 Estimates suggest that during the quest to create the atomic bomb, an investment of $2 billion, 86,000 tons of silver and 24,000 skilled workers drove the research and development phase of the project.Those skilled workers included the people to maintain and operate the machinery necessary for research.The largest Western facility had five hundred scientists working on the project, as well as a team of fifty to derive the equations for the cascade of neutrons required to drive the reaction.