11 ms·

What if the Trinity test had failed?

blibble 6y ago
there was a very early Sliders episode about exactly this! https://sliders.fandom.com/wiki/Asteroid_World https://sliders.fandom.com/wiki/Asteroid_World
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  They got the bit about nuclear power wrong though. Fission was discovered in Germany just before WWII, which is why Einstein (the real one) was concerned that the Germans might develop nuclear weapons first and advised the US to do it. At that point it wasn't obvious that a bomb was possible even if fission was, but even if it wasn't, the application of fission to power generation would still have been obvious. If anything they'd have probably had more nuclear power generation, because the proliferation risk wouldn't have been a concern and the scary association with city-destroying weapons wouldn't have been such a PR problem.
  - trimbo 6y ago
    > Einstein (the real one) was concerned that the Germans might develop nuclear weapons first and advised the US to do it. Leo Szilard had this realization, wrote the letter, and got Einstein to sign it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...
- tobylane 6y ago
  I really enjoyed the Manhattan series, which covered similar ground. Some reasonably accurate but dramatised scenes about viability of the bomb types and exploring how to get there, both physically and in maths. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_(TV_series)
- superkuh 6y ago
  Sliders also predicted people going to bars without masks during a pandemic.
dgrin91 6y ago
What if this website fails because it got hugged to death?
HPsquared 6y ago
Site seems to be down. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200716185116/http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/07/16/what-if-the-trinity-test-had-failed/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200716185116/http://blog.nucle...
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
A lot of people would have been very surprised if it had failed. The physics wasn't considered a mystery by then. Failure would have been caused by fixable engineering and design mistakes - or sabotage - not because the idea was unworkable. There might have been some completely unexpected physics at scale. But given that nuclear reactors were already a thing, that would have been very surprising.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  Trinity was a plutonium device. Reactors were uranium devices. Nobody was really sure if the plutonium implosion device would work - that's why they did the test; they were very sure that the uranium bullet device, that was used on Hiroshima without testing, would work.
- dllthomas 6y ago
  > There might have been some completely unexpected physics at scale. But given that nuclear reactors were already a thing, that would have been very surprising. That sort of happened in a later test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo "Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatons of TNT, 2.5 times the predicted 6.0 megatons, due to unforeseen additional reactions involving lithium-7"
- beervirus 6y ago
  If your time tolerance is nanoseconds, the engineering is everything.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    That's true with implosion but not gun type
    - baud147258 6y ago
      Trinity was an implosion type bomb, so the required tolerances were tight
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
panzagl 6y ago
Failed like didn't explode or failed like set the entire atmosphere on fire?
- RobRivera 6y ago
  The published article annotated modes of failure with respect to the desired operational objective of a 5kton blast, 500 ton, various component failures, and their implications. It's written from a operational impact perspective on the war, Potsdam, and cold war implications.
- beervirus 6y ago
  Read the article, but he's talking about failures as in not exploding (or exploding with significantly lower yield).
- OvidStavrica 6y ago
  I think they refer to the failure mode where: Nothing happened for a day or two. All the experts travel to the location to try to understand what went wrong, in situ... and THEN the explosion occurs.
  - iguy 6y ago
    This really wasn't a plausible failure mode. They had many (9?) detonators which had to be very precisely simultaneous, and had done a lot of tests of those alone (this was cheap & easy). As long as just one of them worked, you would burn all the explosives (just not in the right order) and destroy the device.
    - catalogia 6y ago
      I'm sure they had some redundancy in the systems required to fire those detonators too, but how much?
      - iguy 6y ago
        Not sure how you would quantify this, but enough? Inventing detonators that worked fast enough (i.e. small enough error in firing time) was one of the challenges. They did a lot of tests of those explosive lenses. (32, not 9, of course.) The electronics to fire them would have comparatively easy to test well, and I'm sure they over-designed it all. I doubt that duplicating it would have made anything better.
Animats 6y ago
Everyone involved was confident the gun-type bomb would work. They'd tested bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close together in criticality experiments. That experiment killed several people at Los Alamos. The big worry was it going off prematurely. When the Enola Gay took off to drop the uranium bomb on Hiroshima, their orders were that if they had to turn back, dump the bomb in deep water. A billion dollars to the bottom of the sea. That was preferable to taking the chance of blowing the airfield on Tinian off the map if the B-29 had a fire on landing. Making enriched uranium was slow, but working. The gaseous-diffusion plant cascades were working, after months of startup. The second gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, K-27, opened in September 1945, a few weeks after the end of the war. If the war had dragged on, there would have been more uranium bombs.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >Everyone involved was confident the gun-type bomb would work. Yes. That's why the design of the Little Boy bomb carried by the Enola Gay was only "unit tested." That's not what the Trinity test tested. The uranium gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima was basically a backup plan in case the plutonium-implosion design--which was the primary focus of Los Alamos during the later part of the Manhattan Project--couldn't be made to work. And it was the plutonium-implosion design that was tested at Trinity. (And was the design dropped on Nagasaki.)
- wtallis 6y ago
  > They'd tested bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close together in criticality experiments. That experiment killed several people at Los Alamos. I think the fatal criticality accidents at Los Alamos involved a single chunk of plutonium and neutron reflectors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
  - ZeljkoS 6y ago
    The Demon core story is quite fascinating, I compiled several Wikipedia articles to construct the full narrative: https://svedic.org/history/demon-core https://svedic.org/history/demon-core
RangerScience 6y ago
This is a pretty fascinating exploration into what wasn't known about the bomb prior to the test, the range of expectations about what would happen, and the various things that the test results affected.
plasticchris 6y ago
One of the most interesting stories about.. work life balance... was in Richard Rhodes' book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb), about fixing imperfections in the high explosive castings with dental tools just before (I think it was the night before?) the test. Another source here: https://www.abqjournal.com/trinity/trinity3.pdf https://www.abqjournal.com/trinity/trinity3.pdf
cryptonector 6y ago
TFA asks a bunch of what-if questions -- very good ones indeed. > Would a failure at Trinity have changed the outcome of World War II in any significant way? Ultimately this question relies on what you think caused the Japanese to offer up a conditional surrender on August 10th, and then an unconditional surrender on August 14th. In particular, it depends on how important you think the Nagasaki bombing was for the decision-making of the Japanese high command. I think it's pretty clear that a) the Japanese had been willing to surrender on one condition (keeping the emperor) for weeks, b) the U.S. was holding out for an unconditional surrender, c) the USSR entering the war pushed Japan to make, and the U.S. to accept, a privately-conditional / publicly-unconditional surrender. I believe the bombs made little real difference. From a Japanese perspective they destroyed nothing that hadn't already been firebombed to smithereens -- all large- and medium-sized cities already had been firebombed to smithereens. It's really hard to believe that the war with Japan would have had a different outcome if either or both bombs had not been dropped. But I found this very interesting: > After getting the successful results from Trinity, Truman took a very hard line with Stalin. He believed that the bomb gave him leverage for both the end of World War II and the peace that would follow. Though he did not try to argue that the Soviets should not declare war on Japan or stop their invasion plans, he was less convinced he would need the Soviet entry into the war, and did not encourage them. Well! If he had been certain enough to demand that Stalin not enter the war, that might have meant we'd have no North Korea today. Interesting thought.
- opo 6y ago
  >I think it's pretty clear ... I don't think there is a clear consensus on any of the points you bring up: >...a) the Japanese had been willing to surrender on one condition (keeping the emperor) for weeks, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan >...On June 9, the Emperor's confidant Marquis Kōichi Kido wrote a "Draft Plan for Controlling the Crisis Situation," warning that by the end of the year Japan's ability to wage modern war would be extinguished and the government would be unable to contain civil unrest. >...Kido's proposal did not contemplate Allied occupation of Japan, prosecution of war criminals or substantial change in Japan's system of government, nor did Kido suggest that Japan might be willing to consider relinquishing territories acquired prior to 1937 including Formosa, Karafuto, Korea, the formerly German islands in the Pacific and even Manchukuo. In July, Togo told the ambassador to the Soviet Union: >...Although the directing powers, and the government as well, are convinced that our war strength still can deliver considerable blows to the enemy, we are unable to feel absolutely secure peace of mind ... Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians' mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender. >In reply, Satō clarified: >It goes without saying that in my earlier message calling for unconditional surrender or closely equivalent terms, I made an exception of the question of preserving [the imperial family].[49] >On July 21, speaking in the name of the cabinet, Tōgō repeated: With regard to unconditional surrender we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever. ... >...b) the U.S. was holding out for an unconditional surrender It is more accurate to say they were holding out an acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. >...c) the USSR entering the war pushed Japan to make, and the U.S. to accept, a privately-conditional / publicly-unconditional surrender. It is not like the US didn't know the Soviet Union was going to enter the war. When the Japanese government demanded that the emperor would remain in power, the reply simply was: >...From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms. ... The ultimate form of government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people. Eventually Japan agreed to the Potsdam Declaration. >...From a Japanese perspective they destroyed nothing that hadn't already been firebombed to smithereens That is basically true and had been true for months. The question is why did so many have to die in Okinawa? I think an argument can be made that the atomic bomb made it very clear to the emperor how ruinous the situation was and pointing at the bomb allowed him to save face: >...In a meeting with the Emperor, Yonai spoke of his concerns about growing civil unrest: >I think the term is inappropriate, but the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, divine gifts. This way we don't have to say that we have quit the war because of domestic circumstances. Indeed the major reason that Hirohito publicly mentioned in his speech to the nation was: >...Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_Voice_Broadcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_Voice_Broadcast >...It's really hard to believe that the war with Japan would have had a different outcome if either or both bombs had not been dropped. There is no way that Japan would have "won" the war at point, but if the surrender of Japan had been delayed and the invasion occurred, there would have been many more casualties on both sides. Both sides were preparing for a horrific battle: >...Instead, everything was staked on the beachhead; more than 3,000 kamikazes would be sent to attack the amphibious transports before troops and cargo were disembarked on the beach.[8] If this did not drive the Allies away, they planned to send another 3,500 kamikazes along with 5,000 Shin'yō suicide motorboats and the remaining destroyers and submarines—"the last of the Navy's operating fleet"—to the beach. On the other side: >...Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyūshū, was to begin on "X-Day", which was scheduled for 1 November 1945. The combined Allied naval armada would have been the largest ever assembled, including 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Fourteen U.S. "division-equivalents" (13 divisions and two regimental combat teams)[28] were scheduled to take part in the initial landings. and if that armada wasn't enough: >...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
Koshkin 6y ago
I find it most fascinating that when Little Boy was detonated the portion of only about one kilogram underwent fission out of the total Uranium mass of 64 kg. So much destruction from such a tiny amount of stuff...
johnklos 6y ago
"It should not be much less than me thousand tons unless there is an actual malfunctioning of some of the components." "me" == "meh"?
- JoshuaDavid 6y ago
  "One" I think. Probably was "ne" and got autocorrected to "me" instead of "one" (would make sense, "less than me" probably occurs more often than "less than one").
chasd00 6y ago
if you have never been to the nuclear science museum in Albuquerque NM is amazing... and a little surreal. I remember walking outside to see the planes and icbms, off in a corner mixed in with some scrap was a pallet with a big metal cylinder thing. I thought it was construction equipment or just trash but, nope, it was a B41. The B41 is a 25mt air dropped bomb, the largest strategic nuke ever fielded by the US. I had a couple moments like that at the museum. Behind a door was a bomb casing with B61 written on it with a sharpie. these were the most destructive devices ever conceived of by man but just strewn about like what you'd find in some old timer's garage.
Syzygies 6y ago
The Trinity test remains the most intellectually arrogant moment in history. The bomb could have ignited the atmosphere, turned us into another sun for reasons we didn't understand. They worried about this, and were fairly confident in their calculations. But every century of physics brings the realization we had little clue a century earlier. If the Trinity test had behaved in an unexpected way, we wouldn't be reading this. That's what I assumed the headline meant. I was disappointed.
- tinalumfoil 6y ago
  That's a bit too fearful of the unknown. Where would we be if our ancestors didn't play with fire?
- dogfoods 6y ago
  "The bomb could have ignited the atmosphere," No, it could not have.
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    The point is not whether it could have, or not. Its whether they knew it wouldn't. And in fact, they didn't know it wouldn't ignite the atmosphere - there was a chance it might and they went ahead anyway. It was a calculated risk.
    - dogfoods 6y ago
      No, Bethe and others knew in the 40s it could not have. Enough nuclear physics was known then to know that the atmosphere cannot be ignited by a nuke. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bethe-teller-trinity-and-the-end-of-earth/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bethe-telle...
      - fit2rule 6y ago
        They didn't know for sure until they'd tested it in the real world. That's the point of the hubris.

there was a very early Sliders episode about exactly this! https://sliders.fandom.com/wiki/Asteroid_World https://sliders.fandom.com/wiki/Asteroid_World

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
They got the bit about nuclear power wrong though. Fission was discovered in Germany just before WWII, which is why Einstein (the real one) was concerned that the Germans might develop nuclear weapons first and advised the US to do it. At that point it wasn't obvious that a bomb was possible even if fission was, but even if it wasn't, the application of fission to power generation would still have been obvious. If anything they'd have probably had more nuclear power generation, because the proliferation risk wouldn't have been a concern and the scary association with city-destroying weapons wouldn't have been such a PR problem.
- trimbo 6y ago
  > Einstein (the real one) was concerned that the Germans might develop nuclear weapons first and advised the US to do it. Leo Szilard had this realization, wrote the letter, and got Einstein to sign it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...
tobylane 6y ago
I really enjoyed the Manhattan series, which covered similar ground. Some reasonably accurate but dramatised scenes about viability of the bomb types and exploring how to get there, both physically and in maths. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_(TV_series)
superkuh 6y ago
Sliders also predicted people going to bars without masks during a pandemic.

dgrin91 6y ago

What if this website fails because it got hugged to death?

HPsquared 6y ago

Site seems to be down. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200716185116/http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/07/16/what-if-the-trinity-test-had-failed/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200716185116/http://blog.nucle...

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

A lot of people would have been very surprised if it had failed. The physics wasn't considered a mystery by then. Failure would have been caused by fixable engineering and design mistakes - or sabotage - not because the idea was unworkable. There might have been some completely unexpected physics at scale. But given that nuclear reactors were already a thing, that would have been very surprising.

zabzonk 6y ago
Trinity was a plutonium device. Reactors were uranium devices. Nobody was really sure if the plutonium implosion device would work - that's why they did the test; they were very sure that the uranium bullet device, that was used on Hiroshima without testing, would work.
dllthomas 6y ago
> There might have been some completely unexpected physics at scale. But given that nuclear reactors were already a thing, that would have been very surprising. That sort of happened in a later test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo "Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatons of TNT, 2.5 times the predicted 6.0 megatons, due to unforeseen additional reactions involving lithium-7"
beervirus 6y ago
If your time tolerance is nanoseconds, the engineering is everything.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  That's true with implosion but not gun type
  - baud147258 6y ago
    Trinity was an implosion type bomb, so the required tolerances were tight
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

panzagl 6y ago

Failed like didn't explode or failed like set the entire atmosphere on fire?

RobRivera 6y ago
The published article annotated modes of failure with respect to the desired operational objective of a 5kton blast, 500 ton, various component failures, and their implications. It's written from a operational impact perspective on the war, Potsdam, and cold war implications.
beervirus 6y ago
Read the article, but he's talking about failures as in not exploding (or exploding with significantly lower yield).
OvidStavrica 6y ago
I think they refer to the failure mode where: Nothing happened for a day or two. All the experts travel to the location to try to understand what went wrong, in situ... and THEN the explosion occurs.
- iguy 6y ago
  This really wasn't a plausible failure mode. They had many (9?) detonators which had to be very precisely simultaneous, and had done a lot of tests of those alone (this was cheap & easy). As long as just one of them worked, you would burn all the explosives (just not in the right order) and destroy the device.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    I'm sure they had some redundancy in the systems required to fire those detonators too, but how much?
    - iguy 6y ago
      Not sure how you would quantify this, but enough? Inventing detonators that worked fast enough (i.e. small enough error in firing time) was one of the challenges. They did a lot of tests of those explosive lenses. (32, not 9, of course.) The electronics to fire them would have comparatively easy to test well, and I'm sure they over-designed it all. I doubt that duplicating it would have made anything better.

Animats 6y ago

Everyone involved was confident the gun-type bomb would work. They'd tested bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close together in criticality experiments. That experiment killed several people at Los Alamos. The big worry was it going off prematurely. When the Enola Gay took off to drop the uranium bomb on Hiroshima, their orders were that if they had to turn back, dump the bomb in deep water. A billion dollars to the bottom of the sea. That was preferable to taking the chance of blowing the airfield on Tinian off the map if the B-29 had a fire on landing. Making enriched uranium was slow, but working. The gaseous-diffusion plant cascades were working, after months of startup. The second gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, K-27, opened in September 1945, a few weeks after the end of the war. If the war had dragged on, there would have been more uranium bombs.

ghaff 6y ago
>Everyone involved was confident the gun-type bomb would work. Yes. That's why the design of the Little Boy bomb carried by the Enola Gay was only "unit tested." That's not what the Trinity test tested. The uranium gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima was basically a backup plan in case the plutonium-implosion design--which was the primary focus of Los Alamos during the later part of the Manhattan Project--couldn't be made to work. And it was the plutonium-implosion design that was tested at Trinity. (And was the design dropped on Nagasaki.)
wtallis 6y ago
> They'd tested bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close together in criticality experiments. That experiment killed several people at Los Alamos. I think the fatal criticality accidents at Los Alamos involved a single chunk of plutonium and neutron reflectors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
- ZeljkoS 6y ago
  The Demon core story is quite fascinating, I compiled several Wikipedia articles to construct the full narrative: https://svedic.org/history/demon-core https://svedic.org/history/demon-core

RangerScience 6y ago

This is a pretty fascinating exploration into what wasn't known about the bomb prior to the test, the range of expectations about what would happen, and the various things that the test results affected.

plasticchris 6y ago

One of the most interesting stories about.. work life balance... was in Richard Rhodes' book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb), about fixing imperfections in the high explosive castings with dental tools just before (I think it was the night before?) the test. Another source here: https://www.abqjournal.com/trinity/trinity3.pdf https://www.abqjournal.com/trinity/trinity3.pdf

cryptonector 6y ago

TFA asks a bunch of what-if questions -- very good ones indeed. > Would a failure at Trinity have changed the outcome of World War II in any significant way? Ultimately this question relies on what you think caused the Japanese to offer up a conditional surrender on August 10th, and then an unconditional surrender on August 14th. In particular, it depends on how important you think the Nagasaki bombing was for the decision-making of the Japanese high command. I think it's pretty clear that a) the Japanese had been willing to surrender on one condition (keeping the emperor) for weeks, b) the U.S. was holding out for an unconditional surrender, c) the USSR entering the war pushed Japan to make, and the U.S. to accept, a privately-conditional / publicly-unconditional surrender. I believe the bombs made little real difference. From a Japanese perspective they destroyed nothing that hadn't already been firebombed to smithereens -- all large- and medium-sized cities already had been firebombed to smithereens. It's really hard to believe that the war with Japan would have had a different outcome if either or both bombs had not been dropped. But I found this very interesting: > After getting the successful results from Trinity, Truman took a very hard line with Stalin. He believed that the bomb gave him leverage for both the end of World War II and the peace that would follow. Though he did not try to argue that the Soviets should not declare war on Japan or stop their invasion plans, he was less convinced he would need the Soviet entry into the war, and did not encourage them. Well! If he had been certain enough to demand that Stalin not enter the war, that might have meant we'd have no North Korea today. Interesting thought.

opo 6y ago
>I think it's pretty clear ... I don't think there is a clear consensus on any of the points you bring up: >...a) the Japanese had been willing to surrender on one condition (keeping the emperor) for weeks, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan >...On June 9, the Emperor's confidant Marquis Kōichi Kido wrote a "Draft Plan for Controlling the Crisis Situation," warning that by the end of the year Japan's ability to wage modern war would be extinguished and the government would be unable to contain civil unrest. >...Kido's proposal did not contemplate Allied occupation of Japan, prosecution of war criminals or substantial change in Japan's system of government, nor did Kido suggest that Japan might be willing to consider relinquishing territories acquired prior to 1937 including Formosa, Karafuto, Korea, the formerly German islands in the Pacific and even Manchukuo. In July, Togo told the ambassador to the Soviet Union: >...Although the directing powers, and the government as well, are convinced that our war strength still can deliver considerable blows to the enemy, we are unable to feel absolutely secure peace of mind ... Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians' mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender. >In reply, Satō clarified: >It goes without saying that in my earlier message calling for unconditional surrender or closely equivalent terms, I made an exception of the question of preserving [the imperial family].[49] >On July 21, speaking in the name of the cabinet, Tōgō repeated: With regard to unconditional surrender we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever. ... >...b) the U.S. was holding out for an unconditional surrender It is more accurate to say they were holding out an acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. >...c) the USSR entering the war pushed Japan to make, and the U.S. to accept, a privately-conditional / publicly-unconditional surrender. It is not like the US didn't know the Soviet Union was going to enter the war. When the Japanese government demanded that the emperor would remain in power, the reply simply was: >...From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms. ... The ultimate form of government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people. Eventually Japan agreed to the Potsdam Declaration. >...From a Japanese perspective they destroyed nothing that hadn't already been firebombed to smithereens That is basically true and had been true for months. The question is why did so many have to die in Okinawa? I think an argument can be made that the atomic bomb made it very clear to the emperor how ruinous the situation was and pointing at the bomb allowed him to save face: >...In a meeting with the Emperor, Yonai spoke of his concerns about growing civil unrest: >I think the term is inappropriate, but the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, divine gifts. This way we don't have to say that we have quit the war because of domestic circumstances. Indeed the major reason that Hirohito publicly mentioned in his speech to the nation was: >...Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_Voice_Broadcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_Voice_Broadcast >...It's really hard to believe that the war with Japan would have had a different outcome if either or both bombs had not been dropped. There is no way that Japan would have "won" the war at point, but if the surrender of Japan had been delayed and the invasion occurred, there would have been many more casualties on both sides. Both sides were preparing for a horrific battle: >...Instead, everything was staked on the beachhead; more than 3,000 kamikazes would be sent to attack the amphibious transports before troops and cargo were disembarked on the beach.[8] If this did not drive the Allies away, they planned to send another 3,500 kamikazes along with 5,000 Shin'yō suicide motorboats and the remaining destroyers and submarines—"the last of the Navy's operating fleet"—to the beach. On the other side: >...Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyūshū, was to begin on "X-Day", which was scheduled for 1 November 1945. The combined Allied naval armada would have been the largest ever assembled, including 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Fourteen U.S. "division-equivalents" (13 divisions and two regimental combat teams)[28] were scheduled to take part in the initial landings. and if that armada wasn't enough: >...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall

Koshkin 6y ago

I find it most fascinating that when Little Boy was detonated the portion of only about one kilogram underwent fission out of the total Uranium mass of 64 kg. So much destruction from such a tiny amount of stuff...

johnklos 6y ago

"It should not be much less than me thousand tons unless there is an actual malfunctioning of some of the components." "me" == "meh"?

JoshuaDavid 6y ago
"One" I think. Probably was "ne" and got autocorrected to "me" instead of "one" (would make sense, "less than me" probably occurs more often than "less than one").

chasd00 6y ago

if you have never been to the nuclear science museum in Albuquerque NM is amazing... and a little surreal. I remember walking outside to see the planes and icbms, off in a corner mixed in with some scrap was a pallet with a big metal cylinder thing. I thought it was construction equipment or just trash but, nope, it was a B41. The B41 is a 25mt air dropped bomb, the largest strategic nuke ever fielded by the US. I had a couple moments like that at the museum. Behind a door was a bomb casing with B61 written on it with a sharpie. these were the most destructive devices ever conceived of by man but just strewn about like what you'd find in some old timer's garage.

Syzygies 6y ago

The Trinity test remains the most intellectually arrogant moment in history. The bomb could have ignited the atmosphere, turned us into another sun for reasons we didn't understand. They worried about this, and were fairly confident in their calculations. But every century of physics brings the realization we had little clue a century earlier. If the Trinity test had behaved in an unexpected way, we wouldn't be reading this. That's what I assumed the headline meant. I was disappointed.

tinalumfoil 6y ago
That's a bit too fearful of the unknown. Where would we be if our ancestors didn't play with fire?
dogfoods 6y ago
"The bomb could have ignited the atmosphere," No, it could not have.
- fit2rule 6y ago
  The point is not whether it could have, or not. Its whether they knew it wouldn't. And in fact, they didn't know it wouldn't ignite the atmosphere - there was a chance it might and they went ahead anyway. It was a calculated risk.
  - dogfoods 6y ago
    No, Bethe and others knew in the 40s it could not have. Enough nuclear physics was known then to know that the atmosphere cannot be ignited by a nuke. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bethe-teller-trinity-and-the-end-of-earth/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/bethe-telle...
    - fit2rule 6y ago
      They didn't know for sure until they'd tested it in the real world. That's the point of the hubris.