If time, not money, was the crucial issue—in Conant’s words, “if the possession of the new weapon in sufficient quantities would be a determining factor in the war”—then “three months’ delay might be fatal.” It followed that all five methods should be pushed at once, even though “to embark on this Napoleonic approach to the problem would require the commitment of perhaps $500,000,000 and quite a mess of machinery.”1582
