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Well beyond "live field testing on untouched targets", the purpose of dropping the bombs was to display the capability to the USSR, and thus assert the US posit

• defrost 3y ago
  > the purpose of dropping the bombs was to display the capability to the USSR Can you support that with a quote from before the bombing of H&N from the senior staff responsible for testing the weapons? Here's a better than half decent resource to get tarted that points at most of the majr sources and opinions on the matter: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb-a-consensus-view/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-u... Bear in mind that Truman was a late in the day President with no prior knowledge of the Manhatten Project until after he was read in and that many of the driving forces in the later stages came from justifying the single most expensive military R&D project undertaken to date in the face of a German threat that no longer existed. Rudimentary bureaucracy theories might suggest that the primary driving force was to demostrate vast amounts of money hadn't been pissed up against a wall. With the end of the war and the transition to a Cold War a great many justifications and motivations for dropping the bomb were created and transmorgified over the decades, few of these seem to have been in active play when making the actual decision in the month before.