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'The US opened this can of worms' No it was Germany, and specifically Japan. US didn't decide out of the blue to build nukes. US was expecting 0.5 to 4 MILLION

• defrost 14y ago
  > ... and specifically Japan. US didn't decide out of the blue to build nukes. Seems a little unfair to Japan. As FDR approved a project to investigate the Military Application of Uranium Detonation in October 1941. This was 2 months prior to the December 1941 Pearl Harbour attack. It seems unlikely that Japan, specifically, prompted the R&D that led to ... In July 1945 the end result of the MAUD project came about in the Trinity tests of the first nuclear weapon, this was two months after the May 1945 German surrender, leaving the US with a weapon that needed testing and a Soviet frenemy that needed impressing. As for the need to use nuclear weapons on Japan, well, the post war FDR FUD on that matter has obfuscated the extensive saturation bombing, using a mix of incendiaries and high explosives to burn Japanese cities to the ground that was already at play - from the Japanese perspective Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just another two cities levelled to the ground by the US, just two among the many others similarly destroyed. There's an argument to made, and it's one for the historians, that the decisive factor for the Japanese was the fact that the Soviets were now free to invade Japanese territories. This is usually not part of the post WWII US narrative.