I just posted this in the commentary about safety of nuclear power in America: "Of course there's a worst one, there has to be. Well Hanford didn't principally

I just posted this in the commentary about safety of nuclear power in America: "Of course there's a worst one, there has to be. Well Hanford didn't principally produce energy, so much as just plutonium, so really its mission was weapon production. So now we're changing the subject a bit, no longer is it about electricity, but defense. So we can address that immediately: without the Hanford site, Japan would not have surrendered without an invasion of the home islands. Maybe not even then. It was the "new and cruel bomb," as the Emperor of Japan described it while citing it as the reason for surrender in his speech. That "new and cruel" bomb meant an alternative to reenacting the Battle of Iwo Jima (which I would describe as "fucked up" for both sides without question) a thousand times. Battles to the last cartridge. Forgetting completely about the lives of Allied and Axis soldiers, you realize the death toll that would have on the civilians of Japan? They were on the hook for all kinds of atrocities all over Asia and the Pacific, in the context of total war they pissed off the rest of the world way too hard for the Allies to declare a truce. Just in Korea alone, the stories are just...let's not talk about that, let's stick to what is fucked up within nuclear science. Japanese were subscribed to the idea that their genocide was preferable to surrender. So that's why the bomb, and by extension the Hanford site, were so important. In practice the nukes in Japan explosives second, fireworks first. Napalm was a much better explosive for the money, in terms of the destruction it could produce. The really bad bombings in WWII were in Tokyo and Dresden, a hundred thousand dead per bombing, a new climactic event called a "Firestorm," terrible burns, pavement getting goopy, high winds--I claim those bombings were worse. But they weren't as flamboyant as a star." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30362668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30362668