" Eventually 395 million troy ounces of silver—13,540 short tons—went off from the West Point Depository to be cast into cylindrical billets, rolled into 40-foot strips and wound onto iron cores at Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee. Solid-silver bus bars a square foot in cross section crowned each racetrack’s long oval. The silver was worth more than $300 million "

― Richard Rhodes , The Making of the Atomic Bomb