Hard to say for sure. The way the Russians tell it, their program was already too far along to benefit from successful espionage beyond confirming they were on the right track.
