r/todayilearned • u/devourke • 1d ago
TIL it cost more to develop the plane that carried the atomic bombs, than it did to develop the actual atomic bombs themselves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress#Design_and_development949
u/CaptRackham 1d ago
Kind of, the B-29 was so large it needed an entirely new factory, with new assembly lines, to be built just to build the plane. Moreover it’s not like the B-29 was “An existing plane but a bit bigger” it was a brand new era of strategic bomber with all the new tech. The pressurized cabin required new structural designs, new defensive armament designs, new navigation equipment. Even the flare gun for this plane had to be redesigned so they could fire flares out of the pressurized cabin.
So while’s it’s easy to say “That plane was expensive” it’s more accurate to say “It cost 3 billion dollars to develop pressurized high altitude crew stations, new alloys and structures for pressurized aircraft, remote-control parallax-corrected gyroscopic lead-computing gunsight equipped turrets, and a brand new factory to produce all of this in, within 3 years.”
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u/PeculiarNed 1d ago
Never forget, the b29 has a better fire control system than the millennium falcon.
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u/Idenwen 1d ago
Eh?
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u/Maleficent-Studio-34 1d ago
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u/Dog_--_-- 23h ago
Interesting thread, but they got something wrong. The b-29 is actually based on the millennium falcon, as it's older. It was made long ago, in a galaxy far away.
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u/Darthwilhelm 22h ago
In the millennium falcon the guns were entirely manual, the Superfortress' could computer lead while allowing gunners to dynamically take and release control of the guns around the plane. The computer could also calculate the trajectory to make several guns in several different points on the plane to hit the same target as seen by one person.
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u/Otaraka 12h ago
To be fair, the B-29 has never knowingly managed to destroy a spaceship. So far the Falcon is ahead on actual results.
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u/ThrownAway17Years 1d ago
As an engineering project manager, I can’t even begin to imagine how to scope out a project like this, let alone getting it all to production within a couple of years, without the aid of computers. The saving grace is that budget would have been unlimited.
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u/Lord0fHats 1d ago
It kind of was in a way. A lot of US military spending in these years is hard to really account for a number of reasons. It's hard to track how the government spent money on secretive classified projects. Non-secret projects often operated out of large budget accounts where every single penny of spending was tracked sure, but not necessarily itemized by project. Many accounts, funds, and expenses were for multiple things like the above mentioned Silverplate B-29s. These variants were specifically designed to carry the atomic bombs. Do they count as part of the expense of the B-29 project, or the Manhattan project in this context?
Part of what makes the OP claim so messy is that the numbers behind it are themselves best estimates drawn from available information. The projects actual costs was almost certainly a different number we simply can't pin down.
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u/Thirty_Helens_Agree 23h ago
Meanwhile, the Navy and Marines are island hopping just to get to an island big enough to hold the airbase for them, then take the island over and get to work building the airbase AND basically a small city’s worth of infrastructure to support it.
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u/seatux 18h ago
That would be Iwo Jima (for fighter escort and emergency landing for B-29) and Tinian (actual B-29 base) if I recall right.
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u/Thirty_Helens_Agree 17h ago edited 17h ago
And Guam for the big permanent base.
I saw some fascinating (and grim) statistics about how many emergency landings were made on Iwo Jima and how many thousands of lives were saved by having a large airstrip there vs. lives lost in taking the island.
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u/seatux 16h ago
When looking at money, it costs way more to train a pilot than the average Marine, so in a weird financial sense Iwo is worth the money. This is also the age before downed airmen retrieval made easy and ejection seats, so landing someplace is quite preferable than yeeting into freezing water.
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u/NightOfTheLivingHam 10h ago
lots of money and lots of engineers who got into engineering because of public works programs in the 30s. My grandpa worked on dams in the western US before joining boeing in the late 30s because they were basically throwing large chunks of cash at anyone who specialized in structural engineering.
The craziest part about this plane is that it was conceptualized and designed in the 1930s. 35 years after the first manned flight.
Went from a kite with a motor to this space ship of a plane in 35 years. That would be like the first plane being flown in 1991 and the B-29 being started to be worked on this year.
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u/Thirty_Helens_Agree 23h ago
I was reading about the development of the B-29 while I was on a flight. The book described how people marveled at the massive size of the B-29 and doubted it could move, let alone fly.
I got curious about the size comparison to the 737 I was in. They’re the same size.
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u/Hussle_Crowe 18h ago
What’s the name of the book ?
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u/Thirty_Helens_Agree 18h ago
Twilight of the Gods - Ian W. Toll.
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u/Darmok47 18h ago
I'm looking forward to that one! I just finished the second book in the trilogy.
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u/supermuncher60 16h ago
It's funny how the B29 today isn't very big at all. Compared to the B52 and especially the B36 they look tiny.
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u/Donatter 21h ago
That and the number in the article op linked, includes the manufacturing costs of 4000 B-29’s.
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u/Magnus77 19 1d ago
This gets posted fairly regularly.
The cost isn't just development, its the develop and manufacturing, which was almost 4000 planes.
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u/Danloeser 23h ago
I think it sounds more impressive if you say the B-29 cost more than the Manhattan Project and just leave it at that.
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u/CelestialFury 14h ago
Yeah, this TIL is kinda cheating by including the total manufacturing of all the planes. Like, what the hell?
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u/screamingcheese 1d ago
That statement is an example of creatively rearranging data to create a novel, but inaccurate story. The cost of the B-29 program includes the actual production of the aircraft themselves - nearly four thousand of them in various different configurations and mission types. The Silverplate versions capable of delivering nuclear payloads was less than 150. Nuclear payloads were not a consideration when starting the program.
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u/PetriDishCocktail 1d ago
Fun fact: at peak production during world war II the US built a warplane every 6 and 1/2 minutes.... Nearly 250,000 planes in 3 and 1/2 years.
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u/Namika 1d ago
The number of aircraft carriers built is also insane.
The US started the war with 4 aircraft carriers in the Pacific. Japan had 6, quite the advantage!
...the US ended the war with 150 aircraft carriers
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u/SagittaryX 1d ago
To add some nuance, those 4 and 6 initial carriers were all fleet carriers. The vast majority of the ~150 carriers built during the war were escort carriers that are much less capable (Like the 50 Casablanca-class carriers that carried 27 planes, vs most fleet carriers carrying ~100). The main bulk of fleet carriers built during the war were 17 Essex-class ships as well as 9 light carriers.
But in comparison during the war Japan only built 4 fleet carriers, 6 light carriers and 4 escort carriers.
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u/GreatScottGatsby 1d ago
A lot of those "carriers" were escort carriers that were basically freighters with a sheet of metal on top
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u/Tehbeefer 1d ago
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u/CharlotteRant 22h ago
Modern automobiles are probably more complex than a pre-45 piston airplane, and the US pounds out millions of those a year.
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u/Rampant16 21h ago
Idk about the first part just because the engines on aircraft are so much bigger in terms of piston count. But I agree that we could probably pump out a shitload of them today if we really wanted to.
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u/Livid_Tax_6432 18h ago
Everything modern is more complex that previous iteration(s)...
then again so are factories making it...
it would be quite shocking if we weren't better than before...
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u/ArcadesRed 1d ago
WW2 was just different. These days, the US will buy like 200 of something, and that's 180 more than anyone else can afford. And it will take 20 years to fill the contract.
In WW2 the US was like, I need 4000 new bombers in 4 years please.
You need new cargo ships? Best I can do is a new one every 16 hours or so. You have an emergency order? I can gen you up a new boat in 5 days.
You wanna bomb Cologne? All I have available is 1000 bombers. That enough?
You need a heavy machine gun? How about this thing. I call it the Ma Deuce. I can make 3 million of them for ya, and they will last oh... the next 150 years. You can put it on everything.
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u/LoganNolag 1d ago
Yep it’s because America was the manufacturing center of the world back then much like how China is now.
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u/Rampant16 21h ago
To be fair though, a modern combat aircraft is a lot more complex and a lot more capable. You needed absurd numbers of aircraft because back during WW2 you might send 200 bombers on one raid, lose 20% of them, and not even hit the target. Whereas one B-2 bomber with guided bombs is going to flatten almost any single target.
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u/skippythemoonrock 14h ago
Even fighter aircraft are about 20x the unit cost in 1991 as they were in 1945, but you're also comparing a total war economy to whatever you would describe US defense now.
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u/robots_love_tacos 22h ago
If you're going to include production costs of all of the planes you should also include the operating costs of all of the Manhattan Project sites along with the cleanup costs (that are still ongoing).
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u/Legatus_Aemilianus 1d ago
The B29 was truly ahead of its time. Its defensive guns used analog computers to calculate where to aim, and it was pressurised. No other bomber came close to it until the Soviets copied the design.
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u/metsurf 1d ago
So are we talking tube-based computers or crystal diodes?
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u/more_than_just_ok 22h ago
Mechanical (gears and machined surfaces) and tube op-amp with resistors and capacitors for solutions to simultaneous algebraic and differential equations. Analog computer design was the opposite of general purpose digital computing in that the machines were built to solve one problem. Google B29 fire control computer for pictures
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u/Germanium235 21h ago
Congrats on not being able to properly compare the costs, and ALSO being unable to understand the difference between R&D and production, and ALSO being unable to distinguish between initial costs and overall program costs. The B-29 program ran for eighteen years, with numerous upgrades, with almost 4,000 units built.
Not to mention that you completely failed to take into account production costs of the first atomic bombs. Look up Oakridge and Hanford, and how much money was spent to build and operate those facilities.
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u/devourke 17h ago
Construction of Oak ridge and Hanford are the vast bulk of the $1.9B project manhattan cost, why do you think they’re not included?
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u/Germanium235 15h ago
Because the OPERATION of those facilities was ridiculously expensive, which is not included in the comparison. Oakridge alone used something like 10% of all electricity in the entire United States while it was running.
If the manufacture of planes is included (not just the R&D), then the operating costs of the nuclear program must also be factored in.
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u/notataco007 23h ago
World War II is so much more advanced than people give it credit for.
Last week there were lots of posts and articles citing "the first" use of a US suicide boat. Bullshit, that was in 1944.
The US also had suicide drones, radar guided guns, radar guided glide bombs, proximity fuse explosives, etc etc.
And I'm bringing this all up because the plane in question had networked, computer assisted aim defensive machine guns.
The technology of this war is absolutely jaw dropping relative to the time.
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u/therealdilbert 22h ago
and the production numbers of all that stuff is completely mind blowing. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-war/war-production
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u/NoWingedHussarsToday 1d ago
And 6 years after it became operational it was already obsolete.
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u/cylonfrakbbq 1d ago
And the B52 is still flying, which is insane when you think about it. I can understand gun platforms having a long life, like the M2, but an airframe is an engineering triumph
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u/LordBrandon 20h ago
But many of the technologies made for B-29 were used on other bombers after it.
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u/Ron0hh 17h ago
But, I bet the cost per plane was significantly less than the cost per nuke.
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u/devourke 17h ago
It 100% was, the actual unit cost for production of 4000 planes was around 2.5B of the 3B total
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u/No-Deal8956 1d ago
To be fair to Boeing, it wasn’t all their fault.
The Duplex-Cyclone engines had an awful habit of going all Heinkel He177 on them, especially during early production. This lead to Boeing spending a lot of money trying to stop them catching fire, which was really Wright’s job. They did get better, but their tendency to light up like the arse end of a Saturn V was never completely eradicated.
The remote turrets cost a fortune to develop, but they did get them working, something Germany never really managed, despite them trying to fit them on every late war two engined aircraft they had. If you look at the size of the fire control unit on a B-29, you’ll understand why.
It was the most complex aircraft ever built at the time, so yeah, it’s gonna cost you.
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u/sharpsicle 1d ago
That’s an apples to oranges comparison, since the plane numbers includes the mass production of it, but the bomb doesn’t. So no, not really accurate.
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u/TheRealColdCoffee 1d ago
Did you saw the latest Vlogging Through History video too?
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u/devourke 22h ago
No, I'm not sure what that is. I was actually on a wiki binge where I went from the Big Dig to this page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megaprojects
I read through the B-29 page and started digging into whatever sources from wiki were actually usable (not a lot, unfortunately, most of them are either old books that weren't available or in the case of one of them, the source seemed to be just irrelevant in general, so I ended up doing some digging outside of wiki to help corroborate what it was saying until I seemed confident enough that it was accurate).
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u/Desertortoise 21h ago
Whether it’s medicine or machinery, the delivery mechanism is often more complicated than the payload.
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u/metsurf 1d ago
The other significant industrial project during WW2 was the development of synthetic rubber. 90 percent of natural rubber production was captured by Japan by early mid 1942. No tires, engine seals, gas masks etc. The Manhattan project was the star but the rubber project did all the grunt work.
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u/Mattloch42 23h ago
Synthetic rubber was already a thing pre WWII. Making it industrial was the trick.
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u/metsurf 21h ago
As long as natural rubber was available it was a research curiosity.
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u/Mattloch42 21h ago
The Department of War did studies and research in the interwar period and even had stockpiled plenty of natural rubber in the 1930s. By 1935 research into synthetics was progressing so quickly that they stopped making plans for it. In 1937 new synthetics were developed that could replace many natural rubber products, and by 1940 Standard Oil had obtained patent rights from I.G. Farben, plus developed their own by mid-year (along with Goodyear with a different variation) superior enough that any disruption in natural rubber from SE Asia could be managed and overcome.
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u/March_-_Hare 23h ago
Well yeah. At the risk of sounding callous, this is partly from the need to deploy any given aircraft with some degree of assurance it’d make it home in more or less one piece, with the plane and all its crew able to fly again with minimal delay. Those are costs that don’t exist in the same way for a single use item for which you’re not assuming an aftercare support liability, and where any of your OH&S obligations conclude while the item is still enroute to the intended recipients.
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u/CommOnMyFace 22h ago
Ask me how long the b-52 is going to fly because of how expensive it is to develop a replacement.
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u/NightOfTheLivingHam 11h ago
My grandpa worked on engineering that plane. He was on the team responsible for providing maximum visibility and keeping the pressure in. That webbed window design was his solution. He was a structural engineer.
Sadly that engineering knowledge cost him to lose out on some insane real estate investments because he said it didnt make sense to live up against the beach because of erosion. He was right, of course, however, that didn't stop people from wanting to buy land on the beach.
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u/MandemModie 20h ago
This is not accurate, which im sure is reflected in the comments. Great gotcha headline tho
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u/Tribe303 1d ago
It was more expensive to build 4000 things than 2 things? Who knew! Thanks for figuring that out Einstein!
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u/Polar_Vortx 21h ago
Also, the normal B-29 did not drop the atomic bomb. It was a special variant known as "Silverplate".
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u/SxpxrTrxxpxr 1d ago
Col. Robert Morgan’s book, The Man Who Flew The Memphis Belle, talks about the B-29 and his missions in them after he came home from Europe. It’s a great book.
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u/Funny-Presence4228 1d ago
Wasn't the release mechanism designed and built by one of the Marx brothers?
Edit: I think I'm right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marman_clamp
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u/ImpossibleCreme 1d ago
Does that cost include the Norden Bombsight? Because the development of that on its own cost more than the atomic bomb
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u/kalnaren 23h ago
And the funny thing was it wasn't even that good, at least not for the type of bombing in the ETO. When the Brits were finally able to test one they found it only slightly better than what they were using, and the Germans were likewise unimpressed with captured units.
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u/devourke 22h ago
I don't believe so; from a little bit of research it seems like the bulk of that cost was shouldered during development of the B-17 platform.
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u/CameronGMann 1d ago
TBF that plane was absolutely cutting edge. Guns, engines, fuel, fussilage. It could theoretically, land on an AC. Not realistically.
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u/Imaginary-Ogre 1d ago
Project Manager - Alright team we got the bomb ready, now how do we get there?
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u/hoojantic 23h ago
Yeah, if you don’t have a way to deliver the package safely you kinda play yourself.
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u/blackhorse15A 21h ago
To be fair, the bombs broke the first time they were used. The plane was reusable and got a lot more missions out of it. Cost per use is important.
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u/chuck-bucket 20h ago
According to the NYTimes, the bomb was funded under the line "Expediting Production" when Congress approved the budget.
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u/hamstervideo 1d ago
That cost includes design AND production of the Superfortress. So that includes the manufacturing costs of 4000 airplanes.