Comment by vessenes
3 hours ago
Others noted this should be $19m, not billion. That said, often a more useful analysis is percent of GDP -- this can give a sense of what fraction of effort of the total economy went into it. On those terms, 1943 GDP: $200bn, 2025 GDP: $30tn, for an increase of 150x.
So, depending on how you count, these were $19-150m each in today's dollars, or between 1/10 and 1/3 of an ASML EUV machine.
Yeah, I honestly wouldn't have commented at all if I had avoided such an embarrassing reading comprehension mistake, since the correct number is not particularly interesting.
My lesson for today is not to trust my ability to count comma separated digit groups.