How were 2 countries able to discover and build nuclear weapons from scratch, simultaneously during the 1940s but most countries today can’t build them without decades of effort?
In: Physics
TLDR: Effectively un-limited funding
During WW2 both the Allies and the Axis powers invested a tremendous amount of time and money to develop new technologies to help in the war effort. Some worked and changed the world, others were a colossal waste of time. But the point was the governments were willing to entertain virtually any brilliant idea worth pursuing and threw tons money and resources at the problem.
We went from using semi-auto rifles, cloth winged bi-planes, and horse drawn carts to having Assault Rifles, Jetplanes, computers, and nuclear weapons in a span of about a decade.
The amount of money spent during WW2 was just outrageous and the technologies developed during it shaped the rest of the 20th century.
EDIT: It’s also worth noting that they skipped a lot of safety precautions for the sake of expediency. Which in the case of the Axis powers also included human experimentation in the concentration camps.
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