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
The US threw an assload of money and resources at the problem. The Manhattan Project budget was over $20 billion (2019 dollars) and employed over 100k people. The US also had the advantage of not having to worry about other countries boycotting or embargoing them for building the bomb. Countries these days can face severe trade sanctions if they get caught building a bomb. The major nuclear superpowers are also the ones happening to sit on the large uranium reserves, so if you want to build a nuke, you need a fuel source and the big boys just aren’t going to hand over a ton of ore for you to play with.
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