Really good points. It might take me being further from covid for how similar it is to the Manhattan project response to really sink in. Might be too “fresh.”

Really good points. It might take me being further from covid for how similar it is to the Manhattan project response to really sink in. Might be too “fresh.” Maybe this is a chance to learn something about those times. So until the bomb was dropped, the public wouldn’t have had any conception of it being a way out of the war. Yet if the war was in decline when the bombs dropped, I suspect we can agree the bombs did make the finality pretty certain. (Edit-I would argue the bombs absolutely did end the war in a way that wasn’t assured without them dropping, but that’s a point for another time.) As someone living through covid, the vaccine was something we all were essentially waiting around for while others developed it. We’re aware of it, even if we don’t know how much work was needed to develop the mRNA vaccines. So in WWII your average person could have perceived much more terror from not even fathoming the end of the war at various points.