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On this day 69 years ago, the Manhattan Project ended with a bang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)

View attachment 177789

Greg

This picture makes the explosion look like a very large Scrubbing Bubble.

314180_10150263373039999_437995430_n.jpg
 
"Why should the Fire be shared by so few? Let Bombs explode, cuz' that's what they do!"

[video=youtube;wESpXvwHloc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wESpXvwHloc[/video]
 
A sad day for the world.

While I understand the sentiment, it was only a matter of time/will/money until it was developed.

I'm glad the USA got to that finish line first, and it's only been used "in anger" twice (and it would have been used just once if the leadership of the Empire of Japan had been wise).

Greg
 
A sad day for the world.

With out this, millions more would have likely died in WWII, and countless millions in the wars that these weapons deterred. USA and USSR would have almost certainly had a war... but these weapons took that option off the table and they essentially agreed to disagree for many years instead.

Nothing sad about that.
 
While I understand the sentiment, it was only a matter of time/will/money until it was developed.

I'm glad the USA got to that finish line first, and it's only been used "in anger" twice (and it would have been used just once if the leadership of the Empire of Japan had been wise).

Greg

Correct. Without the two weapons that were dropped on Japan to convince them to surrender, we would have invaded their country. They'd proven over and over that they prefer to be killed fighting than to surrender in battle, and would take out as many of the Allied troops as possible on their way down. Islands in the pacific were occupied by Japan and taken by the Allies only after killing all the Japanese soldiers on it, and losing way too many of our soldiers in the process. The Allied forces were making preparations to invade Japan in case the decision was made not to drop atomic bombs on them.

Nobody else was close to developing atomic bombs at that time. The USSR was the closest but only because they'd stolen the secrets from the US, and they were still years away from developing a working weapon. After the first bomb was dropped on Japan the USSR declared war on them to make sure they got their share of the spoils when Japan surrendered a short time later. They demanded a lot of land that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten.

So if we hadn't used the bomb on Japan, dozens of millions of Japanese and Allied soldiers would have died in the invasion of Japan, and when the USA and USSR went to war years later the atomic bomb would have probably been used a LOT more than twice.
 
Interestingly enough, H.G. Wells can be credited for the invention of nuclear weapons. It was his 1914 book The World Set Free that prompted Szilard to begin what would become the Manhattan Project. It took 42 years to get from fiction to reality.

Like Benny Hill would say, "No' a lo' o' people know dat."
 
I think when people express regret about the development of The Bomb, it's because they have regret about war in general. So pointing out that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs may have saved lives by ending the wars earlier isn't really going to help much. The regret comes from having a situation where vaporizing a few hundred thousand people is preferable to slaughtering a few million the old fashioned way. It's hard to put a happy face on that.
 
I think when people express regret about the development of The Bomb, it's because they have regret about war in general. So pointing out that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs may have saved lives by ending the wars earlier isn't really going to help much. The regret comes from having a situation where vaporizing a few hundred thousand people is preferable to slaughtering a few million the old fashioned way. It's hard to put a happy face on that.

Well, you could say that the A-bomb is the reason why there is still democracy in the world today. Hard to frown at that!
 
This might not be as sad as you think. At that point Japan was going to lose the war. But with the traditions and mind set the Japanese had the only viable alternative would probably have been a saturation bombing of the entire island followed up by a land invasion. This would have killed many more thousands of people on both sides. The shock of the bomb was probably the only thing that could have caused a surrender.
 
Well, you could say that the A-bomb is the reason why there is still democracy in the world today. Hard to frown at that!

I think the idea that nuclear weapons have saved democracy is debatable...

My point was not to disagree with the idea that the nukes succeeded in bringing a close to the war with Japan or that they deterred war with the Soviet Union. I agree with that. My point was that it's regrettable that you could have a situation where incinerating a couple of cities could remotely be viewed as a good alternative. It's true, but it's regrettable. If someone feels that the Manhattan Project was a "sad day for humanity," it's not likely to change their mind by pointing out the historical context (the entire world engulfed in a global conflict costing millions and millions of lives). The sadness comes from the fact that humanity is so warlike.
 
It is unfortunate that Japan decided to attack is in the first place. It is unfortunate that they did not realize that come hell or high water that we would eventually beat them into surrender. It is sad that we had to nuke them twice.

Think of it this way- it could have been much worse- we could have dropped either bomb on Tokyo.

A frightening weapon to be sure. Still, have only used two of them in conflict so I think a certain historical point was made. Let's see who is next to use one as it will happen eventually. Jihadists with a backpack nuke anyone?


Mark Koelsch
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I am aware. Still, it was a huge population center. It could have been targeted and was not.


Mark Koelsch
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If you have ever travelled in Southeast Asia, you find a whole bunch of people who are not fans of the Japanese still to this day. They were harsh and cruel in the extreme to those they conquered, committing war crimes like the rape of Nanking and thinking nothing of it. They were arming the entire population with sticks to fight until the death of the last man, woman, and child. Estimates were that it would cost more that a million American lives and many more Japanese lives to invade.

You used the word generous, putting words in someone's mouth. I'll use it directly. Not bombing them all the way back to the Stone Age and letting them surrender and keep their precious emperor was, in fact, damned generous. It was a hell of a lot more generosity than imperial Japan ever showed in any conquered land.


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Yeah... Very generous...:eyeroll:

It was generous on our part. We could have dropped an a bomb on one of the most populous cities in the world and did not. You can roll your eyes all you want, but the reality was a state of total war. Not some little police action here- it was win at all cost, and if you had a bigger stick you use it. We used said stick twice, and it had the desired effect. The Japanese could have surrendered before we ever dropped a nuke on them but they did not. Ultimately, this did save lives on both sides as an invasion of mainland Japan could have cost millions of lives.


Mark Koelsch
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Yeah... Very generous...:eyeroll:

Oh please... They started the war-- they sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind, as they should. Just how it is... Geez you bleeding hearts make me want to puke...

Besides, more people died in the Tokyo fire raids than in either of the nuclear attacks...

Either way, it saved at least hundreds of thousands of American men who would have been killed or maimed for life, and literally millions of Japanese whom they would have had to kill or be killed...

Guess some folks would have rather seen it that way than the nukes used... course if history had unfolded that way, they'd be lamenting all the little kids and women and old people blown away by the Allied invaders as they faced down Banzai charges from these people armed with sharpened bamboo sticks and anything else that could possibly inflict injury or death. They'd be arguing that the US had a moral obligation to prevent unnecessary death to our forces and their population by using the bomb to shock them into surrender...

Most people don't know, but that's EXACTLY what the Japanese had in mind... they had saved basically everything they had left in the form of aircraft and ships and anything else of use to be used for kamikaze suicide attacks and hopeless banzai charges, both by the military and civilians. Civilians were trained in how to take out soldiers with sharpened bamboo sticks and anything else available. Their military were trained to take out tanks and armored vehicles and convoys using satchel charges strapped to their bodies, as living landmines. The remains of their navy had been trained to crash boatloads of explosives into US ships to sink them. Men volunteered to be dropped in the water equipped with explosives on suicide missions as living mines. Virtually all their remaining war industry had been moved deep underground, out of the capabilities of US bombers, to keep essential warmaking supplies coming, to the extent possible, and would have been vigorously defended. Their remaining aircraft had been moved into underground caves and revetments and were being outfitted as kamikaze suicide planes, and manned cruise missiles like the "baka bomb" were being developed, rocket powered to allow them to outpace US pursuit fighters and interceptors to blow up US ships, facilities, and troop concentrations. Their few remaining naval aviation planes and crew and the remains of the Japanese air force had been totally surpassed in quality and capabilities of their aircraft since the war's beginning, and couldn't survive combat with US air assets, therefore they had been held back for suicide missions in a last ditch defense of the islands during invasion.

The US knew a lot of this (though just how thorough their preparations were and how murderous the suicidal defense of the home islands would have been wouldn't be discovered until during the occupation of Japan). The US plans before the bomb, for a conventional invasion of Japan, anticipated millions of Japanese deaths (in the range of 5-6 million) and up to a million US casualties. The Fifth Air Force was to continue the bombing campaign until they had practically burned everything above ground in Japan of any consequence. To "soften up" the defenders, both military and civilian, the US had stockpiled massive amounts of poison gas and chemical weapons to be dropped by the bombers once the fire bombing campaign was pretty much done. This alone would have killed and maimed millions of Japanese. The invasion would have dwarfed D-Day in Europe and would have similarly taken place across five invasion beaches named after American cars. The Kanto plain surrounding Tokyo was one of the main targets. Plans after the initial invasion were more hazy, left to the strategic situation of the battlefield to dictate movements after securing the initial beachheads and the initial advance.

Once it became apparent that the bomb would probably work and be available for use, the plan became to drop a pair of bombs to "demonstrate" the capability and hopefully induce the Japanese to surrender. More bombs were being constructed, as the Fat Man plutonium design was well suited to mass production, more so than the Little Boy design relying on highly enriched uranium (U-235), which was difficult to produce and more difficult to separate from regular Uranium 238. Design work was continuing to go forward on things like levitated cores for new pit designs for more explosive yield from a given amount of plutonium and greater bomb efficiency, plans that would be tested successfully in the Sandstone test series in 1948. Five atomic bombs were being held back and readied for use as tactical weapons to bomb Japanese troop concentrations or strong points preventing or holding up a US advance, or to bomb defenses or troop concentrations behind the invasion beaches themselves in anticipation of the invasion. More bombs were the pipeline and would have been available late in 1946, had the war continued.

So, while sad, the fact that 140,000 or so Japanese died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the atom bombings, it DID induce the Japanese to face the inevitable and surrender (though barely so-- the war cabinet was tied and the Emperor cast the tie-breaking vote-- for peace... and was very nearly overthrown in a coup by some young officers desiring a "final battle with honor" rather than surrender, but they failed and committed ritual suicide).

Yes it was an ugly chapter in world history, but it ended about as well as it possibly could have, considering the alternatives. Of course it would have been better if Japan and Germany had not started the war to begin with, but unfortunately it seems human nature made the discovery and acknowledgement of that fact untenable until those countries suffered the fates they did before they would admit that war wasn't the answer... And it could have been SO very much worse than it was...

We should remember that.

I personally find it disgusting how people sitting safely 70 years after those events sit and pass judgment and wag a finger at the hard decisions and harder consequences faced by their predecessors who had to live, fight, and die in the battles that would have occurred at that time, had the apologists living today had had their way... How many dozens of millions of people, both here and elsewhere, would never have been born due to their parents having been killed in the invasion and subsequent futile battles... we'll never know.

Later! OL JR :)
 
If you have ever travelled in Southeast Asia, you find a whole bunch of people who are not fans of the Japanese still to this day. They were harsh and cruel in the extreme to those they conquered, committing war crimes like the rape of Nanking and thinking nothing of it. They were arming the entire population with sticks to fight until the death of the last man, woman, and child. Estimates were that it would cost more that a million American lives and many more Japanese lives to invade.

You used the word generous, putting words in someone's mouth. I'll use it directly. Not bombing them all the way back to the Stone Age and letting them surrender and keep their precious emperor was, in fact, damned generous. It was a hell of a lot more generosity than imperial Japan ever showed in any conquered land.


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Amen!

We COULD have demanded UNCONDITIONAL surrender, meaning no Emperor. We could have kept fire bombing them until Japan was a complete wasteland with nothing above ground. We could have invaded and killed 5-10 million of them. We could have done a lot worse, but we didn't.

As you said, they did, and worse. They committed atrocities that would have shocked even the Nazis. Their Unit 731 deliberately infected thousands of Chinese and American prisoners with various biological warfare agents they were experimenting with and then performed vivesections on the victims-- that's being dissected while you're STILL ALIVE, in case some apologists don't know. They simply raped and slaughtered countless millions of noncombatants in their conquests and occupations, for NO reason other than to get rid of any possibility of resistance and eliminate anyone they didn't like, and prove their own capability to do so. Their cruelty and inhumanity has been unmatched in human history, or very nearly so. They started the war, and brought all the results of that on themselves.

Now we have crybabies sitting and whining that we did what we had to do to end the war as quickly as possible, and they can't take it. Of course the fact that they'd probably be dead or in prison camps as slaves or worse nor the COUNTLESS DOZENS OF MILLIONS that they would have slaughtered had the Japanese and Germans won never enters their mind... just the constant handwringing over the bomb...

Sickening...

Later! OL JR :)
 
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Yeah... Very generous...:eyeroll:

The cities selected for bombing were on the list not because of how many people would be killed, but because they had been untouched so far in the war. The Army wanted to make it obvious how much destruction these new bombs could cause. If they'd dropped a bomb on Tokyo and killed 10 times as many people, the Japanese might not have been convinced to surrender so soon.

Instead they looked at the destruction and said, "ONE bomb did all that?!?! Holy CRAP!!!" Even then it took a second demonstration on a second untouched city to get them to give up.

If Japan hadn't given up at that point the demonstrations would be over and the populated and military targets would get the next wave of bombs.
 
The cities selected for bombing were on the list not because of how many people would be killed, but because they had been untouched so far in the war. The Army wanted to make it obvious how much destruction these new bombs could cause. If they'd dropped a bomb on Tokyo and killed 10 times as many people, the Japanese might not have been convinced to surrender so soon.

Instead they looked at the destruction and said, "ONE bomb did all that?!?! Holy CRAP!!!" Even then it took a second demonstration on a second untouched city to get them to give up.

If Japan hadn't given up at that point the demonstrations would be over and the populated and military targets would get the next wave of bombs.

They held back on five cities IIRC to demonstrate and scale the destructive force of the bombs. Hiroshima was bombed first, and then three days later the B-29 "Bock's Car" was to drop the Fat Man bomb on Kokura. Arriving over the city, they found the city clouded in and, under orders to bomb visually (rather than by radar, which was possible but was at a very elementary stage at that point, and thus wasn't to be used for the atomic raids) and after making a second pass, determined that it was unlikely that the clouds would break enough for visual bombing, and decided to proceed to their secondary target, Nagasaki.

IIRC bombing conditions weren't a lot better at Nagasaki, but they did manage to sight some of their landmarks and finish the bomb run. The bomb actually hit off-target by a considerable distance, but instead was nearly a direct hit on the Mitsubishi Arms Works, leveling the plant. The blast wave rolled up the valley and destroyed the city, but with less casualties than at Hiroshima despite the greater power of the bomb (21 kilotons versus an estimated 15 kilotons of the Little Boy gun weapon dropped on Hiroshima). The rolling hilly topography of the city also helped lessen the destruction, since hills tend to reflect the blast energy upward into the atmosphere, protecting what is on the lee side of the hill from the detonation.

Later! OL JR :)
 
The cities selected for bombing were on the list not because of how many people would be killed, but because they had been untouched so far in the war. The Army wanted to make it obvious how much destruction these new bombs could cause. If they'd dropped a bomb on Tokyo and killed 10 times as many people, the Japanese might not have been convinced to surrender so soon.

Instead they looked at the destruction and said, "ONE bomb did all that?!?! Holy CRAP!!!" Even then it took a second demonstration on a second untouched city to get them to give up.

If Japan hadn't given up at that point the demonstrations would be over and the populated and military targets would get the next wave of bombs.
A more cynical view of the cities selected, the weather requirements and the number of bombs is:
- untouched cities would better show the patterns of destruction for each device as well as show the power of a single bomb,
- clear skies were preferable to record the explosion and aftermath to rate the effectiveness of each device, and
- we had two designs that were untested in the field; some think we would have found a reason to drop the second even if Japan had hinted at surrender after just the first.

Again, over nearly 70 years of hindsight, many people and groups can carve up the information to fit their own desired beliefs. At the time, the decision was made, the deeds were done and the war in the Pacific was no doubt shortened. Maybe not the sweetest way to get it done but it is what was done.

To the original thoughts of the thread, the anniversary of the first atomic bomb detonation, the Manhattan Project produced a product of a very young technology in a remarkably short time much like the race to the moon. The genie was going to get out of the bottle; I hope we can focus on some of the more benign uses of nuclear technology.
 
The cities selected for bombing were on the list not because of how many people would be killed, but because they had been untouched so far in the war.

This was exactly the reason.

Part of it was to get Japan to surrender, but an equal part was to see the amount of destruction one bomb would cause an intact city. Call it data collection / research.
Where do you think we got the data for what physical extremes humans can endure before dying... The Nazis from their "experiments".
You have to remember that the US spent 2 Billion (1945) dollars on the Manhattan project; they wanted to collect as much data as they could on the detonation of these bombs.
Japan wasn't even originally considered as a target, Germany was, but Germany surrendered before the bomb was ready. And believe me, if the US spends that amount of money on something, we're going to use it one way or another.
The city of Kobe was also talked about as a target, but somebody in the FDR/Truman administration advised against it as it was a large spiritual/religious center for Japan and the US wanted Japan to surrender, not to hate us.
You have to remember, the Japanese weren't the most rational of humans back then, they had some extreme viewpoints. Like thinking that the emperor was a deity. Like suicide was a better alternative to surrender.

As for the Russians stealing nuclear secrets... It was more like the Russians were given a lot of that data by several Manhattan Project scientists, Fuchs especially. He, among others, thought that it was a very bad idea that only one country in the world have the power of nuclear armament. Manhattan Project scientists basically handed over documents to the Russians so there would be more of a "balance of power" in the world. Obviously, treason for profit was involved later on.
 
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many people and groups can carve up the information to fit their own desired beliefs. At the time, the decision was made, the deeds were done and the war in the Pacific was no doubt shortened. Maybe not the sweetest way to get it done but it is what was done.

Agreed. I've heard a lot over the years of people saying that using an atomic bomb is so horrible that it shouldn't have ever been done. But why? If you're in a position where you have to kill an enemy, and you've made the decision to kill as many as possible, what difference does it make if you use a bunch of knives, or guns, or flame throwers, or HE bombs, or atomic bombs??

And if ending a war is the goal, and killing 100,000 people in one week with atomic bombs will do it but killing 1,000,000 in a year of invading and using guns/HE bombs/grenades won't... why would anyone choose not to use atomic bombs?
 
Years ago I read an article in a math journal (of all places) that talked about the next use of an atomic weapon. They argued that it would not be a state versus state situation due to the impact on the economies of the two states. Their conclusion was that a weapon would be procured from a failing state but that it would not be used in the conventional sense. They determined the final use would be that of a dirty bomb and sadly against US interests.
 
Agreed. I've heard a lot over the years of people saying that using an atomic bomb is so horrible that it shouldn't have ever been done. But why? If you're in a position where you have to kill an enemy, and you've made the decision to kill as many as possible, what difference does it make if you use a bunch of knives, or guns, or flame throwers, or HE bombs, or atomic bombs??

And if ending a war is the goal, and killing 100,000 people in one week with atomic bombs will do it but killing 1,000,000 in a year of invading and using guns/HE bombs/grenades won't... why would anyone choose not to use atomic bombs?

I'm with you on that. I like War and Weapons in general,(Fought in Iraq from 2003 to the end of 2004), and wish we would atleast still use Tactical Nukes.
I like Chemical Weapons too, as long as they are not being used against me.
 
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