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The Third Atomic Bomb
- mannyv 2y agoJust started a book on the American Occupation (Architects of Occupation). It's interesting realize that the US at one point was able to rebuild a society from the ground up. They took the lessons from Versailles and made a peace (and society) that lasted for a surprisingly long time. That success in Japan and Europe probably emboldened the B team, who went on to handle regime change in Central/South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. That's the difference between reading the book and reading the cliff notes, presumably.
- readthenotes1 2y agoEisenhower and the Dulles Brothers weren't interested in nation building, they were intent on countering the Soviet Union's meddling and/or preserving USA business interests.
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- UIUC_06 2y ago> They took the lessons from Versailles what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all. Germany would have resumed the war if that was what the Versailles conference came up with, and the Allies had no stomach for more war.
- FredPret 2y agoBut isn’t that the lesson? Occupy while you rebuild?
- UIUC_06 2y agoNo, the lesson was to demand unconditional surrender. That was just not in the cards for WW I. Russia had already dropped out.
- bumby 2y agoIt's of course up for debate, but one of the general assessments is that the resentment caused by the Treaty of Versailles gave fertile ground for the rise of the Nazi party. It's hard to see how unconditional surrender would have made the treaty more palatable to Germans rather than less.
- sib 2y agoI would rather say that the fact that there was a (conditional) surrender by Germany and it took place before the Allies had significantly entered German homeland territory enabled certain agitators to claim that Germany had been betrayed rather than defeated. You are correct that the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles made for good grist for the mill when those same agitators to point at the "unfair" consequences of the betrayal. After WWII there was no one who could possibly say that Germany had not been completely and utterly defeated (and the Allies, at least the western ones with respect to western Germany) did invest in rebuilding the country.
- otherme123 2y agoThe WWI ended with an armistice, and then a peace treaty. It was intended to save Germany from the shame of total defeat. The problem with that was that peace terms were extremely harsh, as you would impose on an inconditional surrender, and France intention was to get revenge, applying the terms of the treaty as hard as they could. Said agitators tried to take advantage of that duality: "we didn't surrender, yet we are being humiliated". The lesson for WWII was that as shameful it could be for Japan to surrender inconditionally, it was needed to shut those sectors of the society that would think they could had won the war if only... This was more a problem with Japan than Germany in the WWII: Germany never (seriously) wanted a negotiated peace, and specially the soviets didn't want any of that. It's know that Hitler and friends wanted either victory or the complete annihilation of Germany. But Japan actively tried in the last couple of months of the war to achieve a conditional surrender.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all Of course we did [1]. The ACC was far more intrusive than the American occupation of Japan; we formally stripped Germany of its sovereignty. EDIT: the lesson from Versailles was that we had to rebuild Germany. To rebuild required occupation. Occupying Germany after WWII was one of the lessons learned from Versailles. > Germany would have resumed the war Germany was in no position to keep fighting. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Germany
- dabluecaboose 2y agoThe Treaty of Versailles[1] was the treaty that ended World War I, not World War II [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoOh, I see what happened. OP said we learned from Versailles. That’s why we occupied Germany after WWII: to rebuild it.
- quietbritishjim 2y agoThe comment you're replying to is about the Versailles conference after WW1, but your link is about WW2.
- UIUC_06 2y agoso that's three of us who noticed that.
- UIUC_06 2y agoyour link and comments are about WW II. Versailles was the treaty that ended WW I. > Germany was in no position to keep fighting. No one was in 1918 and everyone was exhausted, but "defending the homeland" is a more powerful motivator than anything the Allies had. Germany asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14 Points" which did not include occupation.
- jjk166 2y agoThe allies did occupy a substantial portion of Germany after WW1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Rhineland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Rhineland
- harry8 2y agoVersaille treaty consequences were predictable, predicted and WW2 did in fact occur one generation later. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/keynes-the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/keynes-the-economic-conse...
- hnbad 2y agoIt's a bit more complicated. The reparations were a bigger concern in the early interwar period and hamstrung the Weimar government but a big problem was that although Weimar Germany was formally a democratic republic following the deposition of the Emperor, a lot of its institutions were still monarchists and saw the social democrats as traitors, hoping for a restoration of the monarchy. For example while especially in the build-up to 1933 a lot of the political violence and murders came from the political right and especially the NSDAP, German courts would repeatedly rule the attackers "not guilty" if the victims were on the political left because they did it "out of the love for their country" (i.e. the monarchy). Even the "rise to power" of the NSDAP was a de-facto legal process following the passing of the Enabling Act, co-signed by the conservative Christian "center party" which saw the NSDAP as a tool to defeat communism, believing that Adolf Hitler would use his power to restore the Emperor to the throne and transfer his power to him. It's difficult to tell how things would have played out without the crippling reparations but given Germany's actual history I don't think it's plausible that Weimar Germany would have been stable without it even if it was something that fueled the political right's narrative of betrayal. Germany simply did not have a history of democracy to build on. I think one of the most genius moves following WW2 was to fully dismantle Prussia by restructuring Germany. This was more than a cession of territories, even the parts of Prussia that remained part of Germany were dissolved and integrated into new subdivisions without a clear one-to-one mapping. In modern Germany the strongest remaining notion of Prussia is a general idea of "everything north of Bavaria" mostly present in Bavaria (notably one of the states that remained unchanged after the restructuring - a mistake in my opinion). Prussian identity was inseparable from militarism and a sense of supremacy, even without the formal monarchy. Another possible move would have been to strip German royalty and nobility of its titles and claims like in France but this would have never been supported by the European monarchies like Britain, which often had strong dynastic ties to these families.
- csomar 2y agoJapan and Germany success post-war were not due to US occupation but in spite of it. Both were pretty industrialized nations before the war and had highly skilled population. Their success afterward was a continuation of their previous trend but under a different regime.
- bell-cot 2y agoThis, pretty much. Both the Germans and Japanese knew, in exhaustive detail, how to build and run a modern industrial country. And given the obvious alternative (sheltering in bombed-out smoking ruins, more-or-less) they very quickly decided to Do Whatever It Took to regain their former standards of living.
- WalterBright 2y agoGermany also lost 5,533,000 men while France lost 217,600 and Britain 383,600.
- bell-cot 2y agoI believe you're only looking at military deaths. For purposes of rebuilding, civilian deaths (from all causes, including Germany's national suicide cult insanity shit) are at least as damaging. Similar for all the millions who lived, but were badly damaged themselves - mentally and/or physically.
- WalterBright 2y ago> you're only looking at military deaths Yes, and those are the younger, fit men. The people who work in industry.
- Yeul 2y agoThis is what happened in the Netherlands. After the war the entire population genuinely believed that they were engaged in rebuilding the nation into something better. Turns out humans can do a lot if they work together- ofcourse it usually takes a near apocalyptic event. And it never lasts.
- markvdb 2y agos/Russia/Soviet Union/ . Sloppiness weakens trust in the rest of this otherwise intriguing post.
- exmadscientist 2y agoIt was quite common "back in the day" to call what was properly "the Soviet Union" just "Russia". And it wasn't just pure sloppiness, either; the Soviet Union and its predecessor Russian Empire both had Russia as their heart and soul. Also, everything in this article has been well known for ages. No need to hold back your trust. It's a nice writeup though!
- hsyehbeidhh 2y ago[dead]
- markvdb 2y agohttps://deportetie.kartes.lv https://deportetie.kartes.lv is but one illustration of Soviet != Russia for history buffs. An empire's heart and soul is usually black ice. The USSR was not an exception.
- nsonha 2y agono more "sloppiness" than to refer to the USSR as just "Moscow", as that's where the majority of important decisions, the kinds that nuclear weapon would fall into, were made.
- oneshtein 2y agoRussia is historical name of Ukraine before Moscow renamed their empire into Russian Empire. Ethnic Russians took meeting in 1910 and rebranded themselves into Ukrainians, to avoid confusion with bloody empire, then started Great Ukrainization, to separate themselves from enslaved and erased nations, which ended with mass murder of millions of Ukrainians by Russians in 1932-1934. Russian Empire died and buried in a grave in 1917. Don't dig it up, please.
- AceJohnny2 2y agoTL;DR: it became the Demon Core, after its core was repurposed in criticality experiments with poor methodology. Though the article is mostly about the politics of Japan's surrender, and of maybe/not dropping the third bomb. Kinda offtopic: > Private Robert Hemmerly, was also irradiated but survived, only to die of cancer 33 years later. The phrasing is odd, "only to ..." is a colloquialism to indicate bad luck, as in to escape one bad event only to immediately fall to another bad event. But living 33 more years is a good amount of life! (and long enough interval to start doubting a direct causality between the irradiation and the cancer)
- grvbck 2y ago> and long enough interval to start doubting a direct causality between the irradiation and the cancer A report from Los Alamos Scientific Lab (1979) draws the same conclusion: For example, a brother of [Hemmerly] also died of leukemia (and three other siblings are believed to have had cancer). This makes it likely there is a familial component to the development of the disease. https://www.orau.org/ptp/pdf/accidentsurvivorslanl.pdf https://www.orau.org/ptp/pdf/accidentsurvivorslanl.pdf
- stavros 2y agoIs it just me, or should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians? It would be like Russia dropping two bombs in Kyiv today, which is unthinkable, but it feels the US bombing of Japan is kind of shrugged off.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians? Not really. Strategic bombing, as a concept, was about killing civilians. The idea that you should try not to kill civilians in war was still an evolving concept around WWII, in part because precision munitions and industrial warmaking were in their infancy and toddlerhood, respectively.
- stavros 2y agoThat's an interesting perspective, thanks.
- markovs_gun 2y agoIt was also a response to the horrors of world war 1, where armies faced each other in open fields and the conflict dragged on for years without lines changing much. The reasoning was that ending the war quickly by completely destroying the enemy's capacity and will to continue fighting was better than letting it drag on and become a meat grinder, even if that meant bombing civilians and civilian industry. Obviously this didn't work since WWII was both longer and more deadly than WWI but that was the thinking.
- defrost 2y agoWe should be as exactly horrified as we are by the fact the US dropped convential high explosives and incendaries on civilians. The firebombing of Tokyo had similar death and injury stats to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and there were another 72 cities in Japan completely destroyed by bombing prior to the atomic weapons being rushed into use before the war ended. Cities in Europe were also bombed, and later more tonnage was dropped by the US in SE Asia than they dropped in WWII .. many of those mines dropped remain to this day, still killing and maiming children.
- retrocryptid 2y agoThat would have been the fourth atomic bomb. The first was the Trinity detonation. Second was Hiroshima. Third was Nagasaki. FWIW. You can see the fourth gadget at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque.
- woodpanel 2y ago100,000 civilians killed instantly and an additional 130,000 died from the exposure afterwards and till this day no official excuse from the US. [1] In my social circles I'm usually the first one pointing out the tiniest scent of anti-americanisms but this is too pathetic, even for me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
- southernplaces7 2y ago>100,000 civilians killed instantly and an additional 130,000 died from the exposure afterwards and till this day no official excuse from the US. With all due respect to the enormous civilian suffering behind yours and the following numbers, why should there be an official excuse other than the obvious of winning the war against a barbaric enemy that had already ferociously invaded most of eastern Asia, the western Pacific and ruthlessly killed over 15 million people in the process? The atomic bombings, by the perspective of the time and what had already been done, weren't even so terrible in terms of dead. The mass firebombing campaigns of the entire last couple years of the war against Japanese cities, using completely conventional weapons, had already killed possibly as many as 700,000 people with hardly any allied leader batting an eye, or the U.S. public for that matter. Given this mentality, and the subsequent lack of an apology for those conventional bombings, what would have made the atomic bombings deeply unique? (except for the nature of the bombs themselves). Let's not also forget that Japan itself did everything possible to make the use of atomic bombs seem reasonable, having promised repeatedly that it would fight even in the face of horrendous casualties both for its own people and the forces of any invading army. Given the absolutist stance of Japanese forces in the field previous to those last weeks, fighting until every last man is dead and killing as many civilians as they could in the process, on directives and mentalities instilled directly from Tokyo, it's not hard to see why the Americans took seriously the idea of an unimaginable bloodbath in any potential invasion of the home islands. Just look at the battles of Okinawa, in which the local forces encouraged their own local civilians to commit mass suicide as they lost the island, or the battle of Manilla, in which the knowingly losing Japanese just kept fighting, butchering, raping and burning the city solely for the sake of doing so.
- billti 2y ago> was foolishly violating the safety protocols by using a screwdriver to hold the two halves of the sphere apart. When the screwdriver slipped, the core dropped to form a critical mass I always thought the material had to be forced together at high pressure for the chain reaction to start. Crazy that just dropping it had such dire consequences.
- charles_f 2y agoI was also surprised. I thought you had to use an explosive to initiate the reaction. I never took the expression "critical mass" to such a literal expression, but it seems to be.
- dudinax 2y agoThey do experiments where they get oh-so-close to critical by dripping solution into a container.
- psunavy03 2y agoCriticality is what you get in a nuclear reactor and what killed Slotkin. Supercriticality requires explosives. One is a self-sustaining chain reaction, the other is a runaway chain reaction.
- dumah 2y agoNo, super-criticality occurs in a nuclear reactor when ever the neutron population is increasing. You might be conflating that condition with prompt criticality.
- Tuna-Fish 2y agoCriticality is simply the condition where on average a single neutron interacting with nucleii in the device will on average (through initiating fission) cause one or more additional neutrons to interact with nucleii. Geometry and mass matters here because the "default" thing a neutron does is "misses all the nucleii and exits the device", unless the device is fairly big, simply because as electrically neutral particles neutrons do no interact with electrons and only interact with nucleii when very close, so most material looks mostly like empty space to them. So in principle if you just form a large enough ball of Pu-239, it would go critical. The reason you need explosives is that in order to form that ball, you need to go from a state where there is not enough material together to go critical to a state where there is, and the criticality will immediately start releasing very large amounts of energy. This energy then heats things and drives them apart, preventing a chain reaction where the entire core goes up. In the criticality accidents listed above, that is precisely what happened. In Slotin's case, the upper half of the core kept falling on the lower half and then pushed apart.
- dxs 2y agoThis book is an incredibly good read: "'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is a history book written by the American journalist and historian Richard Rhodes, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1987. The book won multiple awards, including Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The narrative covers people and events from early 20th century discoveries leading to the science of nuclear fission, through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Possibly the best book that I have ever read. It deals with many of the issues raised in the comments here, and with politics, industrial development, economics, military capabilities, and the history of modern physics. Rhodes also wrote "'Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb', which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II, the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced, and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race." Also impeccable Info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb
- complaintdept 2y agoI wish I had read your entire comment before ordering "The Making of" because now I'm paying double shipping to get "Dark Sun" as well.
- kilolima 2y ago[flagged]
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoYou seem to be advocating piracy for a book still in print, still for sale, and from an author who is still alive; please don't, it's mean.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoHard disagree that it is inherently "mean" to pirate a book regardless of its status. If you can afford to support someone you should, but IMO we should value most of all unrestricted access to knowledge without shame. Also this book first came out in 1986. One hopes the author is still not dependent on its sales.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- robterrell 2y agoHere's a movie dramatization of the Louis Slotin screwdriver accident with the demon core: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY
- P_I_Staker 2y agoYet no body talkin' Seems suspicionious.
- darby_nine 2y agoI strongly recommend the book "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety". It's a nice view of how many more bombs we made and how incapable we are of responsibly managing them even before questioning the rationality of the state.
- ErigmolCt 2y agoNuclear weapons management is challenging. This book is a good read connected to the topic
- rurp 2y agoI second this, it is a great book. It's an eye opening and terrifying look at what is involved in managing these weapons. A lot of people take nuclear weapons for granted these days, but the book drives home how fortunate we are that there hasn't been a horrible accident at some point.
- asdasdsddd 2y agoThe Japanese debating over whether to surrender or not after 2 bombs and 100 firebombed cities is genuinely insane.