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Remember, it took not one, but two atomic bombs dropped on cities for Japan to surrender. And even after that, there was an attempted coup to continue fighting
by manfredo 6y ago
Remember, it took not one, but two atomic bombs dropped on cities for Japan to surrender. And even after that, there was an attempted coup to continue fighting the war: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
There only existed two bombs at the time. Had the bombs been dropped as a show of force, it is very likely the US and Japan would have to suffer through a costly invasion anyway.
- dboreham 6y agoHmm. I think the US had at least one more core for a fat man type weapon.
- hpcjoe 6y agoSpecifically, the demon core[1]. It was the core-in-waiting for a third bomb if needed, and I believe that the uranium and plutonium production lines were ramping up by that time[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core [2] https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/timeline https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/timeline search for 1945 July 23 entry.
- Gibbon1 6y ago40 years ago I wrote a paper on nuclear weapons. My memory isn't perfect and the sources are 40-50 years out of date. But here goes. The US built a massive manufacturing pipeline to make nuclear weapons. Little boy was a once off. Fat man was basically a functional prototype. And the manufacturing pipeline was running and kept running after the war. How much weapons grade plutonium they had left over after they bombed Nagasaki is kind of a quibble.
- garmaine 6y agoThe production line was already delivering about 1 bomb per 10 days at that point. The military wanted to keep bombing until surrender was achieved.