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This is revisionist thinking, applying current knowledge to the motivations of those 75 years ago. Nuclear weapons were developed because they could be. More
by caf 11y ago
This is revisionist thinking, applying current knowledge to the motivations of those 75 years ago.
Nuclear weapons were developed because they could be. More specifically, it was feared that Germany was already researching them.
During the Manhattan Project and for the next several years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they were thought of as just another weapon of war, different perhaps in scale but not in essential character (certainly by the US Army brass, anyway). It wasn't until later in the Cold War that the deterrent value of nuclear weapons was emphasised.
- douche 11y agoIt did take quite some time for the full power and destructiveness of atomic weapons, let alone the later fusion bombs, to be appreciated. At one point, it was a serious idea to fire atomic shells from the standard 155mm field howitzers. Or, for even greater insanity, from over-sized crew-served bazookas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
- dragonwriter 11y agoThis wasn't because the power of nukes was unappreciated, it was because Soviet conventional superiority in the European theater was seen as an existential threat to Western Europe for which the cost of using that kind of nukes was acceptable in order to mitigate.