A further thought about the Manhattan Project

A thought occurred to me complementing my previous posting on J. Robert Oppenheimer. In that posting I suggested that the Manhattan Project which created the first atom bomb was trailbreaking in the magnitude of the effort to develop a cutting-edge technology.

The project was initiated by physicists, and was quite small in its origins. It succeeded in producing an atom bomb in 1945 only because Leslie Groves came in and put 100,000 people to work producing the fissionable materials that were needed to make the bomb.

Scientists were accustomed to working on a small scale with miniscule budgets. It may not be surprising that when they were developing the ideas that an atomic bomb might be created and estimating the amounts of fissionable material that would be needed, they did so with a limited effort and budget, and therefore rather slowly.

Groves, was an engineer, trained at MIT as well as West Point and the Corps of Engineers. He had lead in the construction of the Pentagon as well as in other facilities needed to upgrade the army capabilities to fight World War II. He was the man, apparently, who recognized the scale of the effort that would be needed to produce a bomb in a reasonable time, and he was the man who lead the mobilization of the vast resources needed to achieve a reasonable rate of progress.

Engineers had long experience with massive projects, including the construction of the Panama and Suez Canals, transcontinental railways, canal systems hundreds of miles long, and laying the undersea communication cables.

Thus perhaps it was the transition of the Manhattan project from the control of scientists to the control of engineers that led to its accomplishments. Not only were engineers more accustomed to thinking big, they had experience in the management of massive projects. Indeed, perhaps Groves had the advantage of both military and engineering background in managing the mobilization of massive numbers of people and amounts of resources to build the atom bomb.

Today we see large scientific projects such as ITER (building a machine to study fusion energy production), atom smashing machines, and projects to sequence genomes. The Encyclopedia of Life may illustrate another approach in which scientists are using the current technology of online crowds to undertake a huge scientific project without hierarchical management. However, it takes a long time for a professional group to institutionalize the management skills and procedures to allow it to undertake really large, expensive projects.