It always amazes me how seemingly careless they were with these nuclear devices back then. To know that such a devestating bomb was handled by a sultry, shirtless youngster, in a shed on a small island in the Pacific...
"Immediately, all eight scientists in the room felt a wave of heat accompanied by a blue glow as the plutonium sphere vomited an invisible burst of gamma and neutron radiation into the room. As the lab's Geiger counter clicked hysterically, Louis used his bare hand to push the upper plutonium hemisphere off and onto the floor, which terminated the supercritical reaction moments after it began."
Big oopsie.
However gruesome the goal of these bombs, the rate of advancement in such a short timespan is nothing short of amazing. From the very first successful test (Trinity) to bombing Hiroshima: just 21 days. They were great days for science, but a shame to mankind that it had to come this far.
> "Immediately, all eight scientists in the room felt a wave of heat accompanied by a blue glow as the plutonium sphere vomited an invisible burst of gamma and neutron radiation into the room. As the lab's Geiger counter clicked hysterically, Louis used his bare hand to push the upper plutonium hemisphere off and onto the floor, which terminated the supercritical reaction moments after it began."
Nit pick: What you have described is the incorrect version in the movie "Fat Man and Little Boy". It was a knee-jerk reaction that stopped the supercritical reaction, and it was the beryllium outer sphere which was dropped, not the plutonium core.
Slotin was holding the top half of the beryllium sphere with his thumb which he immediately lifted up due to the intense heat.
> which he immediately lifted up due to the intense heat.
Had he not made this instinctive move, everyone present would have perished and the area would have remained deadly until some other poor soul came upon the tragedy to stop the reaction.
The first-hand accounts of those present are in the thorough official report, which just happens to be collected in John Coster-Mullen's Atom Bombs book.
There was a similar thing somewhere in Russia, I just can't find the link right now....when a scientist spilled some radioactive material, ran out, and then out of fear of prosecution came back to clean it up - died of radiation poisoning shortly after. Anyone remembers which accident was it?
You should read Command and Control which is about the history of nuclear accidents and management in the US. Carelessness didn't go away for a long time, especially in the upper management.
To anyone that wants to read this book (and you should), be prepared to frequently hold one hand under your jaw - to prevent it from hitting the floor when it falls.
A very well-researched book that challenges, adequately in my opinion, some of the fundamental assumptions about nuclear weapons. First and foremost, that "the atomic bombs ended the war with Japan".
The bomb that was tested during Trinity was a plutonium, implosion device, completely different from the uranium, gun-type device dropped on Hiroshima. The designers were so confident of the latter that it was never tested before being deployed.
As I underestand, it was not purely confidence, it was also that there was a major war going on and the expected production rate was low, so the risk of failure in the field was judged a lesser cost than the using up another bomb in testing.
It took basically the entire Manhattan project to create enough U-235 for that single bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was no more U-235 coming, at least not any on a scale or timeline for the war.
It probably would have been more efficient to dilute the U-235 into reactor grade and use it to manufacture weapons grade Plutonium. However at the time the U.S. only had two bombs (the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and it was probably judged politically expedient to drop two instead of one.
Well, there were basically a few different strategies to produce U-235 during the war. For Hiroshima, most of the Uranium came from a very temporary but quicker to setup using an electromagnetic process at Y-12 in Oak Ridge, and that ended with the war. The gaseous diffusion plant at K-25, also in Oak Ridge, came online in 1945 and ended up being the main enricher for much of the cold war; it was a construction marvel, and the fact it was built in 2 years is still remarkable. The US definitely would have been ready to produce many more in not too long for the war had it been needed.
All of these processes were brand new at the time and mostly untested. Plutonium enrichment at the Hanford site used a reactor design that was validated well into the construction of the site. The Manhattan project already had a lot of risks, and they weren't going to attempt chaining projects for something unproven. Real experiments came after the war.
I'm not sure the interval from test to drop is all that meaningful. If you can build one, you can build two.
Also note that the design tested at Trinity was not the design used on Hiroshima. The Little Boy design used on Hiroshima was a gun-type design that was so obvious it would work that it wasn't felt that any testing was required. The Fat Man design used on Nagasaki was vastly more complex (but much more efficient and scalable) that it was felt best to validate it before using it in war.
I occasionally wonder about the atomic bombings and the timing of everything. If the project had been delayed by a year or so, the war would have ended without them. But the development would continue, and the Cold War would no doubt kick off something like it did in reality. But without two examples of the horrors of nuclear war, would the superpowers have been as restrained as they were in reality? Rather than the first (and so far, only) use of nuclear weapons in war being two primitive bombs, it could have been hundreds or thousands, in a war run by people thinking that they were just doing a scaled up version of the city bombing of WWII. It seems like the timing ended up being extremely lucky.
How do we really know this? The Japanese were ready for a long drawn out decades conflict. The US forces were war-weary and war was draining the economy. This could have gone on with quite some time, or ended in a frozen conflict that would reignite periodically. Who knows, but a quick non-nuclear win was certainly not in the cards.
>would the superpowers have been as restrained as they were in reality?
Arguably, if the US used nukes on Chinese soldiers during the Korean conflict, as some generals advised, there would be no North Korea. We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea. Instead we have one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen as a client state of China, who uses China's political influence and muscle to threaten the West with nuclear war every day. So, progress?
Conflicts need to happen. The more we put them off or try to find conditional surrenders or half-assed peace, the more we're asking for more trouble down the line.
imho, the cold war thinkers had no love for humanity and weren't influenced by the bombings in Japan. From a game theory perspective they had no incentive to fight a full scale war because it would annihilate both sides quickly. Its a losing outcome for all. Instead, it led to dozens of brutal proxy conflicts in non-nuclear states paid for by the lives of young men of those states. How many died because of the advance of Communism in Asia? How many states failed because of it? How many did Stalin send to their deaths?
These are not trivial numbers. You still had conflict by the USSR's expansionist agenda, and a serious amount of it, just with conventional arms while nuclear arms largely protected the West from a Soviet surprise nuke attack. Countries without nukes were gristle for the Soviet oppression machine.
> We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea.
Yeah, one large, irradiated South Korea, ruled by a pathetic murderous dictator who would have friends in Washington D.C. instead of Moscow, and who would have killed people throughout the peninsula for being Communists[1], instead of being against Communists.
Yay for progress?
Fuck freedom and democracy. All those talk of freedom didn't do shit when Rhee murdered Koreans, when Park murdered Koreans, and when Chun murdered Koreans.
I know I can't really expect American soldiers to wage wars and get killed just to support the freedom of some third-world country they've never heard of, instead of ensuring the continuing political dominion of the US in a large portion of the world, but people could at least be honest about it.
I don't think there's any chance of the war lasting more than a year or so longer than it did absent nuclear bombing. The US was preparing for a full-scale invasion. That invasion would have succeeded, albeit at great cost. No matter how stubborn the Japanese were about not surrendering, there was simply no way they could mount an effective long-term defense.
Your counterfactual about North Korea seems rather weak. You seem to assume that we'd drop The Bomb and then the war would be won and we'd all go home. But it probably wouldn't have won the war. The Chinese would have been happy to keep on fighting even with nuclear bombardment. All it would have done would be to greatly widen the scope of the war and turn a small proxy war into a general WWIII.
As for the rest, those brutal proxy conflicts were still way better than direct conflicts between great powers, especially a potential large-scale nuclear conflict.
Instead of going for the quick win, you'd rather we had risked an invasion with five- to seven-figure casualties to each side, followed by years of necessarily yet insufficiently brutal occupation, followed in its turn by another war against a nation we'd just finished giving every reason in the world to want to wipe us off the face of the earth?
Japan had already offered a complete surrender, conditional only on the protection of the emperor. They were looking for a way to surrender since at least April, according to the post-war inquiries.
Which inquiries, by whom, of whom, and in what context? Links, please; that doesn't accord with any history of WWII I've ever read, and while I don't assume that makes what you're saying false, I would very much like to evaluate the claim for myself.
The details were in a memo from the president's Chief of Staff, detailing McArthur's accounts of five separate surrender offers. This article gives more details and a lot of sources:
In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:
- Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
- Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
- Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
- Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
- Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
- Surrender of designated war criminals.
Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):
The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.
As we know from 'Operation Valkyrie', high-level officials in the Nazi party wanted to surrender to the allies days after the Normandy landing. The problem is they were not high-level enough, and out-numbered.
And as we can all agree, the emperor played at least as central a role to the Japanese leadership's legitimacy as the Fuhrer did to his.
What the atomic bombs did was made the emperor himself call on his people to surrender. This removed the ability for more hawkish parts of the Japanese leadership to continue a resistance effort, which some surely would have pursued.
Given the sprawling nature of Japanese positions, its deep cultural divides even between army/navy, its hard to know exactly who could authorize a peace treaty and if all other factions would listen to him.
The alternative to invasion was a long-term blockade. Japan was already near the breaking point and there would have been millions dead due to starvation in fairly short order in that scenario.
There was probably no way to beat them without getting a lot of people killed. Leaving them alone was probably not a good option either.
I also feel a need to point out that Japan did invade the US in the Aleutians campaign, albeit a fairly insignificant and deeply out-of-the-way portion of the US. The Philippines could also be considered part of the US at the time the Japanese conquered it, although pretty loosely.
> How many died because of the advance of Communism in Asia?
How many died because the US fought the advance of Communism in Asia?
And why do you believe that it is even your damn business to interfere in countries that are thousands of miles away from the US?
By the way, the General that was responsible for the bombing Japan with nuclear weapons, Curtis LeMay (you can see his signature on one of the photos) was in favor of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and proposed dropping more than 140 nuclear bombs on Russia.
And yes, he was willing to lose US cities due to counter strikes. All that mattered to him was that the US had an advantage at the time, and could win a war.
He also insisted on invading Cuba during the Missile Crisis and almost convinced Kennedy. We are lucky that he failed, because there were already nuclear weapons on Cuba at that time (which he didn't know) and an invasion would have triggered an all out war.
> How do we really know this? The Japanese were ready for a long drawn out decades conflict. The US forces were war-weary and war was draining the economy. This could have gone on with quite some time, or ended in a frozen conflict that would reignite periodically. Who knows, but a quick non-nuclear win was certainly not in the cards.
A quick non-nuclear win was very much on the cards. The soviet union had just entered the war. The navy knew that it couldn't protect the homeland and didn't have any planes. There was, at the very least, a substantial faction in the cabinet that wanted to surrender, and had the support of the emperor in this. Can we be sure the war would have ended quickly? No. Can we be sure that the human cost would have been less than the ~200,000 civilian deaths caused by the bombs? Definitely not - conventional firebombing could have inflicted those kind of casualties if the war had continued for as little as another week or two. But a decade-long conflict or frozen ceasefire is really implausible; the balance of conventional forces was really overwhelming at that point.
> Arguably, if the US used nukes on Chinese soldiers during the Korean conflict, as some generals advised, there would be no North Korea. We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea. Instead we have one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen as a client state of China, who uses China's political influence and muscle to threaten the West with nuclear war every day. So, progress?
You could equally argue that if the US had given up and pulled out of Korea entirely, instead of North and South Korea we'd have a country like Vietnam, which is doing pretty well. Or that if the Soviet Union had used nukes to conquer the world we'd have peace everywhere. Everyone thinks they're the "good guy"; any moral principle that would allow the US to use nukes would seem to allow other countries to do so too.
The project was huge because of the amount of effort it took to assemble and purify the material needed for a bomb. The plutonium bombs were coming online faster, but it was still weeks or months to make one bomb in those days.
I'm not sure if I agree on the superpowers being as restrained as they were. The US and the USSR had over 70,000 nuclear warheads in the 80's... If they showed any restraint, it was more in not using them.
That's what I mean by restraint. They built up a vast arsenal, but never used it.
Imagine the alternate version of something like the Korean War in a world where WWII ended without the use of nuclear weapons. Are the Americans going to refrain from using nuclear weapons on their enemies when the going gets tough in that scenario? My money is on "no", and I'd also wager that the nuclear bombing campaign would last a lot longer, since it would be initiated against countries with a much greater capacity to fight. For example, Mao really didn't seem to care about the potential devastation of nuclear war: "Let us imagine how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world, and a third could be lost. If it is a little higher it could be half ... I say that if the worst came to the worst and one-half dies, there will still be one-half left, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. After a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again."
It is not clear that dropping the bomb was necessary to end the war. Was it even necessary to develop it?
Eisenhower said "it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
At the time Truman said Japan had been "repaid many fold" for Pearl Harbor. In these new images there is a bit of graffiti on the bomb allegedly written by a Rear Admiral: "a second kiss for Hirohito". It seems to me like the mood in the US camp was "let's hit them hard, teach them a lesson." rather than a more considered or balanced calculation.
Edit: in the documentary "The Fog of War" on McNamara, there is discussion of Curtis LeMay's decision to firebomb Tokyo. In that case there was apparently a degree of cool-headed calculation. http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html
Personally I think that dropping the bomb was much less about winning the war and far more about winning the post-war.
They already knew that they could take Japan, it would be nasty, but they could do it. So from that point of view, the bomb was unnecessary. But from a post-war perspective, the West was facing the prospect of a strong aggressive Soviet front. The A-bomb put an instant chill on all post-war aggression and helped encourage the worlds armies to stand down just a little bit.
I think in hindsight it's also worth pointing out that people in general are pretty terrible at judging the consequences of things of that scale. ie. You can describe just how big an explosion a nuclear bomb is going to make, but until one is actually dropped and the casualties start coming in, you don't really comprehend it fully. If those bombs hadn't been dropped, the aversion to destruction might not have been fully ingrained in the minds of every commander and it could well have meant that the Cold War would have turned "Hot".
Yeah, from what I've read on the subject, it seems that it's pretty well understood now that the Soviet Union was as much (or more) the intended "audience" for the A-bombs as Japan....
Pretty scary stuff considering that the main brunt was born by civilians.... oO;
"The use of the atomic bomb would have to be done with visual targeting, not by use of radar. [...] The targets should be 'large urban areas of not less than 3 miles in diameter existing in the larger populated areas… between the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Nagasaki… [and] should have high strategic value.' A list of possible targets that met this criteria was given [...] Of these, Hiroshima was noted as 'the largest untouched target not on the 21st Bomber Command priority list.' Tokyo, on the other hand, was 'now practically all bombed and burned out and is practically rubble with only the palace grounds left standing.' It was further noted that they had to take into account that the policy of the 20th Air Force was now 'systematically bombing out' cities 'with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone lying on the other,' and that they would not likely reserve targets just for the Manhattan Project."
"Stimson left the meeting thinking Truman completely understood the matter, and the final target order — with Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki (the latter added only then) — was sent out.
But what did Truman take away from this meeting? We can look at Truman’s own diary entry from July 25th:
"
This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.
He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.
"
This passage reflects an incredible misconception. Truman appears, here, to believe that Hiroshima was 'a purely military' target, and that 'soldiers and sailors' would be killed, 'not women and children.' But of course every city on that list was inhabited primarily by civilians. And by the calculus of war being waged, every city on that list had a military connection — they produced weapons for the military."
Japan was beaten. They had already offered a complete surrender, conditional only on keeping the emperor, which was rejected by the U.S. Their utter defeat and the hopeless state of their armed forces was well-known by the allies, since their communication encryption had been cracked months earlier.
The real issue was likely that the Soviet Union, positioned to become a formidable power in the post-war theater, had promised to enter the war against Japan on August 6. The Americans needed to make sure that Japan had been defeated by that point and that the U.S. would occupy Japan, not Soviet Russia. Hence the rush to drop the bombs before that.
Also, there was no uncertainty about the lack of military significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the contemporary reports state this clearly, they even warn about the presence of American POWs in the area (which was ignored and they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians).
> Also, there was no uncertainty about the lack of military significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the contemporary reports state this clearly, they even warn about the presence of American POWs in the area (which was ignored and they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians).
Hiroshima was the city that supported the Kure Naval Base and associated anchorage. Nagasaki was a major port that was an adjunct of the Sasebo Naval Base. Those were two of the IJN's four main bases. The impotence of the IJn at this point notwithstanding, I think it is unreasonable to claim they had little military significance.
Whether or not that justified levelling them in what you can argue were just live-fire nuclear tests is a different question.
> They had already offered a complete surrender, conditional only on keeping the emperor, which was rejected by the U.S.
Are you saying the Japanese offered to surrender, with the only condition being maintaining the emperor, prior to the bombing of Hiroshima? My understanding is that was the terms accepted after the atomic bombings and the declaration of war by the USSR.
Yes. According to documents from Roosevelt's office, the Japanese had previously offered surrender on roughly the same terms that the U.S. ultimately accepted after the bombings:
> (which was ignored and they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians).
This is inaccurate. Much fewer than 200,000 people were killed immediately (totaled across both bombings), including both incinerated and not, civilian and not.
Casualties and losses:
20 U.S., Dutch, British prisoners of war killed
90,000–166,000 killed in Hiroshima
39,000–80,000 killed in Nagasaki
Total: 129,000–246,000+ killed
It doesn't say if these are all immediate casualties (does it even matter), but it does mention estimates for Nagasaki immediate casualties is between 22,000-75,000.
You wrote that "they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians", which implies that at least 200,000 Japanese civilians were incinerated in the bombings. The 129,000–246,000+ killed figure you cite covers 2-4 months after the bombings. I am confident that no one was incinerated 2 or more months after the bombing.
Wikipedia gives an immediate death toll of 70,000–80,000 people, of whom 20,000 were soldiers for Hiroshima and 22,000-75,000 people for Nagasaki. This is far from hundreds of thousands of incinerated civilians.
I'm sure you're trying to make a point here. But the fact is upwards of 80 THOUSAND people died immediately. Not sure what this hair splitting accomplishes.
I'm not trying to make a point. I just got the impression that upwards of 200,000 people were incinerated in the bombings, but I was skeptical of that number. I investigated a bit and just wanted to leave a note that the number was incorrect.
I don't think 120,000 lives qualifies as splitting hairs. I thought I was delivering good news, but judging by my karma, it has not been well received.
Trying to win by bombing civilians was a common theme in world war two. From British Air Staff papers (1941)[1]...
The ultimate aim of an attack on a town area is to break the
morale of the population which occupies it. To ensure this,
we must achieve two things: first, we must make the town
physically uninhabitable and, secondly, we must make the people
conscious of constant personal danger. The immediate aim, is
therefore, twofold, namely, to produce (i) destruction and
(ii) fear of death.
Whilst that strategy may have worked in Japan with the atomic bombs it was hardly successful in Europe. And surely the impact was on the high command and political leadership rather than normal people.
Arguably the only civilian bombing success in Europe was the August 1940s RAF air raid on Berlin... inasmuch as it angered Hitler into diverting the Luftwaffe's resources away from a relatively effective campaign of targeting airfields and ports towards a useless campaign of indiscrimate city bombing.
You are confusing two moral issues. You're talking about revenge, and the Christian moral position is of course, that nothing justifies revenge.
(But keep in mind, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and others all regulate revenge instead. Revenge is certainly justified under those moral systems, and the revenge is usually bigger than the event that "justified" the revenge. Judaism, but especially Islam is especially famous for having revenge punishments so extreme (I should say so extremely stupid) that they have triggered civil wars on occasion (of course these come from the Roman Empire's late-empire laws, which had a justice system that can reasonably be called "based on terror"). Which moral system is right ?)
The moral issue here is the duty to stop or at least contain moral wrongs in progress, e.g. this Unit 731, the Soviet Union, ... The key difference being that revenge is after the fact and is unnecessary. The key thing about revenge is that it makes society worse off in the short term, both the person taking revenge and the person being punished (e.g. kids destroying a toy rather than giving it back).
To fight moral wrongs in progress the moral position is that it is justified to use any amount of force, but comparable force should be tried first. Collateral damage should be avoided, but if you can't stop a criminal without causing collateral damage, then it is acceptable to, for example, destroy property (if the police destroys your front door chasing a robber, you will not receive compensation, nor if they burn down your house, though insurance usually covers this). If someone fights, beat him a bit and lock him up. If someone has a knife or a gun and is (trying to) kill people, shoot him. If a country is raping and killing half a continent, ...
This differentiation can be found in the bible, and in any sane moral text. Hell, it can be found in the UNCHR (united nations convention on human rights).
Considering that the "peace" faction's strategy was to force an invasion and massive casualty's (98% wastage for the first 5 waves) to help a negotiated settlement I think Pres Eisenhower is as naive as Chamberlin was prior to ww2
> Considering that the "peace" faction's strategy was to force an invasion and massive casualty...
The notion that the alternative to the bombings was an invasion is an utterly pernicious falsehood. It is a matter of record that Japan had offered to surrender prior to the bombings, conditional only upon retaining the emperor. Those terms were subsequently accepted, after the bombings. The "peace" faction's strategy was to accept the surrender before conducting the bombings.
You may be right, I don't know enough to say. Perhaps it was wishful thinking in retrospect. (He said it in the 1960s when the nuclear genie was definitely out of the bottle and causing major headaches for everyone.)
There is a 1950s fictional film by Akira Kurosawa called "I Live in Fear" which tells the story of a man driven mad by fear of radiation from a nuclear war. For better or worse it is easy to forget now what a catastrophic thing the introduction of the bomb was for everyone.
d don't for get that American politicians saw what the butchers bill for Verdun and Somme did t France and England.
What if 4 or 5 years after the war it turns out that the president had a wonder weapon that could have ended the war in a week and saved 1/2 a million GI's - it would have been the end for the democratic party when that came out.
Ignoring the nuclear device aspect of it, I would think that these days anyone spraying any kind of sealant or paint these days in a commercial setting would have PPE to avoid breathing the stuff in.
As well as the health and safety aspect I imagine that during times of war, your personal long term health outlook pales in comparison to the short-medium term survival possibilities.
Hence, I imagine that many servicemen and women didn't see themselves as having a long life span. Maybe not consciously, but certainly subconsciously.
I'm no nuclear physicist but I think there wasn't a danger of dropping the a-bomb accidentally. If I recall from reading about it the a-bomb needed a huge electronic catalyst to start the fission processes. In fact a lot of time was spent setting up the timer to determine when to start the reaction during the bomb descent. I'm just recollecting so i could be wrong.
The Hiroshima bomb, which was a uranium gun bomb, was quite easy to set off accidentally. It was just a gun tube, with a propellant charge of powder in a silk bag, just like naval guns of the period, and fired by an ordinary detonator. The crew of the Enola Gay was under orders that if they had to return to base, they were to drop the bomb into deep water, rather than trying to land with it. It could easily have been set off in a crash or fire.
The plutonium bomb was an implosion bomb, and had to be set off with the simultaneous (< 1us difference) firing of all the explosive lenses to get a symmetrical compression. This was done by charging up a big capacitor bank and discharging it through a krytron switch (like a thyatron or SCR; there's a turn-on gate, but no turn-off) into resistance wires used as detonators. There were no intermediate explosive detonators; they weren't consistent enough on timing. Any inconsistency on timing would cause the explosion to blow out on one side rather than achieving full compression. That still might produce a "fizzle yield", tons rather than kilotons of TNT.
"Single point detonation safe" bombs came years later.
In reality, the early weapons were not "single-point safe". That means that should a single one of those shaped charges be fired via static electricity, etc., that there would be at the least severe contamination and quite likely somewhat of a yield.
The original nuclear bombs used hi voltage detonators, detonators which were incredibly highly sensitive - and they all had to be connected by hand just before the bomb was loaded. If you read the command&conquer book that was linked to above you will see that the risks that were being taken with early designs were just insane and it's incredible that we have not had an accidental detonation during the cold war.
You're right, there wasn't any immediate danger of fission. It's just that now we know how deadly and powerful these things were, it seems almost endearing to see them being handled this way.
Are they? These aren't the multi-megaton nuclear behemoths that people associate with nukes post-cold war. Those bombs are three orders of magnitude more powerful than the one shown in the picture. This bomb is probably comparable to a warehouse full of conventional weapons, which the shirtless youngster was probably manhandling in his everyday work.
And unlike a conventional weapon, it's pretty hard for a nuke of this design to accidentally explode.
There were a few nearly identical incidents. Another involved someone working alone after hours dropping the last block of plutonium/uranium onto a stack during criticality testing after realizing that it was going to go critical, and removing it by hand.
Its pretty amazing that the test procedure for determining the critical mass was essentially "stack these blocks of plutonium/uranium (by hand) until the neutron detector starts going off, and then take one away"
> There were a few nearly identical incidents. Another involved someone working alone after hours dropping the last block of plutonium/uranium onto a stack during criticality testing after realizing that it was going to go critical, and removing it by hand.
IIRC, that incident happened with the same sphere of plutonium, causing it to be called the "Demon Core".
I have had a lot of oh shit moments in my days, but none gets close to dropping the plutonium onto the uranium and nearly detonating a nuclear payload.
It wouldn't have detonated. The worst that would have happened... is exactly what did happen. Lots of radiation release and the death of one nuclear scientist that should have been more careful (he died of radiation sickness a few days later).
Yea, after reading the article fully I wish I could edit my comment a bit. It isn't really amazing when 3 people died because of it (2 other scientists apparently later died as well).
Or accidently dropping a tungsten carbide brick on the plutonium bomb core, for that matter...(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_K._Daghlian,_Jr.)
That picture fascinates me. It's like a deadly game of Jenga.
> I have had a lot of oh shit moments in my days, but none gets close to dropping the plutonium onto the uranium and nearly detonating a nuclear payload.
Not possible for a plutonium device, and this is why the implosion method was so technically challenging. The plutonium must be transitioned from subcritical to supercritical very, very fast to achieve any significant nuclear energy release. In the final design, shaped plastic explosives, chosen for their very high velocities, were used to compress the plutonium from all directions simultaneously, very fast. Then, after the compression phase is complete, a carefully timed burst of neutrons triggers the nuclear fission event.
To know that such a devestating bomb was handled by a sultry, shirtless youngster, in a shed on a small island in the Pacific...
Consider this: even if that "youngster" wasn't filtered out from his contemporaries due to his skills or character, he still came from a generation that was engaged in a war that had taken the lives of friends, family and neighbors. It was also probably also obvious by then that you don't mess around with bombs, regardless of how they worked.
I'd wager that the average "youngster" during WW2 was a great deal more responsible than their modern-day counterparts of similar age.
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/dp... is a fantastic book for anybody in a technical field. It describes in precise detail how a team of scientists, materials engineers, and government came together to make possible something that started as theoretical physics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves were a fascinating team, Oppenheimer being a physicist and Groves an Army general.
Its sequel, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb [1] is also great. It deals with Edward Teller's hydrogen bomb, the nuclear spies (Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, etc.), the beginning of the cold war, Oppenheimer's ambitious attempts at atomic regulation, and his subsequent trial. TMAB stands out, however; it is superb in its panoramic, often lyrical depiction of science and philosophy coming together in a broad cast of scientists. Much of Dark Sun is about spies, cops and military figures, and its subject matter is somewhat more prosaic.
So if the airmen wore shirts and were less sexy, you'd feel the whole situation was more safe? Or, do you need to take a time out and have a cold shower? Because it kinda of sounds like you are one Tom of Finland book away from hyperventilating.
This sort of appeal to superficial appearances generally doesn't hunt on HackerNews.
That's hilarious! Imagine sitting in the mess hall, overhearing two men discussing their day:
"I'm working on a cunning plan. It involves bombs, strapped to bats. What are you working on?"
"Oh, just a nuclear fission device. When it goes supercritical it's.. oh well, never mind. Tell me more about the bats!"
I found out a few weeks ago they made a bunch of those bombs, minus the nuclear elements, for training. They even dropped some on Japanese targets and found they were fairly effective just from the explosive content.
huh.. you're right. I assumed that anything the military bought these days came with a 1/4 million dollar price tag, but the Mark 84 bomb is only about twice the price per lb of the pumpkin bombs.
Wow. There's an industry in massive need of disruption. I'm thinking a mid-range android phone + some servos + software would do the trick. Let's say one year's dev for a reasonable engineer, so $100k + $300 in parts. Make a 1-Iraq-war-day's worth, and you'd have the unit price down to hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands.
You'll need radiation hardening, a more precise inertial measurement unit (six axis gyro), and extreme reliability and lifetime that no consumer electronics device provides. The labor and materials cost, plus electronics mentioned above, is a lot more than $300. I also doubt you'll find a single engineer with the required aerospace and electrical engineering skills - you don't build an flight control surface control system with some 'ninjas' working on node.js in SF in a year.
I also haven't gotten into the business and logistics costs of pulling this off, but consider the fact that there is not even a RFP for such a device in existence.
Radiation hardening is a requirement to protect the arsenal from EMP attacks in a large scale conflict with a nuclear component. This will hopefully be a rare or nonexistent occurrence, and hardening should not be considered a requirement for bombs used on Al Qaeda and IS (and nearly all other expected enemies). There is a place for radiation hardened munitions in the arsenal for deterrance, and there is also a place for some that are not, and these should be the ones we drop in "low intensity" conflicts, with the occasional release of a hardened munition to act as a quality control test.
Reliability is obviously a concern, but the procurement process should force contractors to open their designs to qualified competitors after a certain period of monopoly profits to recoup their research expenses, sort of like the same way that brand name drugs are eventually forced to compete with generics. Just because these designs are generally national security secrets doesn't mean that the original developer should own the equivalent of an infinite patent on the technology.
Even if you do that and build one. You'll need to spend many many times over that budget lobbying, making friends, getting noticed and networking, formalizing through red tape and so.
Imagine today you have that device in your table. Ok. What is your next step. Just show up at the Pentagon with it in your bag?
A lot of that costs money (unfairly probably) and that is one of the reasons soldiers sometimes end with crappy hardware that costs some astronomical amounts.
Sigh. I should have pointed out that I used to be an Air Force engineer. Although my post was a massive oversimplification, it was not for any of the reasons you pointed out. No, dev time would not be more than 1 engineer, at least not for the bomb guidance part. Most bombs that are dropped do not need massive accuracy - anywhere in a 10m radius will do the job nicely. There ate a few targets where you want 1m accuracy, but that's the exception. A phone 'a sensors should be able to do the job sufficiently well.
No, where you're really going to get burned in dev is hooking the bomb up to the aircraft's targeting system. That's a world of pain right there. The best solution might probably involve making a Bluetooth widget that hooks up to the aircraft and then talks to the bomb via radio. They could be pre-paired in the factory. Not ideal though. You're also going to need to spend a ridiculous sum of money on sales, just to get your foot in the door.
A mark 84 bomb, one of the largest conventional munitions in frequent use, costs about 3k a piece. The mark 84's smaller cousins are cheaper. JDAM kits costs about 27k a piece. How am I making things up?
Actually, the purpose of the bomb was to save many thousands more lives than it ended. An invasion of Japan would've cost an enormous number of lives. It would've also had a catastrophic effect on the civilian population, because they were being told that the American troops were there to enslave them. It has even been said that the propaganda being told to the Japanese civilians included the idea that the troops would kill and cannibalize their families. I'm not sure whether that latter part is true, but what is true is that the civilians were extremely incentivized to be as hostile as possible to any American invasion army, even to the extent of whole families committing suicide out of fear of being enslaved or tortured, as on Okinawa.
Simultaneously, 42,000–150,000 local civilians were killed or committed suicide, a significant proportion of the local population.
Human affairs are sometimes terrible, but they often take the least terrible path out of all terrible paths. This is evidenced by the fact that the cuban missile crisis didn't result in an all-out nuclear war, and also that these bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than Americans invading Japan, which would have been far more devastating.
Casualty predictions varied widely but were extremely high. Depending on the degree to which Japanese civilians resisted the invasion, estimates ran into the millions for Allied casualties.
I upvoted you because I agree that everyone should be terrified at the prospect of war, because war only happens when people aren't terrified of it.
While there are many people who subscribe to your view, there are an equal number who believe that Japan would have surrendered within months/weeks with no ground invasion.
The allies had complete air and naval superiority and Russia had joined the the Japanese war theatre.
If you have read the ethics of atomic bombings in any detail you are already aware of the details, so I would refrain from linking to wikipedia. To push your POV that the bombing was entirely necessary and entirely morally right is immoral.
I'm not aware of the ethical details, so feel free to correct me. It's my understanding that invasion was imminent at the time of the bombings, so America's choice was either to send bombs or soldiers. If that was truly their choice, it seems hard to argue that the bomb was the less ethical.
It's fine to say that Japan would have surrendered without invasion, but such a strong assertion needs to be backed by equally strong evidence.
EDIT: An excerpt from your link:
This conclusion assumed conventional fire bombing would have continued, with ever-increasing numbers of B-29s, and a greater level of destruction to Japan's cities and population.
It seems hard to argue that literally firebombing an entire civilization into stoneage living conditions was more ethical than forcing a quick political decision to surrender and stop the madness. Can you imagine trying to live without basic necessities? Even if nobody was dropping bombs on you directly, you, your family, and everyone around you would be the definition of misery for the duration of the firebombing. The firebombing didn't simply destroy military targets. It also decimated infrastructure that we take for granted, such as the ability to deliver drinkable water, or to seek medical treatment at hospitals. How many were to die a miserable death due to the firebombing before Hiroshima and Nagasaki could objectively be called the more ethical decision?
Also, the above analysis assumes both sides had perfect information. But information during wartime is asymmetric. It's entirely possible that America had no knowledge of the Japanese political framework at the time the decision to drop the bombs was made. If the Japanese were broadcasting their intention to surrender before the bombs were dropped, that would be different, but it doesn't seem like that was the case.
Would you mind helping me understand why firebombing was more ethical than the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
> It's fine to say that Japan would have surrendered without invasion, but such a strong assertion needs to be backed by equally strong evidence.
This was shown by post-war inquiries. Japan had already offered a complete surrender, contingent only on preserving the emperor. They had been trying to surrender since April, according to documents leaked by the president's Chief of Staff, on roughly the same terms that the Americans ultimately accepted.
The rush to drop the bombs was that the Soviet Union had promised to join the war against Japan on August 10, giving the Western allies only a few days to make sure that they would be the ones occupying Japan, not the Soviets.
A cynic might also suspect a bit of enthusiasm among U.S. military to field test the power of their new weapon.
I don't see a whole lot of point to discussing what we think Japan would have done, given the information that we have now. I have seen some of the research suggesting that Japan was more concerned about Russia's declaration of war than the atomic bombings, and might have surrendered based on that alone. But that research is based on a bunch of historians with unlimited access to Japanese records of high-level meetings and conversations, and all the time in the world to research, correlate, and discuss things.
They may well be right, but American Military officers making decisions couldn't possibly know any of that. All they can know is what the Japanese government has said and done, and anything that their intelligence sources can pick up, which may or may not be believable. Everything they would have seen up to that point says that Japan is ruthless and determined to not surrender, and they can only be convinced otherwise if it's clear that they face total destruction otherwise. I can't see how any information available to them points to any other conclusion than that the bomb should be dropped as soon as it's ready to bring an end to the war as quickly as possible.
It's immoral to state one's opinion? If he truly believes that the bombing was the best outcome, how was that immoral?
Note that even with the bombing and the Soviet intervention, there was a military coup aimed at preventing the surrender that very nearly succeeded. The contingent of the Japanese government that felt it was better to be obliterated than to surrender was large and powerful.
One could certainly argue that they would be overcome as the realities of the situation set in, but one could also argue that they wouldn't.
It is, as you say, debatable. Which makes it odd that you just dismiss the other side so readily.
I believe the parent was relating what was believed at the time, not what is common knowledge today. I'm not sure he's pushing his views on anyone, but more relating what the view at the time was. Careful of cognitive dissonance here - what once once was isn't necessarily what is today.
I apologize if it sounded like I was pushing my opinion on anyone. It wasn't my intent. I'm only here to learn, so I genuinely hope people will correct me when I'm wrong.
The purpose of the nuclear bomb was the same as the purpose of strategic bombing in general - to destroy buildings and infrastructure and kill people indiscriminately. The nuclear bomb was not fundamentally different in that aspect - strategic bombings had been going on for years and was highly destructive and deadly already. For example the firebombing of Tokyo with conventional bombs killed more people than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. So the use of nuclear bomb did not require any special explanation or justification. It was natural extension of the strategy in use.
Of course it can be said that the purpose of the use of any weapon is to win and thereby end the was sooner, hence saving lives in the long run. In that case the purpose of any bomb, tank, landmine or gun is to save lives.
One can entertain the idea that the eventual outcome was ultimately better for all parties than the alternatives (though it's far from clear that's the case when the alternatives included "not playing hardball over unconditional surrender" and the scientists' favoured alternative of "demonstrate the bomb in a relatively benign manner") but the minutes of the meetings that made the decision quite explicitly discuss relative merits of targets in terms of the anticipated destructive effect on civilians, speaking favourably about wiping out Kyoto because of its high concentration of intellectuals before ultimately choosing Hiroshima over more obvious military targets because it "has the advantage of being such a size and with possible focusing from nearby mountains that a large fraction of the city may be destroyed" (and not really being militarily significant, it was largely undamaged). The notion that the surviving Japanese might ultimately be better off doesn't seem to have featured so highly in the decision-making calculus.
It's not like the country would have meekly gone home to lick its wounds, had the nasty Americans only left them alone. Remember the war started because of Japan's imperialistic dreams in SE Asia.
You might have visions of the U.S. systematically destroying any Japanese war power that ventured out for conquest while leaving the home islands untouched, but that kind of shepherding requires a degree of total military superiority we did not posses at the time.
You should look into the history of the relationship between e.g. Japan and Korea or Japan and China and see if anything interesting happened during the late 1930s or early 1940s. It might be the case that there were concerns other than simply "Will Japan attack the mainland".
This was the moment at which the Bushido Code really did the Japanese no favors. The island hopping campaign had been brutal. It did not take a great deal of imagination to make an assault on the Home Islands daunting.
Things I've read indicate that there was an actual lack of trusted comms between the Imperial staff and the U.S. I believe things were going through the Soviets. Some credit that with leaving enough gap to make any offer of surrender much slower and harder to verify. And there was allegedly a power struggle within the Imperial chain of command.
You have to look at these things in the context of the war that had been going on for years at the time. Imperial Japan had attacked, invaded, and occupied any neighbors who had resources they might need or who otherwise might oppose them. That occupation often came with brutality and oppression at a scale that would make the Nazis blush.
When the US entered the war, one of their first moves was unrestricted submarine warfare, meaning any Japanese ship is sunk on sight, regardless of who or what is onboard or where it is heading. It continued with sinking many naval fleets, re-invading many islands, generally resulting in the death of basically everyone in the Japanese garrison, as it was part of their code to kill themselves or carry out suicide attacks rather than surrender.
Continuing on, we have the unrestricted aerial bombing of basically every city in Japan. The only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively untouched so late in the war was that they were exempted from conventional bombing for the purpose of evaluating the effectiveness of the atomic bombs when they were ready. Many of the conventional bombing raids caused greater death and destruction than the atomic bombings.
In light of all of this, suggesting a demonstration of the bomb seems kinda pointless. The Imperial Japanese administration would probably interpret such an act as saying that America didn't have the courage to carry out major attacks, thus encouraging them to hold out longer and requiring more destruction in the end to force a surrender. The bombings were terrible, but the real suffering was the war itself, and the only way to stop it was to force the surrender of Imperial Japan as quickly as possible. Against such an enemy, the best way to end the war with as much of Japanese society as possible still intact was to demonstrate total ruthlessness in doing anything in our power to destroy Japanese infrastructure and kill Japanese citizens as quickly as possible.
> It strikes me as pure evil that the very first use of nuclear energy was to drop a massive bomb over a bunch of fellow humans.
Atomic weapons are a natural evolutionary step up from conventional explosives, which are a natural evolutionary step up from clubs and rocks. All this talk about atomic weapons being qualitatively different (as opposed to quantitatively different) is mostly hyperbole, with one exception -- only wealthy industrial powers can create them ... so far.
> Surely the force of nuclear weapons could have been demonstrated without actually dropping it on a concentration of living, healthy people.
The people in charge decided that a demonstration wouldn't stop the war or the need to use the new weapons, and later events proved them right. Contrary to what many Americans believe, the Japanese didn't surrender because of the atomic bombings, but because Russia invaded Manchuria, a development the Japanese saw as much more dangerous than atomic bombs.
>The people in charge decided that a demonstration wouldn't stop the war or the need to use the new weapons, and later events proved them right. Contrary to what many Americans believe, the Japanese didn't surrender because of the atomic bombings, but because Russia invaded Manchuria, a development the Japanese saw as much more dangerous than atomic bombs.
If that is the case, then that proves they were dead wrong about their justification for the necessity of dropping those bombs in the first place. Why tell everyone "we need to bomb" in order for Japan to surrender when you knew it wouldn't stop the war?
> Why tell everyone "we need to bomb" in order for Japan to surrender when you knew it wouldn't stop the war?
For various political reasons (I'm not justifying this, only explaining it). The Manhattan Project began in response to the perceived threat that Germany might create an atomic weapon. In 1945, with Germany out of the picture, and with no alternative, people began to talk about using it against Japan. It was realized that, if we didn't force Japan to surrender to us, they would surrender to the Russians, with unimaginable postwar consequences.
Again, I'm only explaining the thinking of the time, not justifying it.
After the war, it was discovered that Germany was nowhere near creating an atomic bomb, but it came out that Japan was actively pursuing this class of weapon and was technically farther ahead, lacking only the raw materials. In the closing days of the war, a German submarine was intercepted trying to deliver uranium to Japan for use in a nuclear weapon they planned to build and use against the U.S. :
There are a number of errors in the photo captions, so for the record:
1. The "Little Boy" device, cylindrical in shape, was a U-235 gun-type device that was so simple in its design that it was dropped -- on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 -- without having been tested first. The U-235 was extraordinarily expensive to produce, taking up a large percentage of the Manhattan Project budget and several years. Two independent programs using different methods were designed to produce sufficient U-235, which needs to be separated from the much more abundant and non-fissioning U-238 isotope. The expense of extracting U-235 is the reason that only one such bomb was used, and only a few were ever built.
2. The "Fat Man" bomb design used an isotope of plutonium (Pu-239) that was bred in fission reactors in Hanford, WA and Oak Ridge, TN over a relatively short time and at much lower cost. This bomb was tested at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945, in advance of its use on Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) because its implosion design was much more complex than the uranium bomb.
3. All modern fission weapons, and the trigger devices in fusion weapons, are design descendants of the Pu-239 "Fat Man" device that was dropped on nagasaki.
Given the secrecy surrounding the bombs, it is highly likely that not one of them had any idea what it was they were assembling/loading into the plane. All they likely knew was that it was "some kind of new, secret, bomb". It is questionable whether the "high ranking officials" referenced in the plane alignment photo caption even had much knowledge of just what this "new, secret, bomb" really was.
I think most of them had an idea about atomic bombs back then, and what they were doing could end the war. Robert Heinlien was investigated by the FBI in the late 30's due to a description of atomic bombs in a story he'd written. So the idea was out there so to speack.
What they were ignorant of, I'm pretty sure, was the actual magnitude of the destruction caused by the devices. My father was about 10 yrs old at the time, he was deeply effected by news reels at the time. The tragedy was horrific.
The atomic bombs were not more devastating to Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were conventional bomb campaigns to other similar cities in Japan toward the end of World War II. The damage from atomic bombs did not stand out as extraordinary to the Japanese leadership at the time. What forced Japan to surrender was Russia's declaration of war. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di...
" ... But if you graph the number of people killed in all 68 cities bombed in the summer of 1945, you find that Hiroshima was second in terms of civilian deaths. If you chart the number of square miles destroyed, you find that Hiroshima was fourth. If you chart the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima was 17th. Hiroshima was clearly within the parameters of the conventional attacks carried out that summer. ..."
Now chart out the number of planes used in the attack and the potential rate of attacks once the production pipeline really got going. That's what made it remarkable. A thousand B-29s fly over your city and leave it a smoking ruin is Tuesday, but two B-29s fly over and do the same and that's something new and scary.
Contrary to your statement that the attack was considered unremarkable, reports of the attack were initially disbelieved by the Japanese government because they knew of nothing that had occurred that could have caused such damage: "It was generally felt at Headquarters that nothing serious had taken place, that it was all a terrible rumor starting from a few sparks of truth."
The ultimate effect of the atomic bombings on the surrender compared to the Soviet intervention is highly debatable, of course, but it wasn't irrelevant just because it wasn't the most devastating attack of the war.
Its more like saying that a single bomb that kills 500 is on par with an attack by an army in which 500 are shot dead.
I agree with that idea. Apart from the fact that they were single-plane attacks, there was little that set the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings apart from what happened to almost every city in Japan. Yes, radiation sickness is awful, but so are napalm burns on half your skin.
One thing that I wonder about whenever this subject comes up is whether it would have been cheaper to deploy use conventional bombs against those targets. It would have been fairly easy to send a thousand bombers with conventional payloads (or just 200 that made 5 sorties each)
We know a few other things too. For example, we know that anyone who confidently and bluntly asserts that "if X had been done Y would have happened" is not contributing to any useful discussion. People rarely know why they are doing what they are doing today, and certainly know almost nothing about why someone else did something half a century ago.
We can point to things people said and did in the past and make informed judgements about the plausibility of various reasons they had for doing what they did, but again: anyone who asserts bluntly and with confidence that "Japan would have surrendered if..." or "Japan did surrender because..." isn't helping.
Japan surrendered after Nagasaki was bombed. Some people think this shows that Hiroshima alone was not enough to convince the Japanese government that the new weapon would turn the tide of war against them.
Russia declared war on Japan after Hiroshima was bombed. Some people think this was important to Japan's surrender, but would it have happened without the bomb?
Japan had a history of fighting for every inch of territory. Some people think a conventional invasion would have resulted in a rapid conquest.
Area bombing in Europe had a relatively small effect on the Axis war effort, and an awareness of this was growing within the Allied command. Within military circles there tends to be a feeling that if something isn't working the best thing is to do more of it. The bomb was more of it. Thus, the ineffectiveness of area bombing in Europe may have contributed to the decision to use the bomb in Japan.
And so on...
It is worth noting that war itself is almost always strongly motivated by counter-factuals. "If we just bomb the enemy they will surrender" (they don't: they become more dogged in defense until they demonstrably face total destruction). "If we engage in horrific acts of terrorism the enemy will run in fear!" (they don't: terrorist organizations that employ violence against civilians have a zero--yes, zero--rate of effectiveness in achieving their goals: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/792/why_terr...)
All we can say with anything remotely resembling certainty was that the bombs did drop and the war did end. We can make some informed guesses about why both sides decided the way they did. We can say virtually nothing with any certainty at all about what would have happened if any major decision had been different... except maybe one.
What if Japan had never attacked Pearl Harbor? This is a counter-factual that people who are wont to make blunt, confident predictions about "what would have happened" had the Allies never destroyed Hiroshima or Nagasaki are generally surprisingly silent about, yet it is one of the few things that would plausibly (not certainly) have avoided the subsequent destruction of those cities.
I agree with most of your post, but I don't find the idea of Japan not attacking Pearl Harbor very plausible/useful. It had been clear for years that, given Japan's imperial ambitions and the US's desire to maintain their own influence over the region, that the two would come into conflict eventually. Japan at the time would not accept kowtowing to US power and influence without a fight. Exactly how and when that fight would start could have varied any number of ways, but I think the fight was inevitable.
Arguably, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was the best move they could have made, considering their position. They did succeed in limiting US naval power in the Pacific for the 6 months that Yamamoto estimated.
I was thinking more along the lines of the ensuing nuclear arms race, nuclear proliferation, MAD, etc. The fact that the bomb worked, and worked so well (regardless of its effect on the outcome of the war) definitely contributed to this.
Sure, if it hadn't worked, they may have tried again, and the next attempt may have led to all these things, but fact is, it DID work, and everyone in these photos contributed to it (knowingly or unknowingly).
Just a day on the job as far as they were concerned. As with many things you might do, you only realize what you were doing was important (often) long after the fact.
Edit: He's also the guy who deduced the most probable internal configuration of Little Boy, and built an inert 1:1 scale model which was presented to and signed by the living members of the 509th Bomb Wing.
It is a bit unfortunate that many of the captions and the sequence of photos are inaccurate. There are many misses regarding which bomb was which and on which plane it was loaded and on which city it was felled.
So, look at the pictures and ignore the captions and then read up on Wikipedia to understand the bigger picture.
Remember that for Shellshock, it doesn't matter what language the CGI is written in, depending on how your server is configured to pass on environment variables... :-)
Most of the radioactivity danger from nuclear weapons and reactors relates to the byproducts of the fission process, rather than to the original fissile material.
My grandfather was a mechanic in the Enola Gay's bomber group. He mentioned that his personal bar for heat and humidity are from some of the islands they setup airfields on in the Pacific. Considering he spent a fair amount of his career following that war in LA maintaining the B52 air wings I tend to wonder why more of them aren't wearing shirts.
Most of the local people on Tinian and the other northern Mariana islands historically haven't worn shirts, male or female, although standards of dress on those islands have of course westernized somewhat since Western colonization. The climate there is very suitable for going shirtless at many times of the year.
It helps to understand how it actually works. The s in its does not point towards possession, it is simply part of the word "its".
My, His, Hers, Ours, Yours, Theirs, Its.
Not Me's, He's, She's, Us's, Your's, Their's, It's.
English is an easy language. Most languages use a lot more words than all that to convey all that. English speakers don't have to deal with the singular second person, with a separate objective noun for you/he/she, with neutrals (heck, barely at all with the feminine), and so on.
Argh... now I really got it backwards. What I meant to say was that one does not write "shes", one writes "her", and not "wes" but "our". And that does not apply to "it".
To summarize, comparison to other personal pronouns is irrelevant since "it" has a special combination of rules.
I'm not sure how "it" is special". Because its possessive ends in an s? So do "theirs", "hers", and "ours" (which I think are the ones you meant).
I think you're having a hard time because you're overcomplicating the matter. "its" is the possessive of "it". "it's" is a contraction of "it is". Possessives adjectives: My, Your, His, Her, Their, Its. Possessive pronouns: Mine, Yours, His, Her, Theirs, Its. You have four less to remember than with most languages :)
I'm not sure why you need to tell me I'm having a hard time. I don't feel like having a hard time with this issue. Also I'm not overcomplicating anything.
You said it yourself: you're not sure how "it" is special. I'm sorry, I cannot help you any further. Maybe others in this thread can.
The brain is an incredible pattern recognition machine.
The regular form of possessive is 's. That is, when it's right to add an s to a noun indicate possession we add an apostrophe. This is more regular than a lot of english rules. So now there are pronouns. They are a bit weird, carrying some strange stuff from germanic languages about changing the word based on the case (sometimes). For the most part, it's pretty straightforward still.
Now we get to the word its. Yeah, it's a pronoun, but it follows the possessive pattern of adding an s. So 'it' follows the pronoun pattern of changing the word, but it also phonetically follows the regular noun pattern of adding an s.
In this one special case, there are two patterns being followed at the same time. Except not really, because unlike all the other cases where the s is appended for possession, we don't mark it different.
This is of course because there is a form of the phonetic 'its', which is spelled "it's" . This word is very similar to its, but it really is a contraction (a special word that actually means two words, but we're lazy and drop some of letters from the second word) in this case, "it's" is ("it's"'s :) ) short for it is. That phrase of course is not about possession, but it does describe a quality possessed by the thing referred to by "it".
Of course on top of all this, we have yet another use in english for the 's construct. It is related to the "it's", because it not only denotes possession, but also denotes a contraction with is, or with has (which itself is a completely different rant - have and is are arbitrarily used in all sorts of languages) like described above for it's , but more generally.
That means the the sentence:
Bob's going to Bob's house.
Is a correct way of using the 's in two different meanings...
Bob is going to the house Bob owns.
Yet, if was talking about a robot...
Robot is going home. Its house has its charger and it's going to plug in.
So yeah, English is super duper easy! I mean, how hard is it for our pattern matching machines to not realize that contracting with is means 's, that possession which is phonetically an s sound is spelled 's, and pronouns use different words for different cases, these are all pretty regular occurrances, EXCEPT when talking about spelling the pronoun its, which despite its appearance and phonetics of being a pronoun that follows noun rules, is actually a separate word arbitrarily. I mean, who would ever get confused by the 's pattern not applying in this one case? It's a special case of a special case and should be extremely obvious.
I know you're being snarky, but do you actually speak any other languages? Because I don't think you realize how easy you have it.
He. She. It. That's all you have to deal with. You have to know whether the subject is male, female, or indeterminate in some way. There's maybe a couple of exception (like boats being refered to as She and such) but other than that, you literally go by genitalia.
In most other languages you have to take into account whether the subject is male or female and whether the subject should be referred to as plural as a form of politeness; if their sex is unknown or indeterminate you have to know whether the word itself is masculine or feminine (or neutral!). Shall I go on?
Oh and that's not even mentioning languages with different grammar rules for the various different kind of persons. You have singular and plural. That's it. Some languages have singular, plural-few, plural-many, some, none, all, and they all have their different grammatical rules.
Boo-hoo, you gotta remember whether to put an s or not. Some languages have to remember dozens of different suffixes to put at the end of the word depending on the forementioned rules and a bunch more, including how the word itself is written.
To be considered competent in written English you also have to master a system of orthography so preposterously inconsistent and divorced from the spoken language that native-speaking kids have competitions to show off their prowess at rote-learning spellings of words; far more challenging than remembering whether the nouns are der, die oder das. In many other languages, literacy involves memorizing a few basic rules and knowing how words sound.
Given the vast amount of energy wasted on memorizing spelling quirks, compared with nearly all other languages, it's not surprising that many people, including you, frequently make other mistakes in their written English. When a language consists more of exceptions than rules one can't be too harsh on people for wrongly applying a rule.
To use the programming language you used elsewhere: English is PHP... it's easy to use as badly as everybody else uses it.
All English pronouns are nonstandard, different from each other, and different from nouns. You can bother to learn it or not, you're choice. I mean your choice. Yer?
Part of why English is everywhere is because it is extremely flexible, malleable and very lax about its own rules. Otherwise we'd all be speaking French.
I prefer to see English like I see Python. Younger, easier, more flexible and more self-aware than the languages it draws its roots from, and fun enough that it has a lot of influence on every other language.
I think people coming from other languages have another view of English. As a "swede" I find it surprisingly logical and easy to learn. I bet someone from Finland would agree :-)
You're at an advantage. Swedish is essentially just an antiquated english (I mean that in a good way). The difference in learning Swedish between before and after I learned English was night on pluto and day on venus.
I think OP was just being an ass, but whether the behavior is opposite really depends on your frame of reference. The lack of apostrophe is consistent with how you deal with possessive pronouns: his, her/hers, our/ours, etc. No possessive pronouns have apostrophes, with one exception. And the apostrophe is consistent with how other contractions work.
If you remember (and care) that its and it's are two separate words, then you should be able think your way through it. It's could legitimately be possessive or a contraction, but its can only be the possessive.
Anyway, I agree with you that it's tricky enough that we shouldn't be assholes about it.
It reminds me of the Slotin Incident (http://www.damninteresting.com/bitten-by-the-nuclear-dragon/) where dr. Louis Slotin accidently slipped the screwdriver he used to separate two plutonium/uranium hemispheres:
"Immediately, all eight scientists in the room felt a wave of heat accompanied by a blue glow as the plutonium sphere vomited an invisible burst of gamma and neutron radiation into the room. As the lab's Geiger counter clicked hysterically, Louis used his bare hand to push the upper plutonium hemisphere off and onto the floor, which terminated the supercritical reaction moments after it began."
Big oopsie.
However gruesome the goal of these bombs, the rate of advancement in such a short timespan is nothing short of amazing. From the very first successful test (Trinity) to bombing Hiroshima: just 21 days. They were great days for science, but a shame to mankind that it had to come this far.