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The idea that Japan was going to surrender is revisionist nonsense. The US manufactured millions of purple hearts in anticipation of an amphibious invasion. T

The idea that Japan was going to surrender is revisionist nonsense. The US manufactured millions of purple hearts in anticipation of an amphibious invasion. To this day those are the purple hearts used. Nuclear weapons saved millions of lives.

jleyank 1y ago
Particularly amongst the civilians in Asia who had suffered over the last 10 years. Ending the war quickly stopped this killing, aside from the Japanese and American + allies lives. And the early bombs were merely efficient ways to level a city. 1 B-29 rather than a few hundred. 16 sq miles of Tokyo got burned down in one night, for example.
- pixl97 1y ago
  If atomic bombs never developed past what they dropped in Japan it's somewhat likely be used in war commonly. They are large and nasty, yet still require a lot of them for metropolitan areas. It's the civilization enders we developed in the 30 years after that woke us up.
  - InTheArena 1y ago
    I always found this the most interesting aspect of the timing of the bombs. They occurred at the one moment in 20th century where their power could be seen in a way that everybody immediately grasp the outcome of it and that no response was physically possible. They also occurred at the one moment in time in which a multipolar world essentially coalesced to a bipolar world. And the people that use the bomb had every intention of moving towards a true United Nations with use of the bomb governed via the UN. If any of those things change, I think history looks very different
  - philipkglass 1y ago
    The civilization-enders were in mass production a mere 9 years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb Mk-17: produced Jul 1954-Nov 1955 No. built: 200 Blast yield: 15 megatonnes of TNT This is 1000 times the power of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. From 1935 to 1955 you could plot "firepower deliverable by a single aircraft" and see a trend that looks a lot like Moore's Law for mass destruction of life and structures. Edward Teller thought that it was possible to make bombs a thousand times more powerful than the first generation thermonuclear bombs, but fortunately nobody was willing to commit resources to exploring the concept. Merely testing such a bomb on Earth would have been an act of mass destruction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)
deleted 1y ago
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jleyank 1y ago

Particularly amongst the civilians in Asia who had suffered over the last 10 years. Ending the war quickly stopped this killing, aside from the Japanese and American + allies lives. And the early bombs were merely efficient ways to level a city. 1 B-29 rather than a few hundred. 16 sq miles of Tokyo got burned down in one night, for example.

pixl97 1y ago
If atomic bombs never developed past what they dropped in Japan it's somewhat likely be used in war commonly. They are large and nasty, yet still require a lot of them for metropolitan areas. It's the civilization enders we developed in the 30 years after that woke us up.
- InTheArena 1y ago
  I always found this the most interesting aspect of the timing of the bombs. They occurred at the one moment in 20th century where their power could be seen in a way that everybody immediately grasp the outcome of it and that no response was physically possible. They also occurred at the one moment in time in which a multipolar world essentially coalesced to a bipolar world. And the people that use the bomb had every intention of moving towards a true United Nations with use of the bomb governed via the UN. If any of those things change, I think history looks very different
- philipkglass 1y ago
  The civilization-enders were in mass production a mere 9 years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb Mk-17: produced Jul 1954-Nov 1955 No. built: 200 Blast yield: 15 megatonnes of TNT This is 1000 times the power of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. From 1935 to 1955 you could plot "firepower deliverable by a single aircraft" and see a trend that looks a lot like Moore's Law for mass destruction of life and structures. Edward Teller thought that it was possible to make bombs a thousand times more powerful than the first generation thermonuclear bombs, but fortunately nobody was willing to commit resources to exploring the concept. Merely testing such a bomb on Earth would have been an act of mass destruction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)

deleted 1y ago

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