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What an interesting read. Also, is it just me or are there a surprising number of german related topics on the frontpage right now? "We only had one man workin

What an interesting read. Also, is it just me or are there a surprising number of german related topics on the frontpage right now? "We only had one man working on it and they may have had ten thousand" This is why I always chuckle at the ww2 "documentaries" positing the possibility of german or japanese bomb. Nevermind that both parties were preoccupied fighting far stronger and larger opponents ( US, British Empire, Soviet Union, China ), they lacked the resources, economic power and infrastructure to construct one before the US. We had a much larger economy and resource potential than germany and japan. Just like we do today. It was a race neither had a chance of winning. Another interesting read is the military's view on hiroshima and nagasaki. Most military leaders saw it as serving no military purpose. So ultimately, hiroshima and nagasaki were the largest human experimentation in ww2. It was a predominately a radiation test on civilian populations and cities. Something we'd continue doing on unsuspecting pacific islanders decades after ww2.

skh 8y ago
After the Germans surrendered my dad's division was scheduled to be transferred to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. At least that is what they were told. He was happy to hear of the bombings on Nagasaki and Hiroshima since from his perspective it caused the Japanese to surrender. Of course it's debatable on whether or not those bombings did indeed cause the surrender of Japan. Politically the U.S. has not been a nation to stomach large numbers of its soldiers being killed. The actions on Iwo Jima and Okinawa were far more bloody than the public cared for. How many more such battles would a war weary public have endured? Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military targets but they were political targets. I don't know if the bombings were morally right or wrong and can see the argument both ways. But from at least one drafted soldier's perspective they were a good thing.
- gandhium 8y ago
  > it's debatable on whether or not those bombings did indeed cause the surrender of Japan They were specifically mentioned in emperor's address. Yes, they caused the surrender. > Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military targets They were military targets. There was army HQ, troops stationed there, factories which were producing military goods.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    Citing the Emperor's address as evidence isn't a great idea. It contains plenty of demonstrably false statements, like this: > Indeed, we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.
    - gandhium 8y ago
      If you're cherry-pick anything, you will find plenty of demonstrably false statements anywhere.
  - avn2109 8y ago
    >> "Yes, they caused the surrender." Broadly speaking, this is widely regarded amongst historians as not true at all, though most American schoolchildren are still taught it. Mostly this is because American conventional airpower was so overwhelming in Japan that its effects were substantially interchangeable with the bomb. Before the atomic bombings, Secretary of War Henry Stimson (who chose Hiroshima and Nagasaki as targets) mentioned that America had literally run out of targets to (conventionally) bomb in Japan [0]. A more detailed summary of the "Bomb didn't cause surrender" argument is given in [1]. [0] http://www.doug-long.com/stimson5.htm http://www.doug-long.com/stimson5.htm , ctrl-F for "I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength." [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...
    - iguy 8y ago
      "its effects were substantially interchangeable with the bomb" Yes, its military effects. (And humanitarian effects.) But no, in political effect. If "war is politics carried on by other means" and the goal was to defeat Japanese Fascism, then you had to make sure it couldn't come back from the dead after a grudging surrender. That was IMHO the main lesson of Versailles. And it worked.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  It isn't debatable because we know hiroshima and nagasaki had no bearing on the japanese decision to surrender. If the nukes were the cause of japan's surrender, hiroshima would have been enough and nagasaki wouldn't have happened. Also, there is no ambiguity to the morality of hiroshima or nagasaki. No more than there is any ambiguity to the morality of nazi death camps. They were both racially driven war crimes and crimes against humanity. And as mcnamara said, if we had lost the war, our leaders would have been executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
  - skadamou 8y ago
    >...we know hiroshima and nagasaki had no bearing on the japanese decision to surrender. I think this is an interesting idea but I would love to see a source on this. When I took a Japan at War class in college our professor seemed to be of the opinion that using the atom bomb was what finally convinced the Japanese to surrender unconditionally but that they would have agreed to a conditional surrender as long as their emperor was guaranteed some form of independence. What are your thoughts on this?
    - avn2109 8y ago
      I'm not the parent but I wrote a comment about this elsewhere in the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19115219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19115219 and another similar comment previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10485563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10485563
    - deogeo 8y ago
      avn2109 gave some sources in another comment - let me add one more: https://mises.org/wire/atomic-bombing-japan-reconsidered https://mises.org/wire/atomic-bombing-japan-reconsidered
    - jpfr 8y ago
      That is the justification for the bomb for the American public. Many Japanese cities (sixty-ish) were destroyed by traditional firebombing. For the Japanese, Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply meant "two more cities". Two days after Hiroshima, Russia declared war against Japan. So their strategic position in the war became hopeless. Historians believe Russia entering the war shaped the surrender much more than the atomic bomb. https://nationalpost.com/news/did-the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-really-end-the-war https://nationalpost.com/news/did-the-atomic-bombings-of-hir...
- chris_mc 8y ago
  >I don't know if the bombings were morally right or wrong and can see the argument both ways. But from at least one drafted soldier's perspective they were a good thing. Soldiers volunteer to fight a war, civilians don't. If the Japanese had bombed LA, we wouldn't be having this conversation, every American would understand why this was morally wrong.
  - skh 8y ago
    The question isn’t whether Americans would unambiguously view a fire bombing of LA as morally wrong. The question is would the Japanese view it as morally wrong? Of course the victims view it as wrong. Would the offenders?
    - chris_mc 8y ago
      That's not the question, the question is "was it morally wrong to drop the nukes?" My position, based on my classes on the rule of law in warfare from a US service academy, is that civilians are an illegal target for the military and using a nuke on several hundred thousand people to take out a handful of industry is definitely outside of acts of legal warfare. It's different to target a manufacturing facility directly, even with civilians inside. So, this isn't an argument, my position is the correct one. Even a US service academy teaches its officer candidates that the nukes were objectively wrong. The lives of civilians are more sacred than the lives of soldiers during wartime, legally.
      - skh 8y ago
        The answer to the question of the morality of the bombing at least in part depends on whether one is a victim or perpetrator. You correctly stated that Americans would consider a fire bombing of Los Angeles to be morally wrong. From the viewpoint of the victim it's not hard to view such an act as morally wrong. From the perspective of the perpetrator it's not so clear cut. So, this isn't an argument, my position is the correct one. I did not know your view of the morality of this bombing was the only one that matters. Apparently far too many people are wrong on this issue then. Even a US service academy teaches its officer candidates that the nukes were objectively wrong. The lives of civilians are more sacred than the lives of soldiers during wartime, legally. Apparently our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan did not get the message. Of course, the perspective taught in West Point today was not the one taught in West Point in 1945. It was not the viewpoint of Army Air Force commanders either during WWII. What is deemed moral is culture and time dependent. Hence some people - myself included - think it only proper to at least consider the views and knowledge of the people at the time the decisions are made. Since you have deemed yourself correct on this issue there isn't a point in discussion I suppose. Nothing I say can cause you to question anything on this matter. I will read any response you wish to give since I'm not so certain about my position.
JoeDaDude 8y ago
The military did see a lot of utility in the atomic bomb, though they did not fully grasp the effects. Ostensibly, General MacArthur looked at using atomic bombs to clear the beach heads of Japan before sending in the Marines, which would have killed a lot of the latter.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  I didn't say the military didn't see the utility of the atomic bomb, I said the military saw no military utility in hiroshima and nagasaki. There is a difference between using the bomb to kill soldiers and to destroy/irradiate and kill civilians. Just like there is a a military utility of the gun to kill enemy soldiers, but no military utility to shooting children. For example, a concentration camp to keep enemy soldiers is far different than a concentration camp to keep jewish, japanese american, etc civilians ( fathers, mothers and children ). And it's odd that you bring up macarthur since we know for a fact that he was against hiroshima and nagasaki. "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor." https://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/countdown-to-hiroshima-fo_b_3707531.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/countdown-to-hi...
  - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    > I said the military saw no military utility in hiroshima and nagasaki How do you reconcile that with the commonly held historical view? Or is that merely your own personal opinion? "Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. Hiroshima was the headquarters of the 2nd General Army 第2総軍 (日本軍) with responsibility for most of western Japan including Kyushu as well as a depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. It was a good radar target and it was such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills that were likely to produce a focusing effect that would considerably increase the blast damage. Due to rivers, it was not a good incendiary target. It was classified as an AA(Prime)Target. It had a military garrison of about 40,000 men. Hiroshima was the primary target for the August 6 attack, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternatives. Far from being an innocent city full of civilians, the garrison of 40,000 soldiers were doing calisthenics when the bomb exploded and were in fact the largest single group of casualties in the city. Nagasaki was a major industrial city making torpedoes and ammunition. Mitsubishi Steel, Orikami Ordinance Works and a large engine works dominated the production in the city in addition of a large garrison. There were also a major dockyard used for the transport of men and materials to the north. It, too, was a high priority target but was a secondary target that was only hit if the primary target was too cloud covered for a visual drop on the primary." https://www.quora.com/Did-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki-have-military-significance-or-were-they-purely-civilian-targets https://www.quora.com/Did-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki-have-milita...
maire 8y ago
There were 3 issues involved in the decision to drop the bomb: 1. The battle of Okinawa was fought vigorously by the Japanese leading the allies to increase their estimates of the cost of war on the Japanese homeland. 2. The fear that if the war lasted too long then the Soviet Union would enter the pacific war and carve up Japan in the same way we carved up Germany 3. Japan's desire for a conditional surrender It is the 3rd factor that was the crux. I believe if we understood the terms of the conditional surrender then we could have ended the war without dropping the bomb. In fact, we likely did comply with what the Japanese wanted since we protected the emperor after the war.
- HAL9000Ti 8y ago
  I find it very peculiar that you use "we" when talking about the USA country from 84 years ago, is it just me?
ufmace 8y ago
> We had a much larger economy and resource potential than germany and japan. Yes, I once thought that it should have been surprising that Germany didn't get the bomb first. Upon more reading, the effort that the US threw at the project was simply staggering - nobody knew which was the best technique for how to do a bunch of different things, so the Americans tried all of them at the same time. No other participant in the war could have duplicated that level of effort. And despite all of that effort, the bomb was only ready to be dropped after Germany had already been defeated by conventional arms. I have also read that the German scientists' point of view is that a nuclear bomb as a practical military weapon was an interesting idea, but that nobody would be able to build one in time for the current war. And they were right - for themselves.
- iguy 8y ago
  The effort was indeed huge, but it's not so obvious that the Germans could not have done it. IIRC the V2 missile program may actually have been more expensive? Different technology but also hard... hard enough that in 1969 the same guys were still leading the world.
  - kaybe 8y ago
    It did not help that some new aspects found in physics were considered 'ungerman' ('Jewish physics') and discarded, especially Einstein's work and many aspects of quantum mechanics. This alone would probably have proved crippling to any efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
    - rfinney 8y ago
      [edited to remove mis-information ] apologies!
      - msla 8y ago
        Think Un-German, as an English word.
dfgert 8y ago
I don't believe that it was a unfair race so to speak. In my knowledge it were the German scientists who moved to US and helped US develop the bomb. US may have had the resources but it definitely lacked the knowledge for building bomb which German surely possessed.
- msla 8y ago
  Even had Germany somehow kept the knowledge, it had, at best, a very brief period of time between the beginning of the war and the period when its industrial capacity was being seriously strained, if not bombed almost continuously, to work on the weapon. The Nazi nuclear bomb project was also underfunded for political reasons, not to mention the fact it would have been very difficult to justify working on a blue-sky wonder-weapon instead of building more tanks and planes and rifles for the three-front war practically at their doorstep. You can try to posit a Nazi regime without such constraints, but a Nazi regime which isn't lead by Hitler is fundamentally different from the regime we're talking about. A well-run Nazi Germany, one which didn't pick unwinnable fights, is a Nazi Germany contrary to Hitler's vision.
  - iguy 8y ago
    According to Wikipedia, "The German V-weapons (V-1 and V-2) cost the equivalent of around USD $40 billion (2015 dollars), which was 50 percent more than the Manhattan Project". That was super high-tech, blue-sky research, which in the end had almost zero military impact. It was not stopped by Allied bombing. It was done at the expense of more practical things, like tanks and planes, despite serious shortages of some of the ingredients (like fuel). The Manhattan project indeed had a brain trust working on it, the like of which existed nowhere else on the planet. (Maybe more Hungarian than German, though.) Germany could not have replicated that, but it seems likely to me that the brains they did have would have been plenty. There could have been some other roadblock of course, like the total lack of some material. But I don't know of one. IIRC the Soviets mined about half their Uranium in E Germany, so that was available.
  - roywiggins 8y ago
    The Nazis loved blue-sky wonder weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikabomber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikabomber
opo 8y ago
>..We had a much larger economy and resource potential than germany and japan. Just like we do today. It was a race neither had a chance of winning. Germany spent about an equivalent amount of money in the V1 and V2 rocket programs that the US spent on the Manhattan project. Though Heisenburg later claimed he had sabotaged the German effort, the evidence seems to be a bit in favor of saying that he just miscalculated the amount of uranium needed so that it looked like it would be impractical as a weapon: >...The largest piece of evidence was that Heisenberg had miscalculated the critical mass needed to achieve an atomic bomb, and thus still believed that tons of U-235 was necessary to create the bomb. http://holbert.faculty.asu.edu/eee460/anv/Why%20the%20Germans%20Failed.html http://holbert.faculty.asu.edu/eee460/anv/Why%20the%20German... >...Most military leaders saw it as serving no military purpose. So ultimately, hiroshima and nagasaki were the largest human experimentation in ww2. They weren't chosen at random. For example, the original target for Nagasaki was supposed to be Kokura: >...The American bomber was a B-29 named Bock's Car, and it was supposed to drop the world's first plutonium bomb on Kokura. Three times, Bock's Car passed over Kokura, bomb bays open, a hum in the cockpit signaling that the bomb was ready for release, the crew wearing the special goggles that were supposed to protect them from the flash of the atomic explosion. >But although the radar scope was locked on to Kokura, the orders were to drop the bomb only on visual identification of the huge arms factory that was the target. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/07/world/kokura-japan-bypassed-by-a-bomb.html?mtrref=www.google.com https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/07/world/kokura-japan-bypass... The use of the atomic bomb was both a military and political statement.
ekun 8y ago
If you look more into it, Germany was very close to being able to build a reactor that would have been able to produce plutonium. Their graphite reactor research never went critical because they didn't know that the boron impurities in graphite was absorbing too many neutrons. I'm not saying if they knew that they would've had the resources to make enough plutonium for a bomb, but the German scientists wren't that far away. Having said all that, if you read through all of these documents it seems like they had no idea how the bomb was built and designed.
Tsubasachan 8y ago
Very few documentaries mention this but the Allies won the war because of their colonies. The uranium used for the Manhattan project came from Congo for example. All the resources of South America and Africa were at their disposal.

skh 8y ago

After the Germans surrendered my dad's division was scheduled to be transferred to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. At least that is what they were told. He was happy to hear of the bombings on Nagasaki and Hiroshima since from his perspective it caused the Japanese to surrender. Of course it's debatable on whether or not those bombings did indeed cause the surrender of Japan. Politically the U.S. has not been a nation to stomach large numbers of its soldiers being killed. The actions on Iwo Jima and Okinawa were far more bloody than the public cared for. How many more such battles would a war weary public have endured? Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military targets but they were political targets. I don't know if the bombings were morally right or wrong and can see the argument both ways. But from at least one drafted soldier's perspective they were a good thing.

gandhium 8y ago
> it's debatable on whether or not those bombings did indeed cause the surrender of Japan They were specifically mentioned in emperor's address. Yes, they caused the surrender. > Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military targets They were military targets. There was army HQ, troops stationed there, factories which were producing military goods.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  Citing the Emperor's address as evidence isn't a great idea. It contains plenty of demonstrably false statements, like this: > Indeed, we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.
  - gandhium 8y ago
    If you're cherry-pick anything, you will find plenty of demonstrably false statements anywhere.
- avn2109 8y ago
  >> "Yes, they caused the surrender." Broadly speaking, this is widely regarded amongst historians as not true at all, though most American schoolchildren are still taught it. Mostly this is because American conventional airpower was so overwhelming in Japan that its effects were substantially interchangeable with the bomb. Before the atomic bombings, Secretary of War Henry Stimson (who chose Hiroshima and Nagasaki as targets) mentioned that America had literally run out of targets to (conventionally) bomb in Japan [0]. A more detailed summary of the "Bomb didn't cause surrender" argument is given in [1]. [0] http://www.doug-long.com/stimson5.htm http://www.doug-long.com/stimson5.htm , ctrl-F for "I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength." [1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...
  - iguy 8y ago
    "its effects were substantially interchangeable with the bomb" Yes, its military effects. (And humanitarian effects.) But no, in political effect. If "war is politics carried on by other means" and the goal was to defeat Japanese Fascism, then you had to make sure it couldn't come back from the dead after a grudging surrender. That was IMHO the main lesson of Versailles. And it worked.
porpoisely 8y ago
It isn't debatable because we know hiroshima and nagasaki had no bearing on the japanese decision to surrender. If the nukes were the cause of japan's surrender, hiroshima would have been enough and nagasaki wouldn't have happened. Also, there is no ambiguity to the morality of hiroshima or nagasaki. No more than there is any ambiguity to the morality of nazi death camps. They were both racially driven war crimes and crimes against humanity. And as mcnamara said, if we had lost the war, our leaders would have been executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
- skadamou 8y ago
  >...we know hiroshima and nagasaki had no bearing on the japanese decision to surrender. I think this is an interesting idea but I would love to see a source on this. When I took a Japan at War class in college our professor seemed to be of the opinion that using the atom bomb was what finally convinced the Japanese to surrender unconditionally but that they would have agreed to a conditional surrender as long as their emperor was guaranteed some form of independence. What are your thoughts on this?
  - avn2109 8y ago
    I'm not the parent but I wrote a comment about this elsewhere in the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19115219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19115219 and another similar comment previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10485563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10485563
  - deogeo 8y ago
    avn2109 gave some sources in another comment - let me add one more: https://mises.org/wire/atomic-bombing-japan-reconsidered https://mises.org/wire/atomic-bombing-japan-reconsidered
  - jpfr 8y ago
    That is the justification for the bomb for the American public. Many Japanese cities (sixty-ish) were destroyed by traditional firebombing. For the Japanese, Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply meant "two more cities". Two days after Hiroshima, Russia declared war against Japan. So their strategic position in the war became hopeless. Historians believe Russia entering the war shaped the surrender much more than the atomic bomb. https://nationalpost.com/news/did-the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-really-end-the-war https://nationalpost.com/news/did-the-atomic-bombings-of-hir...
chris_mc 8y ago
>I don't know if the bombings were morally right or wrong and can see the argument both ways. But from at least one drafted soldier's perspective they were a good thing. Soldiers volunteer to fight a war, civilians don't. If the Japanese had bombed LA, we wouldn't be having this conversation, every American would understand why this was morally wrong.
- skh 8y ago
  The question isn’t whether Americans would unambiguously view a fire bombing of LA as morally wrong. The question is would the Japanese view it as morally wrong? Of course the victims view it as wrong. Would the offenders?
  - chris_mc 8y ago
    That's not the question, the question is "was it morally wrong to drop the nukes?" My position, based on my classes on the rule of law in warfare from a US service academy, is that civilians are an illegal target for the military and using a nuke on several hundred thousand people to take out a handful of industry is definitely outside of acts of legal warfare. It's different to target a manufacturing facility directly, even with civilians inside. So, this isn't an argument, my position is the correct one. Even a US service academy teaches its officer candidates that the nukes were objectively wrong. The lives of civilians are more sacred than the lives of soldiers during wartime, legally.
    - skh 8y ago
      The answer to the question of the morality of the bombing at least in part depends on whether one is a victim or perpetrator. You correctly stated that Americans would consider a fire bombing of Los Angeles to be morally wrong. From the viewpoint of the victim it's not hard to view such an act as morally wrong. From the perspective of the perpetrator it's not so clear cut. So, this isn't an argument, my position is the correct one. I did not know your view of the morality of this bombing was the only one that matters. Apparently far too many people are wrong on this issue then. Even a US service academy teaches its officer candidates that the nukes were objectively wrong. The lives of civilians are more sacred than the lives of soldiers during wartime, legally. Apparently our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan did not get the message. Of course, the perspective taught in West Point today was not the one taught in West Point in 1945. It was not the viewpoint of Army Air Force commanders either during WWII. What is deemed moral is culture and time dependent. Hence some people - myself included - think it only proper to at least consider the views and knowledge of the people at the time the decisions are made. Since you have deemed yourself correct on this issue there isn't a point in discussion I suppose. Nothing I say can cause you to question anything on this matter. I will read any response you wish to give since I'm not so certain about my position.

JoeDaDude 8y ago

The military did see a lot of utility in the atomic bomb, though they did not fully grasp the effects. Ostensibly, General MacArthur looked at using atomic bombs to clear the beach heads of Japan before sending in the Marines, which would have killed a lot of the latter.

porpoisely 8y ago
I didn't say the military didn't see the utility of the atomic bomb, I said the military saw no military utility in hiroshima and nagasaki. There is a difference between using the bomb to kill soldiers and to destroy/irradiate and kill civilians. Just like there is a a military utility of the gun to kill enemy soldiers, but no military utility to shooting children. For example, a concentration camp to keep enemy soldiers is far different than a concentration camp to keep jewish, japanese american, etc civilians ( fathers, mothers and children ). And it's odd that you bring up macarthur since we know for a fact that he was against hiroshima and nagasaki. "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor." https://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/countdown-to-hiroshima-fo_b_3707531.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/countdown-to-hi...
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  > I said the military saw no military utility in hiroshima and nagasaki How do you reconcile that with the commonly held historical view? Or is that merely your own personal opinion? "Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. Hiroshima was the headquarters of the 2nd General Army 第2総軍 (日本軍) with responsibility for most of western Japan including Kyushu as well as a depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. It was a good radar target and it was such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills that were likely to produce a focusing effect that would considerably increase the blast damage. Due to rivers, it was not a good incendiary target. It was classified as an AA(Prime)Target. It had a military garrison of about 40,000 men. Hiroshima was the primary target for the August 6 attack, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternatives. Far from being an innocent city full of civilians, the garrison of 40,000 soldiers were doing calisthenics when the bomb exploded and were in fact the largest single group of casualties in the city. Nagasaki was a major industrial city making torpedoes and ammunition. Mitsubishi Steel, Orikami Ordinance Works and a large engine works dominated the production in the city in addition of a large garrison. There were also a major dockyard used for the transport of men and materials to the north. It, too, was a high priority target but was a secondary target that was only hit if the primary target was too cloud covered for a visual drop on the primary." https://www.quora.com/Did-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki-have-military-significance-or-were-they-purely-civilian-targets https://www.quora.com/Did-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki-have-milita...

maire 8y ago

There were 3 issues involved in the decision to drop the bomb: 1. The battle of Okinawa was fought vigorously by the Japanese leading the allies to increase their estimates of the cost of war on the Japanese homeland. 2. The fear that if the war lasted too long then the Soviet Union would enter the pacific war and carve up Japan in the same way we carved up Germany 3. Japan's desire for a conditional surrender It is the 3rd factor that was the crux. I believe if we understood the terms of the conditional surrender then we could have ended the war without dropping the bomb. In fact, we likely did comply with what the Japanese wanted since we protected the emperor after the war.

HAL9000Ti 8y ago
I find it very peculiar that you use "we" when talking about the USA country from 84 years ago, is it just me?

ufmace 8y ago

> We had a much larger economy and resource potential than germany and japan. Yes, I once thought that it should have been surprising that Germany didn't get the bomb first. Upon more reading, the effort that the US threw at the project was simply staggering - nobody knew which was the best technique for how to do a bunch of different things, so the Americans tried all of them at the same time. No other participant in the war could have duplicated that level of effort. And despite all of that effort, the bomb was only ready to be dropped after Germany had already been defeated by conventional arms. I have also read that the German scientists' point of view is that a nuclear bomb as a practical military weapon was an interesting idea, but that nobody would be able to build one in time for the current war. And they were right - for themselves.

iguy 8y ago
The effort was indeed huge, but it's not so obvious that the Germans could not have done it. IIRC the V2 missile program may actually have been more expensive? Different technology but also hard... hard enough that in 1969 the same guys were still leading the world.
- kaybe 8y ago
  It did not help that some new aspects found in physics were considered 'ungerman' ('Jewish physics') and discarded, especially Einstein's work and many aspects of quantum mechanics. This alone would probably have proved crippling to any efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
  - rfinney 8y ago
    [edited to remove mis-information ] apologies!
    - msla 8y ago
      Think Un-German, as an English word.

dfgert 8y ago

I don't believe that it was a unfair race so to speak. In my knowledge it were the German scientists who moved to US and helped US develop the bomb. US may have had the resources but it definitely lacked the knowledge for building bomb which German surely possessed.

msla 8y ago
Even had Germany somehow kept the knowledge, it had, at best, a very brief period of time between the beginning of the war and the period when its industrial capacity was being seriously strained, if not bombed almost continuously, to work on the weapon. The Nazi nuclear bomb project was also underfunded for political reasons, not to mention the fact it would have been very difficult to justify working on a blue-sky wonder-weapon instead of building more tanks and planes and rifles for the three-front war practically at their doorstep. You can try to posit a Nazi regime without such constraints, but a Nazi regime which isn't lead by Hitler is fundamentally different from the regime we're talking about. A well-run Nazi Germany, one which didn't pick unwinnable fights, is a Nazi Germany contrary to Hitler's vision.
- iguy 8y ago
  According to Wikipedia, "The German V-weapons (V-1 and V-2) cost the equivalent of around USD $40 billion (2015 dollars), which was 50 percent more than the Manhattan Project". That was super high-tech, blue-sky research, which in the end had almost zero military impact. It was not stopped by Allied bombing. It was done at the expense of more practical things, like tanks and planes, despite serious shortages of some of the ingredients (like fuel). The Manhattan project indeed had a brain trust working on it, the like of which existed nowhere else on the planet. (Maybe more Hungarian than German, though.) Germany could not have replicated that, but it seems likely to me that the brains they did have would have been plenty. There could have been some other roadblock of course, like the total lack of some material. But I don't know of one. IIRC the Soviets mined about half their Uranium in E Germany, so that was available.
- roywiggins 8y ago
  The Nazis loved blue-sky wonder weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-3_cannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikabomber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerikabomber

opo 8y ago

>..We had a much larger economy and resource potential than germany and japan. Just like we do today. It was a race neither had a chance of winning. Germany spent about an equivalent amount of money in the V1 and V2 rocket programs that the US spent on the Manhattan project. Though Heisenburg later claimed he had sabotaged the German effort, the evidence seems to be a bit in favor of saying that he just miscalculated the amount of uranium needed so that it looked like it would be impractical as a weapon: >...The largest piece of evidence was that Heisenberg had miscalculated the critical mass needed to achieve an atomic bomb, and thus still believed that tons of U-235 was necessary to create the bomb. http://holbert.faculty.asu.edu/eee460/anv/Why%20the%20Germans%20Failed.html http://holbert.faculty.asu.edu/eee460/anv/Why%20the%20German... >...Most military leaders saw it as serving no military purpose. So ultimately, hiroshima and nagasaki were the largest human experimentation in ww2. They weren't chosen at random. For example, the original target for Nagasaki was supposed to be Kokura: >...The American bomber was a B-29 named Bock's Car, and it was supposed to drop the world's first plutonium bomb on Kokura. Three times, Bock's Car passed over Kokura, bomb bays open, a hum in the cockpit signaling that the bomb was ready for release, the crew wearing the special goggles that were supposed to protect them from the flash of the atomic explosion. >But although the radar scope was locked on to Kokura, the orders were to drop the bomb only on visual identification of the huge arms factory that was the target. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/07/world/kokura-japan-bypassed-by-a-bomb.html?mtrref=www.google.com https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/07/world/kokura-japan-bypass... The use of the atomic bomb was both a military and political statement.

ekun 8y ago

If you look more into it, Germany was very close to being able to build a reactor that would have been able to produce plutonium. Their graphite reactor research never went critical because they didn't know that the boron impurities in graphite was absorbing too many neutrons. I'm not saying if they knew that they would've had the resources to make enough plutonium for a bomb, but the German scientists wren't that far away. Having said all that, if you read through all of these documents it seems like they had no idea how the bomb was built and designed.

Tsubasachan 8y ago

Very few documentaries mention this but the Allies won the war because of their colonies. The uranium used for the Manhattan project came from Congo for example. All the resources of South America and Africa were at their disposal.