[HN Gopher] The Third Atomic Bomb
___________________________________________________________________
The Third Atomic Bomb
Author : dxs
Score : 236 points
Date : 2024-08-07 21:48 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lflank.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lflank.wordpress.com)
| mannyv wrote:
| Just 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 wrote:
| Eisenhower 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.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| But isn't that the lesson?
|
| Occupy while you rebuild?
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| No, the lesson was to demand unconditional surrender. That
| was just not in the cards for WW I. Russia had already
| dropped out.
| bumby wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Germany never (seriously) wanted a negotiated peace
|
| Hitler knew that he'd be hung when the war was over. He
| knew what happened to Mussolini. He was never going to
| allow a negotiated peace.
|
| The idea behind the officers' plot to kill him was that
| then Germany could sue for peace. Failing to kill Hitler
| meant the war was going to continue to the bitter end.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| The 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
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Oh, I see what happened.
|
| OP said we learned from Versailles. That's why we
| occupied Germany after WWII: to rebuild it.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| The comment you're replying to is about the Versailles
| conference after WW1, but your link is about WW2.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| so that's three of us who noticed that.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| your 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.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _No one was in 1918 and everyone was exhausted_ [...]
|
| The US had just entered the war after the Zimmerman
| telegram, and so Allied powers had more man power and
| more industrial strength. The Central powers were the
| ones that were exhausted, especially after the Hundred
| Days Offensive.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| The US had lost 116,000 dead. They were hardly raring to
| go.
|
| The British and French were equally exhausted. Their
| casualties combined were about the same as Germany's:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
|
| You're right that Germany was whipped, but the
| persistence of the "stab in the back" theory in the 20's
| and 30's demonstrated that they hadn't quite internalized
| that. After all, they hadn't been invaded, and "news"
| back then was so heavily censored that the Germans didn't
| all know the real situation.
| cperciva wrote:
| _equally exhausted_
|
| France lost 4.3% of its population. The USA lost 0.1% of
| its population. I wouldn't call that equally exhausted.
| defrost wrote:
| I believe the parsing _intended_ might have been that the
| UK and France were "equally exhausted" .. not that the
| US suffered losses comparable to either.
|
| Even so, the UK lost 3/4 million from 45 million whereas
| France lost 1.1 million from 39 million .. so that's kind
| of order of magnitude roughly ballpark from a distance,
| but France got hit harder.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Correct. The UK and France put together were as exhausted
| as Germany. And "exhaustion" can't be measured just in
| body counts. Recall that France had some very serious
| mutinies around the time of the battle of Verdun.
|
| The "lessons of Versailles" is a dumb phrase. Germany
| only asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14
| Points" although Wilson didn't manage to pull that off
| over England and France's objections.
|
| So we have two counterfactuals, neither of which can be
| settled:
|
| 1) Wilson doesn't propound his 14 Points. Perhaps he
| loses the election of 1912.
|
| 2) He does and the Armistice happens as it actually did,
| but the Paris Peace Conference declares that the Allies
| are going to occupy Germany and reshape its government,
| or maybe Germany is to be dismembered.
|
| It's #2 that this phrase seems to imply. I'd claim that
| if that happens, no peace treaty is signed at all,
| similar to the way that the Korean War is technically
| still going on. The Allies would not have invaded
| Germany. Russia was already out of the war.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| certainly not the intended parsing.
| verbify wrote:
| I think the person you are replying to meant that the
| allies didn't occupy Germany after WWI (and therefore there
| could be few lessons from Versailles on nation building),
| your link posts to WWII.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| which is also the point of the comment you are responding
| to:
|
| in the past no occupation led war again a generation
| later, so the second time around occupation was opted
| for.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| They were all exhausted. US troops had been sent home. If
| Germany had said, "Nope, not signing that" results would
| have been unpredictable. But meekly submitting was
| unlikely.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The allies did occupy a substantial portion of Germany after
| WW1
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Rhineland
| harry8 wrote:
| Versaille treaty consequences were predictable, predicted and
| WW2 did in fact occur one generation later.
|
| https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/keynes-the-economic-conse...
| hnbad wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| Japan 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 wrote:
| This, 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 wrote:
| Germany also lost 5,533,000 men while France lost 217,600
| and Britain 383,600.
| bell-cot wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > you're only looking at military deaths
|
| Yes, and those are the younger, fit men. The people who
| work in industry.
| cgh wrote:
| That is deeply disingenuous. The Marshall Plan transferred
| massive aid and hugely sped up reconstruction in Europe:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
|
| 'The Marshall Plan made it possible for West Germany to
| return quickly to its traditional pattern of industrial
| production with a strong export sector. Without the plan,
| agriculture would have played a larger role in the recovery
| period, which itself would have been longer. With respect to
| Austria, Gunter Bischof has noted that "the Austrian economy,
| injected with an overabundance of European Recovery Program
| funds, produced "miracle" growth figures that matched and at
| times surpassed the German ones."'
|
| Aid to Japan was similarly crucial and amounted to billions
| of dollars. These payments were separate from the Marshall
| Plan, which focused on Europe. Pre-war Japan was not a free
| market economy and subsequently underwent massive reform.
|
| Honestly, I get that it's cool to bash on the US (I am not
| American) but give credit where it's due. US-led post-war
| reconstruction was of enormous and lasting significance.
| simonh wrote:
| Disingenuous and wrong don't mean the same thing. Nothing
| in that comment indicates malicious intent, even though I
| don't agree with the opinion.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Germany got far, far less MP money than Britain or France.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
|
| Germany was also flattened far more.
|
| A better explanation for the "German Miracle" was they
| turned to free markets.
|
| As for Japan, the US occupation was advised by leftist
| professors, who deemed that big business was bad and small
| business was good. Japan remained prostrate under that
| policy. When it was changed to allow big business to
| operate again, Japan became a huge economic success story.
| hnbad wrote:
| A big part of the "German Miracle" is that while Germany
| got less money than Britain or France they assumed they'd
| have to pay all of it back and when they didn't, that
| created a massive windfall that was used to provide
| affordable loans to businesses and reconstruction
| efforts. The "KfW" still exists as a public credit bank
| today - most younger people aren't aware its name
| literally expands to "credit institute for
| reconstruction" in German.
|
| West Germany formally has a "social market economy" and
| while there have been pushes towards a "free market"
| economy those were largely the result of reforms from the
| 1980s onwards. I don't think "free markets" is a good
| explanation when looking at Germany vs Britain or France
| in the 1950s to 1970s.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Why was there no economic miracle in Britain or France,
| despite getting 2-3 times as much MP money?
|
| > I don't think "free markets" is a good explanation when
| looking at Germany vs Britain or France in the 1950s to
| 1970s.
|
| It's the only explanation that fits when compared with
| the other economies at the time.
| regentbowerbird wrote:
| > As for Japan, the US occupation was advised by leftist
| professors, who deemed that big business was bad and
| small business was good
|
| What are your sources on this? The US occupation was led
| by Douglas MacArthur, who was about as far from a
| "leftist professor" as possible.
|
| > When it was changed to allow big business to operate
| again, Japan became a huge economic success story.
|
| I'm no expert, but the more common narrative is the
| Korean war was a stimulant for the Japanese economy.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > What are your sources on this?
|
| My father, who was part of the military occupation force
| in Japan. He also was a professional historian and
| economist. The economy remained flat until big business
| was allowed to resume operation.
|
| > I'm no expert, but the more common narrative is the
| Korean war was a stimulant for the Japanese economy.
|
| People can't stand the idea that the free market works.
| :-/
| Maxatar wrote:
| That argument is plausible if not for the fact that East
| Germany was pretty destitute compared to West Germany.
| csomar wrote:
| Given that East Germany was/is still behind West Germany
| kinda support my point no?
| jjk166 wrote:
| How would it?
| hnbad wrote:
| The US and its Cold War allies wanted to use West Germany
| as a strategic partner against the Soviet Union. The Soviet
| Union wanted to stripmine East Germany for reparations.
| Before the end of WW2, the Soviet Union had received large
| amounts of military aid from the Allies. After WW2 Europe
| continued to receive aid in the form of the Marshall Plan,
| which provided heavy discounts on US exports and loans that
| were mostly forgiven later on.
|
| West Germany's economic boom was in part due to the German
| government expecting to have to pay the loans back in full
| and thus setting up a public fund that provided credit to
| businesses and the rebuilding effort rather than paying
| them out as direct subisidies to industry. When the loans
| were eventually forgiven this created a massive windfall.
| The successor program to the Marshall Plan was explicitly
| tied to "defeating communism" and focused on military
| development, which resulted in West Germany rearming
| despite earlier decisions that the country should be
| demilitarized. This change of plan was extremely
| controversial within West Germany and debates around the
| military involvement of Germany continues to this day.
|
| In East Germany on the other hand, the rebuilding effort
| happened despite the Soviet Union not with the help of it.
| Reparations continued even after a lot of the industry had
| been dismantled and shipped to Eastern Europe while the
| isolation from Western Europe provided limited
| opportunities for export and the scarcity of resources
| meant a lot of early industry was built to provide for the
| population rather than trade.
|
| Given the conditions, East Germany performed remarkably
| well, although of course it had a despotic government that
| would literally shoot its own citizens rather than allow
| them to leave for greener pastures. The US was also
| extremely hands-off on West German politics after the
| immediate occupation era. Presumably a major factor was
| that the US didn't have as much skin in the game as its
| European allies whereas e.g. France literally had been
| occupied by Germans during the war, resulting in much
| stronger resentment.
|
| It's also worth noting that one of the plans for post-war
| Germany by the Western allies was full deindustrialization
| to a greater extent than what the Soviet Union ended up
| implementing with the explicit goal of turning Germany into
| an agrarian state incapable of forming a military for the
| forseeable future. This became less interesting as the
| divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies
| became clearer but it wasn't entirely unlikely.
| cdavid wrote:
| It is true both countries were already industrious, but it
| was far from a given they could go back to their former self.
| They were both utterly destroyed, and things could have gone
| really badly, especially in Japan.
|
| I can't find the reference right but I remember reading
| average adult calorie intake to drop to ~1200 kcals in
| 1947/1948 in "embracing defeat" by John Dower. That period
| has a huge influence on Japan to this day, including
| architecture of Tokyo through black market.
|
| Both Japan and Germany had strong military govt culture, and
| became reliably democratic at the end of the allies
| occupation.
| csomar wrote:
| Sure things could have gone wrong. They did, for example,
| for Ukraine or most of Eastern Europe. But my point is,
| were these countries not previously industrialized, they
| probably wouldn't have fared as they did now.
| uticus wrote:
| > ...adult calorie intake to drop...
|
| Thus, Ramen
| nox101 wrote:
| I guess this was a joke? But if not, fyi, ramen is from
| China. Sure, the Japanese have made it their own but even
| the Japanese don't list it in restaurant guides as
| Japanese food. There's a section for "Japanese food (He
| Shi )" and a separate section for "Chinese Food and
| Ramen" (Zhong Hua Lu Li toramen) or it's in a separate
| category. It's still often called "Chinese Soba" (Zhong
| Hua Qiao Mai )
|
| https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A9%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A1
| %E3...
| uticus wrote:
| Not a joke, but I should have worded it better. 'Thus'
| incorrectly implies invention, I meant it as consequence.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramen#Post-
| war_popularization
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| US occupation probably did shift energy away from militarism
| and towards economy though, no? Wars that didn't happen would
| have hurt them and instead of happening the effort of the
| wars was put towards making stuff.
| csomar wrote:
| Yes that helped speed up their recovery to their previous
| standard but I don't think it created it.
| hnbad wrote:
| It's a mixed back. Germany was supposed to be demilitarized
| following the immediate end of WW2 but the successor to the
| Marshall Plan (which was actually fairly short-lived
| relative to what many people seem to think) was a US
| program to rebuild the European military as a bullwark
| against communism. This led to a reversal on the decision
| that Germany should never have a military again although it
| was initially limited to purely defensive operations - a
| restriction that has been repeatedly weakened due to the
| insistence of its allies, including the US.
|
| A bigger difference between the two Germanies is that East
| German industry was mostly stripped for parts as part of
| reparations to the Soviet Union which continued for a long
| time whereas West Germany received active funding as part
| of the Marshall Plan. West Germany also had access to a
| lucrative market for exports whereas East Germany had to
| focus on reparations first, self-sustainability second and
| trade at a distant third with very bad returns.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| The US rewrote Japan's constitution and made massive changes
| in their society...
|
| https://www.cfr.org/japan-constitution/japans-postwar-
| consti...
| uticus wrote:
| Would love to hear more from this viewpoint. On the surface I
| don't see how your argument is against the OP, isn't it very
| conceivable that the "continuation of previous trend but
| under a different regime" was actually part of the occupation
| plan?
|
| Not arguing against you but the logic needs to be filled out
| some.
| markvdb wrote:
| s/Russia/Soviet Union/ . Sloppiness weakens trust in the rest of
| this otherwise intriguing post.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| It 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!
| markvdb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| no 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 wrote:
| Russia 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 wrote:
| TL;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 wrote:
| > 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
| stavros wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| That's an interesting perspective, thanks.
| markovs_gun wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| We 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Well, I am exactly as horrified by that as by the atomic
| bomb.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| We can probably agree that war itself is horrific.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| > We should be as exactly horrified as we are by the fact the
| US dropped convential high explosives and incendaries on
| civilians.
|
| Not exactly. Having firebombs at our disposal does not
| require the head of _one country_ to have unaccountable power
| over the lives of everyone on earth. Firebombs do not require
| entire industries shrouded in secrecy, nor the transformation
| of security clearance, or lack there of, into a weapon for
| shutting down public inquiry and challenges, nor the creation
| of parallel government structure both invisible and
| unaccountable to the public.
|
| The effects on the cities may not be that different, but
| nuke's unmitigated corruption of the democratic system is
| certainly horrifying.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > We should be as exactly horrified as we are by the fact the
| US dropped convential high explosives and incendaries on
| civilians.
|
| And we should be exactly as horrified for what the Japanese
| did to mainland China. Or the fact that they allied
| themselves with one of the greatest genocides in history. We
| should be exactly as horrified at what the alternative was,
| which was hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
| casualties that would have been caused by a conventional
| invasion just to get that country to stop doing what it was
| doing.
| krapp wrote:
| The atomic bombing of Japan didn't happen today, it happened
| nearly 80 years ago. Plenty of people consider it a war crime
| to this day, and plenty of people excuse it, but it's difficult
| to be horrified by events old enough to barely exist within
| living memory.
| pb060 wrote:
| 80 years are not so far in time for me as I recently realized
| that when I was born I was closer to the end of the war than
| my current age. That made me feel somehow more connected to
| that past event than to the present.
| codewench wrote:
| Obviously looking at it from today's perspective it's
| (hopefully) unthinkable, but there is a lot written from
| contemporary sources which make a fairly persuasive argument.
|
| The main concerns were that the Japanese government was simply
| not in a place where it could surrender, which meant a ground
| invasion of the Japanese mainland was seen as mandatory. Given
| the prior experiences of how dedicated Japanese defenders could
| be (eg Mount Suribachi), it was assumed that any actual attempt
| to take the Japanese mainland would result in untold deaths, to
| the point where the US has enough Purple Heart medals created
| (in anticipation of the casualties am invasion would involve)
| that they didn't have to restart production until 2008. As
| horrifying as it is, the first atomic bomb was considered the
| lesser evil. That said, Nagasaki is much much harder to defend.
|
| Unrelated, but I recommend everyone who can to visit Hiroshima
| and visit the museums there. Hopefully it will instill in
| everyone a fervent desire to never again see such horrific
| things enacted again.
| startupsfail wrote:
| It is a bit surprising that so much damage was inflicted on
| civilians with firebombing and all for the sake of what looks
| like vindictiveness. Surely after the victory it would have
| been possible to write the books, stating it was <<
| unconditional surrender >> regardless of what kind of
| surrender it actually was (it is victors who tend to be able
| to write history books as they see fit.)
| mc32 wrote:
| Don't worry, the Japanese are pretty good at writing their
| own history too.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _That said, Nagasaki is much much harder to defend._
|
| The first bomb was dropped August 6.
|
| The Japanese War Cabinet met on August 9 to discuss the
| situation, and concluded that the US didn't have the
| resources for more, so they concluded to not surrender. Even
| after the first bomb was dropped.
|
| In the middle of the meeting they learned of the second bomb
| which was dropped that morning.
|
| After the second bomb the War Cabinet was split 3-3. They
| called in the full cabinet and that was split as well.
|
| _Two_ bombs weren 't enough to decisively convince them to
| surrender, and so the Emperor had to be called in to break
| the deadlock.
|
| And yet we are to believe that even though two bombs were
| _barely_ enough to force a surrender, zero bombs would have
| sufficed?
| kps wrote:
| > _the US didn 't have the resources for more_
|
| They were correct that the US didn't have the resources for
| a second uranium bomb.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You're arguing semantics but aren't really making a
| counter point.
| throw0101d wrote:
| >> _the US didn 't have the resources for more_
|
| > _They were correct that the US didn 't have the
| resources for a second uranium bomb._
|
| Because the difference between a uranium bomb and a
| plutonium bomb is meaningful when you're the target...
| kps wrote:
| Japan didn't know until August 9 that the US was able to
| build plutonium bombs.
|
| Edit since I can't reply: The difference is meaningful
| when you're deciding whether to surrender. If you know
| that the US doesn't have enough refined uranium for
| another uranium bomb, and you have no evidence that the
| US can build plutonium bombs, then you have grounds to
| believe the bombing of Hiroshima was not repeatable.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _If you know that the US doesn 't have enough refined
| uranium for another uranium bomb_ [...]
|
| There was no way for the Japanese to know what the US was
| capable of. It was wishful thinking with zero evidence on
| the part of the Japanese leadership.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > There was no way for the Japanese to know what the US
| was capable of.
|
| The Japanese had their own bomb program underway.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| So did the Germans, but it's not because the biggest
| industrial power on earth (in both demography and
| industrial output), with its capacities fully intact
| because the war never took place there, that smaller
| countries diminished after years of blockade and critical
| infrastructure bombing can do it too...
|
| If the Japanese projected their own capacity on the US,
| they were ripe for a bad surprise.
| nsonha wrote:
| > The Japanese War Cabinet met on August 9 to discuss the
| situation, and concluded that the US didn't have the
| resources for more
|
| does that sound believable to you? The Japanese somehow had
| intel on a secret new weapon? And confident about it to the
| point they are willing to bet their entire country on it,
| in a war that's already ending?
|
| Or does that sound like manufactured consent?
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| > The Japanese somehow had intel on a secret new weapon
|
| Yes. They did. The Mexico branch of the Japanese
| espionage service knew about the Trinity test in advance
| and sent agents to collect fallout to analyze. They
| already knew before Hiroshima that we had a working
| atomic bomb. They underestimated our isotope separation
| production capacity because their own U-235 isotope
| separation plant was behind schedule. There have been
| books written about the Japanese atomic bomb project. The
| day after Hiroshima, the Japanese government announced
| "We also have atomic bombs and we will use them against
| the invasion forces." They were expecting the war to last
| another year. The head of the Japanese atomic bomb
| project said that his military boss expected the war to
| last another year.
| zdw wrote:
| And even then there was still an attempted coup to try to
| stop the surrender:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyujo_incident
| Animats wrote:
| How Japan made the decision to surrender is well covered
| in the book "Japan's Longest Day", originally published
| in 1973. Many of the major players were interviewed.
| There's a reasonably accurate movie version worth
| watching, if you're interested in this.
|
| It's a very strange story of decision-making under
| extreme pressure. No one was in charge. The Navy was
| barely talking to the Army. The civilian government had
| been sidelined from control of military matters years
| before. The Emperor was supposed to be a figurehead. And,
| as pointed out above, there was an attempted coup to stop
| the surrender.
| _hao wrote:
| Japan's decision to surrender was most likely due to the
| fact that the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria with 1.5
| million men.[1] Yes, the atomic bombings were horrible, but
| the fire bombing of Tokyo wasn't much better. The Japanese
| regime didn't care that much. When the Soviets declared war
| that was the breaking point and their situation became
| hopeless. This point is very often overlooked by US based
| media and historians (I guess for obvious reasons), but the
| fact of the matter is that we don't know if only the two
| bombs would've been enough to make Japan capitulate.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _This point is very often overlooked by US based media
| and historians (I guess for obvious reasons), but the
| fact of the matter is that we don 't know if only the two
| bombs would've been enough to make Japan capitulate._
|
| This is covered by Walker in his book _Prompt and Utter
| Destruction_ :
|
| * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/829496
|
| And he still concludes that dropping the bombs was a
| necessary element in their surrender.
|
| The Japanese were expecting the Russians/Soviets to enter
| the war: the only surprise was that it was sooner than
| they expected (Spring 1946). Fighting them was already
| taken into account in their 'calculations'.
|
| From a 1946 article:
|
| > _About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group
| of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent,
| well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked
| him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major
| move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would
| probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing
| operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack
| would have been made on such and such beaches."_
|
| > _" Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and
| he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight,
| but I do not think we could have stopped you."_
|
| > _" What would have happened then?" we asked._
|
| > _He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all
| Japanese were killed, but we would not have been
| defeated," by which he meant that they would not have
| been disgraced by surrender._
|
| *
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1946/12/if-
| the-...
|
| I'd be willing to bet that the Japanese would have been
| willing to pull out of Manchuria, lose that territory,
| and use those troops for home island defence.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > I'd be willing to bet that the Japanese would have been
| willing to pull out of Manchuria
|
| Given the success of Soviet's new combined arm doctrine
| (later called "deep battle"), I don't think "pull out of
| Manchuria" would have been a possibility, as the Japanese
| force there would very likely have collapsed to a point
| where getting back to Japan would have been impossible
| (think Dunkirk but with much more land to leave behind
| you and with an enemy moving even faster and where you
| don't have neither air or sea superiority).
| otherme123 wrote:
| Japan was in talks with the soviets for a couple of
| months, thinking that they were somewhat neutral and
| intermediating with the USA a negotiated peace. On the
| 9th they learned the hard way that it was a ploy while
| they massed troops, and their situation was now a full
| invasion of the USA with nukes and the Soviets, with zero
| allies or even neutrals to lean on
| cataphract wrote:
| So killing civilians en masse is fine, as long it forces
| the enemy to surrender with (probably) fewer casualties?
| Why even have laws of war then, if we adjust adjudicate
| these questions with a utilitarian calculus?
| nihzm wrote:
| > So killing civilians en masse is fine, as long it
| forces the enemy to surrender with (probably) fewer
| casualties
|
| Of course not. Startegic calculations for warfare should
| not be conflated with a moral justifications for military
| actions. We have to come to terms with the fact that it
| was a morally unjustifiable decision, regardless of the
| effects it had on the war. This is something that too
| many people forget today.
|
| > Why even have laws of war then
|
| I think laws of war (the ones that work) are only an
| attempt to change the incentives that are presented to
| the belligerents during warfare, in such a way that the
| confilct is less damaging. They are not much about making
| the belligerents more morally virtuous in any sense other
| than a consequentialist / utlitarian one.
| 0xBDB wrote:
| > Why even have laws of war then
|
| They didn't by our standards. A lot of what we think of
| as the laws of war today were clarified after WWII.
| Bombing civilians was illegal, but not in retaliation; so
| the US could bomb Hiroshima because the Axis had bombed
| Coventry. The fact that that was the Germans and probably
| an accident didn't matter.
|
| If this seems extremely sketchy that's because it was,
| but so was Nuremberg. The Holocaust wasn't illegal for
| the Nazis to do to their own population - the prosecutors
| at the trials had to make up a standard of "behavior that
| shocks the conscience" that previously didn't exist in
| international law.
|
| None of this reflects on morality, only legality, of
| course. But the legalities then were pretty primitive.
| FrojoS wrote:
| What makes you say, that the bombing of Coventry was
| "probably an accident"? There was repeated, and clearly
| well planned out bombing of the city between 1940-1942
| [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz
| littlestymaar wrote:
| You're just missing an entire half of the story here: which
| is the USSR attacking on the 9th of August!
|
| Of course if you omit the second most important factor then
| things start becoming obvious, but in reality the answer to
| this question is far from obvious (in neither direction,
| needless to say, the tankies who claim with certainty that
| the bombing was not needed are equally wrong)
| cocodill wrote:
| well, by August 12, the Red Army had broken through in
| almost all positions.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| In Manchuria, but the question of mainland Japan was
| still open.
|
| But overlooking the Soviet invasion is clearly missing
| half the picture here.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Another factor in the surrender was the Japanese had
| intelligence that a third bomb was to be dropped on Tokyo.
| (That intelligence later turned out to be false.)
|
| One bomb could have been all that America had. Two bombs
| meant more were coming.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > One bomb could have been all that America had. Two
| bombs meant more were coming.
|
| That's not logic bud.
|
| Zero bombs could mean that was all America had. If you
| can make one then you can make two.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The Germans and Japanese each managed to build only one
| super battleship - the Bismarck and the Yamato.
|
| The bomb was even more expensive to develop, and the
| Japanese (with their own bomb program) surely knew that.
| fortran77 wrote:
| > Unrelated, but I recommend everyone who can to visit
| Hiroshima and visit the museums there. Hopefully it will
| instill in everyone a fervent desire to never again see such
| horrific things enacted again.
|
| The Nagasaki muesum is very good, too. And it's a nicer town
| to visit today. (We were just there last month.)
| hnbad wrote:
| The unstated assumption in this is that it was important for
| the US to be the one to defeat Japan. It was not just about
| defeating Japan, it was also about the Soviet Union not
| defeating it first.
|
| The US had been continously fire bombing Japan at the point
| the atomic bombs dropped. In the grand scheme of things the
| bombs were just very large blips in waves upon waves of
| destruction.
|
| Japan would have been defeated without a US ground invasion
| and without the atomic bombs. But it would have been defeated
| by the Soviet Union, not the US.
|
| There were three possible outcomes:
|
| * an unconditional surrender to the Soviet Union, possibly
| following the death or arrest of the Emperor
|
| * a conditional surrender to the US granting immunity to the
| Emperor
|
| * an unconditional last-ditch surrender to the US to prevent
| a Soviet advance and further loss of territory
|
| The atomic bombs played a very small part in this. As has
| been stated repeatedly in attempts to justify their use: the
| Japanese were "dedicated" to defend the mainland and the
| Emperor to the point of performing suicide attacks. The
| deaths from the atomic bombings meant very little relative to
| the civilian lives that had already been lost to the fire
| bombings before, after and throughout. But in consequence
| this meant that the integrity of the mainland territory and
| the life of the Emperor meant a lot - and this was threatened
| by the prospect of an invasion, not further atomic bombings.
|
| The sad irony is that the demand of the surrender being
| unconditional was ultimately more about narrative-building
| and optics as the US effectively gave Japan what it wanted by
| leaving the Emperor untouched and not making any territorial
| changes. It's clear to see why the US demanded it but the
| outcome effectively met most of the terms a conditional
| surrender would have set prior to the atomic bombings.
|
| In consequence the atomic bombs provided very little
| strategic benefits and only meant the US would have to go on
| with those attacks on its conscience - not that it seemed to
| weigh too heavily.
| mmustapic wrote:
| > The main concerns were that the Japanese government was
| simply not in a place where it could surrender
|
| That's the horrifying thing, killing hundreds of thousands of
| civilians so your enemy surrenders.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > That's the horrifying thing, killing hundreds of
| thousands of civilians so your enemy surrenders.
|
| yeah, war sucks. Especially a world wide war, it's not a
| fun time.
|
| "there is nothing good in war except its ending" - Lincoln
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Strategic bombing were attempted multiple time during the
| war (first by the Germans on UK, and the UK/US on Germany
| then Japan) without success (and in most cases it actually
| strengthened the resolve)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The Japanese populace, whether they wanted to or not, was
| fully prepared and planning to defend the home islands with
| their lives as gruesomely as possible.
|
| If America had not dropped the bombs and the Soviets ended
| up finishing off Japan like so many seem to think they
| would, the Soviets at the end of the war were NOT known for
| being gentle in their dominance.
|
| There was no ending to Japan in WWII that did not kill
| hundreds of thousands of civilians.
| derekmhewitt wrote:
| I highly recommend the book 'Flyboys' by James Bradley (also
| the author of Flags of our Fathers) for help putting this
| period of WWII into context. A good portion of the end of the
| book discusses the firebombing of Japan and the dropping of the
| two nuclear bombs, and how that was rationalized as acceptable
| in the minds of those who participated.
| coin wrote:
| Kyiv isn't the aggressor
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Is it just me, or should we be way more horrified by the
| fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians?_
|
| What was the alternative?
|
| The Japanese leadership knew for a year from their own internal
| reports that they couldn't win the war, and simply want to
| grind down US resolve. Imperial Japan wanted the following
| conditions:
|
| * Emperor stays on throne
|
| * Japan gets to keep territory
|
| * any allegation of (e.g.) war crimes would be dealt with
| internally by the Japanese themselves
|
| Would it be okay for Nazi Germany to surrender if:
|
| * Hitler and the Nazis got to stay in government
|
| * Germany got to keep Czechoslovakia, Poland, _etc_
|
| * war crime allegations would be dealt by the Nazis themselves
|
| The first bomb was dropped on August 6. The Japanese War
| Cabinet held a meeting on August 9 to discuss the situation,
| and decided not to surrender as they didn't think the US could
| create more bombs. So _even after_ the first bomb was dropped,
| they wouldn 't surrender.
|
| In the middle of the meeting they learned of the second bomb,
| which was dropped that morning.
|
| The War Cabinet was split 3-3 on whether to surrender. After
| the second bomb.
|
| They called in the full cabinet to discuss things. The full
| cabinet was split. After the second bomb.
|
| They called in the Emperor at that point, and he said to end
| the war. Though in his announcement that was broadcast over the
| radio, the word "surrender" was never used:
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast#C...
|
| Seriously: what was the alternative? Invade the main islands
| (Operation Downfall)? What would have been the US casualties?
| What would have been the Japanese _civilian_ casualties? Or
| blockade Japan and starve them?
| defrost wrote:
| You are dot point framing a complex piece of history that has
| a wide spread of opinion from various historians.
|
| It deserves _at least_ an essay on just the situation and the
| various PoV 's, see:
|
| _The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Consensus View?_
|
| https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-
| to-u...
|
| There's a _very_ good case to be made that the primary
| motivation to _use_ the atomic weapons was the _fact_ that
| they existed ..
|
| developed at very great expense for a European War that no
| longer existed, Germany having surrended when the weapons
| were finally complete - with only one test on a tower in a
| desert the military side _wanted_ a real world 'battlefield'
| test and there was already an ongoing campaign to destroy
| each and every major and minor target in Japan (much much
| cheaper per city) using conventional HE & firebombs.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-
| to-u..._
|
| Well, instead of reading that article, I have already read
| the book that it references, _Prompt and Utter Destruction:
| Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan_ :
|
| * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/829496
|
| It goes through the timeline of the events, including who
| knew what, at what point.
|
| Given Japanese intransigence (and their 'counter-demands'),
| the experiences of Okinawa, _etc_ , I don't see any
| reasonable alternatives--unless you think a bloodbath of
| Allied soldiers and Japanese civilians is reasonable:
|
| * https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/japans-last-
| ditch-...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps
|
| If Japan was not willing to surrender after one bomb, and
| _barely_ decided to surrender after two, what makes _you_
| think they 'd surrender with zero bombs dropped?
|
| Truman's first priority was to the US people. If bombing
| Japan achieved peace faster, and thus reduced US
| casualties, why wouldn't he take that option?
|
| Seriously: what is the counter-factual event in what the
| US/Allies should have done with Japan? Invade?
| Blockade/starve? Not go for unconditional surrender? Other?
| _What is (was) the alternative?_
|
| And I'm aware of the author of the article, Wellerstein,
| having read his book _Restricted Data: The History of
| Nuclear Secrecy in the United States_. He 's also the
| creator of the Nukemap website:
|
| * https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Chomsky claims there was a bombing after the two atomic
| bombings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s1h6wT91sc
|
| I think when the atomic bombs were dropped Japan
| basically didnt have any means of defense. I think nuking
| a country that is defenseless is probably evil even if in
| their hearts they are unwilling to accept unconditional
| surrender (this last point is even in contention).
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Chomsky claims there was a bombing after the two
| atomic
| bombings.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s1h6wT91sc_
|
| The Japanese took 'too long' to surrender, so by the time
| they contacted the US government on August 14th, because
| of communication delays the sorties had already gone out
| early August 15th and dropped their payloads:
|
| * https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14980968
|
| > _I think when the atomic bombs were dropped Japan
| basically didnt have any means of defense._
|
| The Japanese didn't think they were defenseless:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps
|
| From a 1946 article:
|
| > _About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group
| of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent,
| well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked
| him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major
| move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would
| probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing
| operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack
| would have been made on such and such beaches."_
|
| > _" Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and
| he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight,
| but I do not think we could have stopped you."_
|
| > _" What would have happened then?" we asked._
|
| > _He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all
| Japanese were killed, but we would not have been
| defeated," by which he meant that they would not have
| been disgraced by surrender._
|
| *
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1946/12/if-
| the-...
| petermcneeley wrote:
| > "At this stage of the war, the lack of modern weaponry
| and ammunition meant that most were armed with swords or
| even bamboo spears."
|
| So basically defenseless. I understand that your opinion
| is that at the time they did not think of themselves as
| defenseless but this actually doesnt matter to me in the
| moral claims. The fact is that they were defenseless and
| we nuked them twice. We nuke them because we wanted to
| test these weapons and AFAIK the USA kept these cities
| from bombing raids in order to test the effectiveness of
| the weapons.
|
| Also the Japanese being 'too long' to surrender because
| they were not a well organized fighting force by that
| time. I think it was days before they even understood
| what happened in Hiroshima.
|
| and to address your edit: The irony is that we actually
| gave them what they wanted. The wanted to keep the
| emperor and we caved.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _So basically defenseless._
|
| It doesn't matter what "reality" is: it matters what
| (your enemy's) perception is. The Japanese did not think
| themselves defenseless.
|
| You have not beaten your enemy when _you_ think you have:
| you have beaten your enemy when _they_ think you have.
| defrost wrote:
| > Well, instead of reading that article, I have already
| read the book that it references,
|
| It references _many_ books, with a number of _different_
| viewpoints and arguments.
|
| You've read a _single_ book with a _single_ viewpoint.
|
| > what makes you think they'd surrender with zero bombs
| dropped?
|
| There's a breadth of informed opinion on the matter; the
| article you haven't read outlines a number of them.
|
| > And I'm aware of the author of the article, Wellerstein
|
| Cool. But not read much of his work covering the breadth
| of opinion on the use of the atomic bomb.
|
| > He's also the creator of the Nukemap website
|
| I know, he based that on contributions from various
| geophysicists and physicists who have spoken to him IRL.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _It references_ many _books, with a number of different
| viewpoints and arguments._
|
| It references Walker and Alperovitz. I'll be sure to add
| Alperovitz to my reading list.
|
| > _You 've read a_ single _book with a_ single
| _viewpoint._
|
| I said I have read Walker. I have not said I've read
| _only_ Walker.
|
| > _There 's a breadth of informed opinion on the matter;
| the article you haven't read outlines a number of them._
|
| By "number of" do you mean "two": Walker and the
| "consensus" / "traditional" view, and Alperovitz and the
| (so-called) "revisionist" view. (Kuznick is mentioned in
| passing at the very end.)
|
| Walker is well aware of the ambiguity of the situation;
| from an interview:
|
| > _One argument has been made by the scholar Richard
| Frank, and I find it wonderfully convincing. Richard
| makes the argument - going back to the atomic bomb versus
| the Soviet invasion - he says that the bomb was essential
| to convince Hirohito to surrender. But that it was the
| Soviet invasion that convinced the generals of all those
| armies in China and other parts of East Asia to
| surrender. Because there was genuine concern, both among
| American officials and Japanese officials, that the
| emperor's order to surrender would not be obeyed by
| generals in East Asia, who had huge armies and who
| could've fought on for a very long time at enormous cost
| to everybody. Richard makes the argument that once the
| Soviets came in, then the generals out in the field, who
| were outraged by the idea of surrendering, knew they
| couldn't defeat the Soviets. So they went along with it.
| It's a very interesting argument that I think makes a
| very sensible separation of what the impact of the bomb
| was and the impact of the Soviet invasion._
|
| * https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/oral-
| histories/j-samuel...
|
| Further:
|
| > _Walker: [...] Those are the positions. And as I, and a
| lot of others, argue - I'm certainly not alone - they're
| both seriously flawed. The traditional view because
| Truman did not face a stark choice between the bomb and
| an invasion. The invasion was not going to begin until on
| or around November 1, and a lot of could've happened
| between August and November of 1945. Also the view that
| if an invasion had been necessary, it would've cost
| hundreds of thousands of lives: there's simply no
| contemporaneous evidence that supports that argument. It
| was made after the war as a means to justify the use of
| the bomb against a really small number of critics, who in
| the late '40s, early '50s, were saying that perhaps the
| bomb wasn't necessary. It's also beyond question that the
| invasion was not inevitable. I mean, the idea that Truman
| had to use the bomb because if he didn't the only other
| option was an invasion is simply wrong. So, the
| traditional view in its pure form, that Truman used the
| bomb to avoid an invasion, simply doesn't hold up._
|
| > _Kelly: In the view of the revisionists._
|
| > _Walker: No, in the view of those of us who are
| somewhere in between. What I argue is that Truman used
| the bomb for the reasons he said he did, to end the war
| as quickly as possible. No one in a position of authority
| or knowledge, and certainly not his chief and military
| advisors, told him in the summer of 1945 that if you
| don't use the bomb, an invasion is inevitable and it's
| going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Estimates
| for lives lost that were projected by military experts in
| the summer of 1945 were far less than that, and the
| numbers are far from hard evidence. But there's no
| evidence whatsoever that he was ever told that hundreds
| of thousands of lives would be the cost of an invasion of
| Japan. That was something that came about later._
|
| > _My argument is that Truman didn't have to be told that
| an invasion would cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He
| knew it was going to cost a lot of lives, tens of
| thousands, if an invasion was necessary. He also knew
| that even without an invasion, the war was still going
| on. Okinawa had been defeated in late June of 1945, so we
| had one month when there weren't any major battlefronts
| between the end of the Battle of Okinawa and the end of
| the war, which is July 1945._
|
| > _In that month, about 775 American soldiers and Marines
| were killed in combat. About another 2,300 or 2,400 died
| from other causes, disease, wounds, accidents, whatever.
| So, you had 3,000 soldiers and Marines who were killed in
| the month of July of 1945 without any major
| battlefronts._
|
| > _You also had sailors being killed. The sinking of the
| U.S.S. Indianapolis occurred July 28 [misspoke: July 30],
| 1945, just a horrific event, in which a Japanese
| submarine attacked and sank the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Of
| the 1100 [misspoke: 1200] crewmembers, 880 died, either
| from the explosion of the ship or were stranded in water
| for a very long time and either died from exposure or
| from sharks. Just a horrific story._
|
| > _As long as the war was going on, that was going to
| happen, and that's what Truman and his advisors were
| concerned about. No one had to tell them that the
| alternative to using the bomb was saving far fewer lives.
| That number of 3,200 or 3,300 who died in July, that's
| just soldiers and Marines, so you have sailors on top of
| that. That was plenty of reason to use the bomb if it had
| a chance to end the war as quickly as possible._
|
| * _Ibid_
| retrocryptid wrote:
| +1
|
| Should we have dropped the bomb?
|
| That's the last decision in a series of policy questions on
| both sides, each a complex response to complex questions
| going back at least a decade.
| oneshtein wrote:
| We only consider the killing of civilians a crime when it's
| committed by those we define as our enemies.
|
| Replace Hiroshima with a hypothetical New York and ask your
| question again. Do you see an alternative to nuking of a
| hypothetical New York to win a war?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Is it just me, or should we be way more horrified by the fact
| that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians?
|
| First Japan was allied with nazi Germany. And nazi Germany was
| putting jews, handicapped people, romanians, gays, etc. into
| crematoriums, alive. These weren't soldiers either.
|
| Second Japan did the Pearl Harbor attack: up until then the US
| was still a neutral country in WWII.
|
| There were many ways to not get at war in the US. Those two
| weren't among them. What was the US supposed to do? Not drop
| the bomb and let Russia annihilate and conquer Japan?
|
| These two atomic bombs were horrible but during WWII the US
| pretty much single handedly saved (most of) the world from both
| nazism and stalinism.
|
| I'm not saying the US have always been acting in good faith
| lately but during WWII I'm not sure the US can be faulted much.
|
| Put it another way: a world war vs fucking evil incarnate _is_
| messy.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Not a lot of nuance in your view of the U.S. role in WWII.
|
| For example, your point:
|
| > Japan did the Pearl Harbor attack: up until then the US was
| still a neutral country in WWII.
|
| The U.S. Export Control Act (July 1940), freezing of Japanese
| assets (July 1941) and then the oil embargo (August 1941) are
| examples of some of the nuance I see.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The US did those things in response to Imperial Japan's
| invasion, occupation, and looting of other Asian nations.
| No nuance is needed; Japan was the aggressor pure and
| simple.
|
| Nobody would ever defend the Nazis as victims yet people
| come out of the woodwork to defend Imperial Japan, their
| brutal attempt at colonialism, and the equivalent holocaust
| they committed. As I've said before, the Japanese sure got
| good marketing after the war.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Who's defending Imperial Japan? Nuance just means
| recognizing that actors on both sides were participants
| in the build up. I dislike the wholesale excusing of one
| sides actions because the other side was worse.
|
| Given that Imperial Japan was so awful I'm wondering how
| far you would allow the U.S. to go? How about if the U.S.
| rounded up all Japanese Americans and put them in camps?
| Also completely okay, I guess, because Imperial Japan.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| No country is blameless in war and the United States is
| no exception, but there is no reasonable comparison
| between the evil Japan committed in Asia and what the
| United States did to Japanese Americans.
| oneshtein wrote:
| When enemy attacks our civilians -- it's a war crime.
|
| When enemy civilians die because of our attack -- it's
| just consequence of their foolish resistance.
|
| So, enemy commits war crime, while we are not!
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Who 's defending Imperial Japan?_"
|
| When you repeat the justification that the Japanese
| government used for going to war with the US more or less
| verbatim without explaining the background, well, that
| would be you, sir.
|
| > " _I dislike the wholesale excusing of one sides
| actions because the other side was worse._ "
|
| That's not a moral or principled stance. That's just
| whataboutism.
|
| > " _Given that Imperial Japan was so awful I 'm
| wondering how far you would allow the U.S. to go?_"
|
| You seem to be looking for an answer to paint me in a bad
| light and I'm feeling magnanimous today so I'll oblige
| you: like most Asians other than the Japanese, I see no
| moral problem with either the atomic bombings or the
| firebombings of Japanese cities in WW2.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I am white but I have been told by my (Taiwanese) manager
| that, "All Asian's hate the Japanese." I know only a
| little of the history of Japan and its neighbors but he
| assured me there is a long history of Japan being the
| aggressor behind this sentiment.
|
| I don't feel like I'm trying to paint you in a bad light,
| rather hoping you'll concede that one side doesn't get a
| free pass if the other does something atrocious.
|
| Perhaps it was my having been raised a Quaker during a
| formative period of my life, but an eye for an eye is
| quite the opposite of my philosophy.
| usefulcat wrote:
| > First Japan was allied with nazi Germany
|
| That's an odd way to critique Imperial Japan, given that the
| US was allied with the Soviets, under Stalin no less..
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It is horrific. I somewhat purge my feelings of guilt (I was
| born in the U.S.) by believing they "did not know what they
| were doing."
|
| It's maybe a stretch to compare it to modern Russia bombing
| Kyiv -- because modern atomic weapons are orders of magnitude
| _more_ horrific.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| It is not unthinkable. That is the problem.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Ukraine can nuke Moscow as well. Should we?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I thought Ukraine gave up all their nukes after the
| dissolution of the USSR.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Yes, we gave up everything that can harm USA, including
| nuclear silos and strategic bombers, in exchange to safety
| assurances. Is Ukraine safe now?
| pfdietz wrote:
| No one will make that mistake again.
| 05 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass
| _de...
|
| > However, Mariana Budjeryn, a Ukrainian scholar at
| Harvard argued that the denuclearization of Ukraine was
| not a mistake and that it was unclear whether Ukraine
| would be better off as a nuclear state. She argued that
| the deterrent value of the nuclear weapons in Ukraine was
| questionable. While Ukraine had "administrative control"
| of the weapons delivery systems, it would have needed 12
| to 18 months to establish full operational control, and
| Ukraine would have faced sanctions from the West and
| likely retaliation from Russia. Moreover, Ukraine had no
| nuclear weapons program and would have struggled to
| replace nuclear weapons once their service life expired.
| Instead, by agreeing to give up the nuclear weapons,
| Ukraine received financial compensations and the security
| assurances of the Budapest Memorandum.[29]
|
| 12 months seems like a plenty of time for US/Russia to
| come and take back the nukes.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| They never had the launch codes anyway.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| "Launch codes" was a mostly US thing.
|
| In the UK it was famously a cheap lock.
|
| In the USSR, physical control of warheads was supposed to
| be under the KGB according to some sources.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| The US dropped not just the nuclear bombs on civilians.
|
| > The raids that were conducted by the U.S. military on the
| night of 9-10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, are
| the single most destructive bombing raid in human history.[1]
| 16 square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was
| destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over
| one million homeless.[1] The atomic bombing of Hiroshima in
| August 1945, by comparison, resulted in the immediate death of
| an estimated 70,000 to 150,000 people.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
| a-french-anon wrote:
| In the documentary The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of
| Defense Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, who
| relayed the Presidential order to drop nuclear bombs on Japan,
| said: "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been
| prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and
| I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized
| that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had
| lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if
| you win? Selden mentions another critique of the
| nuclear bombing, which he says the U.S. government effectively
| suppressed for twenty-five years, as worth mention. On 11
| August 1945, the Japanese government filed an official protest
| over the atomic bombing to the U.S. State Department through
| the Swiss Legation in Tokyo
|
| Truth is most people here are hypocrites, might makes right and
| the end justifies the means, but only for our side! Mind you,
| I'm no arguing that these obvious truths are wrong, but
| intellectual honesty shouldn't go to the trash in favour of
| wishful thinking and posturing.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The final Japanese defense of their home islands would have
| involved arming every man, woman, and child, for them to act as
| suicide warriors. "The Glorious Death of the 100 Million" (note
| the name was an exaggeration of their actual population)
|
| This made the entire population a military target (except for
| very young children, I guess).
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's still not 100% clear if the nuclear bombing was
| necessary to force the Japanese to surrender, the Soviet
| invasion of Manchuria could have been enough, making the
| civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki pointless
| victims.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Of what relevance is that question? Was the US supposed to
| determine that the use was necessary before it was used?
| How is that even supposed to be determined, especially in
| wartime when the inner workings of the enemy are opaque?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| How is that an argument? In all conflicts the inner
| working of the enemy are someone opaque, why should this
| lead to assuming that everyone including women and
| children is a legit military target?
|
| That's actually the reasoning of war criminals...
| pfdietz wrote:
| The observation about the militarization of the entire
| society is a defense against the charge that dropping the
| bomb was a war crime, even if the decision makers didn't
| know it at the time.
|
| I see you think that even presenting legal arguments in
| defense against war crime charges is "the reasoning of
| war criminals". I guess you're not big on the idea of
| legal defense when charged for a crime. A real fan of
| justice, aren't you. /s
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > The observation about the militarization of the entire
| society is a defense against the charge that dropping the
| bomb was a war crime,
|
| Except there wasn't such "observation" and we cannot be
| certain that it would have happened. You are _assuming_
| that the Japanese would have fought this way, and you use
| this assumption to defend the idea that they were all
| legit targets.
|
| > even if the decision makers didn't know it at the time.
|
| What?
|
| > I see you think that even presenting legal arguments in
| defense against war crime charges is "the reasoning of
| war criminals". I guess you're not big on the idea of
| legal defense when charged for a crime.
|
| Except it's not "a legal argument in defense of war crime
| charge" at all, to accept it as an argument one must
| adhere to your vision in the first place, which make it a
| very weak defense to say the least. Akin to "yes I killed
| my wife but she was completely crazy and I'm sure I'd
| have killed me first at some point", which I'd doubt any
| lawyer would be happy if you said that in court...
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| That applies to every country with any kind of universal
| draft or conscription. For example, that's more or less the
| argument that Hamas was making to justify its hostage-taking
| some months ago.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The horrifying thing is that the US knew the Japanese wanted to
| surrender, and knew that demanding abdication of the emperor
| was both a major impediment, unnecessary and in fact harmful
| (because it would reduce the number of outposts that would
| accept the surrender order). The US had broken the codes used
| with messages to diplomats in the USSR and other traffic and
| could clearly see the Japanese situation. Despite this they
| never waivered from ambiguous "unconditional surrender"
| terminology... likely so they could continue pressing the front
| in Korea which would also end with a peace.
|
| So the US could have had peace earlier, with several hundred
| thousand less deaths, if they had been willing to put in
| writing specifically what they actually wanted, and what they
| got in the end.
| nxm wrote:
| Well a surrender (we stop war but current regime stays in
| power) vs an unconditional surrender is something different.
| The terms must be agreed on.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The viable alternative would have been demanding a
| surrender but stating that The Emperor will remain as a
| constitutional monarch - which is what the US ended up
| imposing anyway because it was the logical way to forestall
| resistance from a radicalized population. Such a demand
| would likely have resulted in a surrender before the atomic
| bombings.
| otherme123 wrote:
| We have records of Japanese high rank military wanting to
| keep fighting _after_ the dropping of the second bomb.
| They figured out the USA might have a couple more nukes,
| so Japan should endure them four and keep fighting.
|
| As said in other threads, it was the nukes _and_ the
| soviets invading what finally forced the surrender.
| keiferski wrote:
| The earliest surrender request wasn't merely just for the
| emperor to stay in power. Japan also wanted to keep the
| territories they had acquired and manage all post-war
| trials of the military in-house.
|
| Any American general or politician that agreed to these
| terms would have been seen as a fool or a coward,
| especially after Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Singapore, etc.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > The horrifying thing is that the US knew the Japanese
| wanted to surrender
|
| > So the US could have had peace earlier, with several
| hundred thousand less deaths, if they had been willing to put
| in writing specifically what they actually wanted, and what
| they got in the end.
|
| These points are both highly contested, yet you say them as
| if they are foregone conclusions.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| We heavily debate this and as kid in school I made paper cranes
| to honor the victims.
|
| We don't make Red Envelopes to apologize for Agent Orange.
| hnbad wrote:
| While the horror of the atomic bombings of civilian centers is
| more obvious in hindsight, it also overshadows what was at
| least equally horrific at the time: the continuous and
| deliberate widespread fire bombings of civilian centers.
|
| Much of what the US did in Japan would be considered a war
| crime if it happened nowadays. The Pacific campaign also
| heavily leveraged existing racist sentiments and explicitly
| dehumanized Asian people which carried over into the Korean War
| (where the US did manage to commit more war crimes than either
| of the two Koreas) and the Vietnam War.
|
| This isn't to excuse Japan who to this day refuse to
| acknowledge the Rape of Nanjing and is orthogonal to the
| legitimacy of US involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese civil
| wars (the former of which explicitly contradicted a UN decision
| and presented a last-ditch effort to avoid an imminent North
| Korean victory). Japan was the aggressor and did horrible war
| crimes themselves. But that doesn't mean everything the US did
| was above the board and it doesn't excuse it. Opinions are
| still divided on the firebombing of Dresden and even by its
| most exaggerated retellings it pales in comparison to what
| happened in Japan.
|
| Also what the article doesn't go out of its way to mention but
| implies: the atomic bombings were part of what led to the
| Japanese surrender but did not play the critical part Truman
| would later claim they did (while continously exaggerating the
| number of American lives saved by it over the years). The
| Soviet invasion and risk of annexation played a far greater
| part and surrendering to the US to stop the Soviet advance was
| preferable to a Soviet annexation that would have at best meant
| a guaranteed deposition of the Emperor if not an execution.
|
| The Japanese Emperor was considered divine. Although the
| surrender ended up being unconditional the US did not hold him
| personally responsible and allowed him to remain in a
| ceremonial function. If there were no off-the-record agreements
| about this, it was at least a leap of faith with the
| understanding that the alternative was not an American
| occupation but guaranteed annexation by the Soviets who were
| known to not look too kindly on kings, gods or the territorial
| integrity of Japan (given the Russo-Japanese war preceding
| WW2). The US wasn't keen on risking the lives of its soldiers
| by invading the deathtrap that was mainland Japan whereas the
| Soviets had a reputation (accurate or not) of not fearing
| meatgrinders.
| croes wrote:
| Same with Western drone strikes vs Russian killers
| retrocryptid wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| 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. [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_a...
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >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.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Yes, but the people making those threats aren't the people
| who were killed. As you yourself say, they were civilians;
| and they certainly weren't in Manilla.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Specifically what are you referring to? Many people,
| civilian and military and political, were making threats of
| all kinds in those last months.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| I mean that great mass of people killed in Hiroshima and
| Nagasaki were civilians.
| defrost wrote:
| So were those in Tokyo and the _other_ 72 cities levelled
| in bombing campaigns on Japanese homeland prior to the
| two additional cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| But i'm not sure what your point is. If you're referring
| to the tragedy of those civilians killed in Hiroshima and
| Nagasaki, it's grotesque, but how is it different from
| the tragedy of million of civilians killed by the Empire
| during its conquests, or the hundreds of thousands of
| civilians killed by the U.S. bombing raids with
| conventional weapons before the nuclear bombs were
| dropped, or most crucially, the possibly millions of
| civilians and soldiers who could have been killed if the
| American forces had directly invaded?
|
| Under the lack of foresight at the time, and given the
| nature of Japanese belligerence, it's not hard to
| understand why the U.S decided to drop the two atom
| bombs, given what they'd already done while still facing
| Japanese intransigence. Maybe it wasn't the most moral of
| choices, but under the circumstances, it had an
| understandable logic of hardened pragmatism that it's too
| easy to sweep under a rug of condemnation today with
| foresight, which itself might be mistaken even now.
| poikroequ wrote:
| The Japanese were ruthless and barbaric during WW2. Too few
| people know the full extent of the atrocities committed by
| Japan during that time.
|
| https://youtu.be/18Xe9HqW8Q4
| billti wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| They do experiments where they get oh-so-close to critical by
| dripping solution into a container.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Criticality 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 wrote:
| No, 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 wrote:
| Criticality 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.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > So in principle if you just form a large enough ball of
| Pu-239, it would go critical
|
| Don't neutrons lose some energy as they transit through the
| material? That would make this bounded in some respect
| anyway.
| Cerium wrote:
| As-in, the neutrons lose energy by hitting the material
| and creating more neutrons?
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| No, as in, as the average distance a neutron-hitting
| nucleus travels before the collision increases, the
| average energy of the neutron at collision time
| decreases. Or so I imagine, that's what I'm asking.
|
| The scenario was that the size of the material can
| increase until you guarantee a sufficiently high rate of
| collision, and I'm asking whether neutrons really do not
| lose energy as they travel prior to collision (as the
| scenario seems to assume).
| simonh wrote:
| Why would the average distance a neutron has to travel to
| strike a nucleus increase?
|
| I suppose it does eventually, as the number of undecayed
| nuclei falls, but that wouldn't be a significant effect
| until the criticality reaction had very significantly
| progressed. In other words the reaction can't go on
| forever.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > Why would the average distance a neutron has to travel
| to strike a nucleus increase?
|
| Because if the problem is that neutrons are escaping the
| object before hitting a nucleus, and we are adding more
| nuclei so the likelihood that they hit something
| increases, the new collision candidates will be further
| away than the old ones.
|
| In other words, adding material to the edge of the object
| does not affect the per distance probability of
| collision. It only affects the overall probability of
| collision. Since the per distance probability does not
| change while the overall probability does, the
| probability increase must lie outside of the average path
| length of a neutron through the original object.
| dumah wrote:
| In the case we are considering, it doesn't, but it could
| with other materials.
|
| Consider that the wavelength of the neutron is a function
| of its energy, and that the cross sections for
| interaction between nuclei and neutrons are strong and
| complex functions of energy.
|
| If the cross section for the interaction of interest gets
| smaller with decreasing energy, then it would be the case
| that the neutrons mean free path length would increase as
| energy decreased.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > In the case we are considering, it doesn't, but it
| could with other materials.
|
| Sorry, I said something subtle and easy to miss and also
| made a confusing typo, writing too fast.
|
| "average distance a [ _nucleus-hitting_ neutron] "
|
| As in, as more material is added, the percent of neutrons
| that successfully collide and don't just fly out
| increases. But, for the class of _nucleus-hitting_
| neutrons, the average distance prior to collision
| increases.
|
| If the neutron loses energy as it travels, then as the
| average distance increases I suppose the probability of
| splitting the collidee nucleus decreases. So as the class
| increases in size, its rate of nucleus splitting may fall
| below the threshold, which bounds the useful size
| increase.
|
| Perhaps this doesn't occur until the object has grown in
| size way past the point of basically guaranteed
| criticality, I haven't done the math, just curious since
| GP's statement sounded as if neutrons do not lose energy
| across any distance and the object could therefore could
| be increased to an arbitrary size while maintaining the
| same qualitative per-iteration behavior, and I find that
| surprising.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| In the regime that's interesting for pure fission
| devices, the opposite is true. The cross section
| increases as energy decreases. This is why moderators are
| a thing in nuclear reactors.
| dontwearitout wrote:
| They certainly can, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Res
| onance_escape_probability. The all-important number in
| nuclear reactions is "k", the average number of child
| neutrons a single neutron will produce. The neutron
| population follows an equation something like N = exp((k
| - 1) * t). For k<1, you get exponential decay, and for
| k>1, you get exponential growth (until everything becomes
| a plasma and k changes). Check out
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_factor_formula.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I think this is neutrons emitted from each collision. I'm
| interested in the energy of each neutron while it is in
| flight.
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| It changes very little because there's nothing to receive
| their kinetic energy.
|
| Neutrons lose energy by colliding with things of similar
| mass, such as hydrogen nuclei (often in water). If they
| collide with a heavy nucleus, such as plutonium, they
| just bounce off without losing speed. (Or fission or
| capture.)
|
| Think of billiards. The cue ball may slow or stop after
| hitting another ball, since they have similar masses. But
| hit the rail and it just bounces off, at the same speed,
| because the table is so much heavier.
|
| If there are no light nuclei in the environment, then the
| neutrons won't slow down.
| User23 wrote:
| There's also been at least one naturally critical deposit.
| numpad0 wrote:
| The reason you need explosives is that you want that
| release of energy to be as rapid as possible to make the
| contraption pass `bomb` object class duck typing.
|
| If you kept criticality to a stable level and let energy of
| fuel release over e.g. 20 years, it's called a nuclear
| power plant. If you let it run away and let the material
| melt itself, it's called a meltdown situation. If you
| instead take highly purified fissile material and
| compressed it instantly into size of a peanut or however
| small you could, the material compressed experience nuclear
| chain reaction everywhere inside that peanut, and
| spontaneous release of that insane amount of energy
| resemble behaviors observed with conventional chemical
| explosive material exploding, and such a contraption that
| do this is somewhat metaphorically called an atomic "bomb".
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I may be misremembering, but it seems like I've read that the
| explosive variation is the "supercritical mass". Critical
| masses aren't anything to sneeze at though, unless you like
| the tickle of fast neutrons massaging your internal organs.
| eig wrote:
| You don't need to force the halves together quickly to start a
| chain reaction, but you do need to put them together fast to
| create a bomb. If it's not fast enough you will get a "Fizzle"
| [0] where some chain reaction is occurring but not over a small
| enough timespan to make a bomb or to stop the material from
| disintegrating itself. A similar slow chain reaction process is
| used to control energy release in nuclear power plants.
|
| [0] -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_chain_reaction#Prede...
| SapporoChris wrote:
| For further reading about the core's history.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
|
| It's also been discussed numerous times on this board.
| H8crilA wrote:
| This is also what happens in nuclear reactors that go bad.
| These aren't full blown nuclear explosions, and if there's
| any major explosion at all it's usually from the hydrogen
| that is created when hot metals touch water.
| mlsu wrote:
| It is fascinating for sure. I don't think there's anything in
| chemistry like it. It depends a lot on the geometry. A chemical
| reaction can be sped up or slowed down by the shape of
| something, but that's just because of exposed surface area.
|
| In the case of Slotin, the thing he dropped onto the core was a
| neutron reflector so it redirected neutrons back into the core.
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/near-disaster-federa...
|
| This is an interesting read, it's a story about a more recent
| near criticality that took place in 2011.. You can see a
| picture in the article of the dangerous configuration -- it's
| just a few rods of plutonium near each other. Any closer, if
| one tips over into the other, and they might go hot and release
| a huge amount of radiation.
| djmips wrote:
| Harry Daghlian dropped a neutron deflector in the first
| incident, Slotin allowed two halves to come together AFAIK.
| elevaet wrote:
| > On August 21, 1945, less than a week after Japan notified
| the US that it would accept the terms of the Potsdam
| Declaration, physicist Harry Daghlian was performing an
| experiment when he accidentally dropped a piece of "tamper"
| material, used to reflect neutrons back into the core, and
| triggered a critical mass. Daghlian used his bare hands to
| pull the mass apart to stop the chain reaction, and
| absorbed a fatal dose of radiation. He died three weeks
| later.
| albert_e wrote:
| > As luck had it that August day, a supervisor returned from
| her lunch break, noticed the dangerous configuration, and
| ordered a technician to move the rods apart. > But in so
| doing, she violated safety rules calling for a swift
| evacuation of all personnel in "criticality" events, because
| bodies -- and even hands -- can reflect and slow the neutrons
| emitted by plutonium, increasing the likelihood of a nuclear
| chain reaction. > A more senior lab official instead
| improperly decided that others in the room should keep
| working, according to a witness and an Energy Department
| report describing the incident.
|
| This part is confusingly worded.
|
| Once the dangerous configuration was noticed what was the
| right thing to do?
| uticus wrote:
| > I don't think there's anything in chemistry like it. It
| depends a lot on the geometry.
|
| Not an argument against your main point but doesn't geometry
| actually have quite a bit to do with chemistry?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_minimization
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There is something _somewhat_ like it in chemistry.
|
| If you look at the energy per unit mass, e.g., J/kg, of
| different materials, you'll note that curiously many _fuels_
| (hydrogen, methane, petrol) and explosives (gunpowder, TNT,
| ANFO), you 'll find that the former are roughly ten times (or
| more) greater.
|
| What makes explosives, well, _explosive_ isn 't the total
| energy contained within them, _it 's the rate at which it's
| released_. Jet fuel contains ten times the energy per unit
| mass than C4, and can in fact melt (or at least significantly
| weaken) steel beams, _but it does so by burning over time_.
|
| What _explosives_ do is to combine oxidiser and fuel in the
| same package (as with gunpowder and ANFO), or contain
| chemically-unstable bonds with high potential in a state
| which can be triggered by a sharp shock (TNT, C-4 /RDX). The
| total energy released is smaller, but the rate of release is
| far greater.
|
| It _may_ be possible to use more conventional fuels to
| generate explosions. This happens with hydrogen gas,
| particularly in a stoichiometric combination with oxygen,
| with petrol within an internal combustion engine (the fuel
| burn is explosive), and in a fuel-air bomb (a /k/a
| thermobaric weapon), in which a fuel is widely dispersed in
| the atmosphere and then ignited. The blast generated is
| typically far weaker than of an equivalent conventional
| explosive, but can still be explosive rather than a
| deflagration (rapid combustion not generating a shock wave).
| Incidentally, virtually all cinematic "explosions" are in
| fact deflagrations, often using either flammable gas or
| suspended powder. There are also relatively frequent dust
| explosions involving powdered foodstuffs (grain, flour,
| sugar, etc.) which are a hazard where large quantities of
| such materials are stored or processed (grain silos,
| processing plants).
|
| USCSB investigative video of an explosion at Imperial Sugar:
| <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Jg7mLSG-Yws>
|
| Raw video of the blast:
| <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=LQZGWjVwN58>
|
| In particular, storage combinations of potential fuels and
| oxidisers in close proximity can lead to explosions.
|
| There's also the case of spontaneous combustion particularly
| of oil-soaked rags or compost piles which shares some
| characteristics with criticality incidents. That's where heat
| release which in smaller concentrations would be benign
| reaches the ignition point of the materials involved. Large
| heaps of freshly-mown grass in particular can spontaneously
| ignite. I've had the experience of moving a large pile of
| woodchips which had been left in sub-freezing weather and
| discovering that the core of that pile was literally steaming
| hot, and was melting snow and evaporating water which had
| flowed in toward it. The chips weren't charring, but they
| _were_ distinctly warm.
| kragen wrote:
| you say 'such dire consequences', but given that your apparent
| point of comparison is atomic bombs, i would rather say that
| the consequences were fairly mild: no buildings were destroyed,
| no fallout was released, and only one person died rather than
| hundreds of thousands. it didn't even kill everyone in the
| room, and the person who it did kill survived for over a week,
| though possibly he wished he hadn't
|
| nuclear reactors also do not force material together at high
| pressure, but nevertheless achieve criticality
| colechristensen wrote:
| Basically the faster you go from non-critical to critical, the
| more energy you get out of a given amount of material. If you
| do it slowly it just blows itself apart before it can do much
| real damage.
|
| If you have a small amount of material but enough to be
| critical and say, generate enough heat to melt itself into a
| puddle in a minute, it doesn't explode or anything, but before
| it melts and likely starts itself on fire, everybody nearby is
| going to get a lethal dose every few seconds.
|
| In other words, there's a lot of room between "self-sustaining
| nuclear reaction" and "bomb".
|
| Even storage of materials in warehouses has to be done
| carefully because too much too close can cause dangerous
| amounts of reactions.
| 1wd wrote:
| Feynman has an interesting story about critical mass:
|
| > Los Alamos was going to make the bomb, but at Oak Ridge they
| were trying to separate the isotopes of uranium ... he saw them
| wheeling a tank carboy of water, green water - which is uranium
| nitrate solution. He says, "Uh, you're going to handle it like
| that when it's purified too? Is that what you're going to do?"
| They said, "Sure -- why not?" "Won't it explode?" he says. Huh!
| Explode?" ... he noticed certain boxes in big lots in a room,
| but he didn't notice a lot of boxes in another room on the
| other side of the same wall ... what you would have to do to
| fix this. It's rather easy. You put cadmium in solutions to
| absorb the neutrons in the water, and you separate the boxes so
| they are not too dense ...
|
| https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos....
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Rehashing some of what's been said and adding to it:
|
| A nuclear chain reaction occurs where more neutrons enter into
| a fissible mass than leave it, where those neutrons trigger
| additional fission events.
|
| "Criticality" is the point at which that neutron emission is
| just balanced: the same number are added as are consumed. This
| is often fairly stable, and can be further controlled with
| moderating systems (e.g., control rods, circulating water, or
| neutron reflectors which _increase_ neutron flow). There 's
| also the matter of "prompt" vs. "delayed" neutrons. The first,
| prompt neutrons, are emitted immediately following a fission
| event, the latter occur after some delay, from milliseconds to
| minutes or longer. The ratio of prompt to delayed neutrons also
| matters in controlling a nuclear reaction.
|
| A nuclear reaction at criticality is _not_ a bomb, at least not
| necessarily. What it _is_ however is _sustained_ , which is to
| say that the nuclear reaction will continue unless
| circumstances change.
|
| A nuclear bomb, and specifically a _fission_ bomb, requires not
| only a _critical_ mass but a _supercritical_ one, with a large
| amount of the material going critical at once. The challenge
| for the engineer is that nuclear reactions release _so_ much
| energy that the explosive material itself can be blown apart
| before enough of it has time to react. So the trick is to
| transition between subcritical and supercritical masses
| _quickly_.
|
| For Uranium-235, the reaction is slow enough that a "bullet-
| style" design is sufficient. A supercritical mass is arranged
| in two pieces, which are separated until detonation is desired,
| at which point one (usually smaller) mass is shot into the
| other, like a bullet down a gun-barrel. Plutonium-239 is so
| fissile that this would result in premature criticality and
| only a small fraction of the material would fission before
| being blown apart. Instead, an _implosion_ design is used, in
| which a subcritical mass of plutonium is surrounded by
| explosive charges which, when detonated, compress the core
| sufficiently that it _does_ achieve criticality, and the much
| larger nuclear explosion follows.
|
| The Uranium bullet-style device was considered sufficiently
| reliable that it was not tested. The Hiroshima bombing was the
| first detonation of this style of weapon. The Trinity test was
| to confirm the theory of a plutonium implosion-style design,
| and Nagasaki saw the _second_ explosion of such a weapon.
|
| In the case of the Hiroshima (uranium) bomb, about 1 g of
| matter was converted to energy, and about 660 g of a total
| fissile mass of ~51 kg actually reacted, or about 1.3% of the
| total mass. Essentially the bomb was already coming apart
| before any more material could engage in fission. See: <https:/
| /old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1546rcv/why_did...>
|
| I believe values are about the same for the Nagasaki weapon.
|
| More on fission weapon designs:
| <https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-2.html>
| dghughes wrote:
| Dropping/gravity had nothing to do with it or an impact. When
| it dropped it fell onto the pile and once there the total mass
| was now enough for it to go supercritical.
| dxs wrote:
| This 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
| complaintdept wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| "Shipping"?!
|
| https://annas-
| archive.org/md5/b83a0898c4c587d635481b5713a6a2...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Hard 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.
| josephg wrote:
| Yep. Personally I'm generally in favour of copyright as
| it was originally drafted: only valid for 7 years, with
| an optional extension to 14.
|
| I'm all for creative people making a living from their
| work, but 40 years copyright is too long. To say nothing
| of the absurd rules today of 70 years after the death of
| the author or whatever it is.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My example is Disney's 1959 _Sleeping Beauty_. Had today
| 's copyright regime been in force, Tchaikovsky's 1890
| ballet would have still been under copyright, so Disney
| couldn't have made it.
| mr_toad wrote:
| If you could patent pulling up the ladder after you,
| Disney would hold that patent.
| sigzero wrote:
| Why should "not dependent" on sales be any kind of
| consideration here? The right thing to do is to purchase
| the book.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I disagree that purchasing the book is automatically the
| "right" thing to do. If someone cannot afford the book,
| it is my view that society should not expect them to pay.
| I believe that this view towards knowledge will lead to a
| wiser society, and we deviate from that path at our
| peril.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Hard disagree that it's not theft. That's what it is.
|
| > One hopes the author is still not dependent on its sa
|
| One hopes that someone moves into your house because
| you're not dependent on that spare bedroom anymore.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Books, especially digital copies, are not property in the
| same way that a house is property. If someone could
| download a duplicate of my house and live in it without
| having any impact on my own house, that would be great.
|
| We invented the idea that information is property, and I
| think restricting access to knowledge via copyright is a
| net harm to society. Authors need to survive, but IMO we
| should seek solutions that provide for authors while also
| allowing unrestricted access. We have seen for well over
| a decade now that "pay what you can" schemes to fund
| music and books can work very well. There are three
| billion people on this planet with an opportunity to gain
| internet access in the next 50 years. Should we paywall
| every book written in the last 150 years to benefit
| publishers? Or make a free public library of every book
| available to benefit humankind? This is the question we
| face, and I know what my view on it is.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| OK, that's your view. The "all information is public"
| view is not the law and will never be the law. But you do
| you.
|
| > we should seek solutions that provide for authors while
| also allowing
|
| Weasel words. We should seek solutions that let us fly
| airplanes without having to pass that bothersome test,
| too.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| > "all information is public"
|
| Published works, not "all information". It's up to
| society to decide if we want to prioritize publishers or
| humanity. I don't believe our restrictive legal regime
| will persist around the world in perpetuity. It is too
| harmful to humanity, and someone will break ranks with
| "harmonization" even if the USA does not.
| ssklash wrote:
| I've read both and they are simply phenomenal.
| nox101 wrote:
| I really loved this podcast
|
| Hardcore History 59 - (BLITZ) The Destroyer of Worlds
|
| https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-59-the-de...
| freedomben wrote:
| Second this. It's currently available free on the RSS feed in
| every podcast directory. The whole back catalog can also be
| purchased, and IMHO it's well worth buying. I bought it a
| couple years back and have been very happy with it. I think
| it's like $80, but you get countless hours of good history
| from a master storyteller.
|
| His series on World War I (aka The Great War) called
| "Blueprint For Armageddon" was one of the most interesting
| and captivating of any podcasts or audiobooks I've ever
| listened to.
|
| When I was younger the older folks would talk so highly about
| the days of theater radio, when actors and storytellers would
| tell audio-only stories. I used to wonder how that could
| possibly compete with video. After listening to Hardcore
| History, I get it now. There's something really powerful
| about listening to a natural storyteller lay things out, and
| Dan Carlin is a master of the craft. If you're new to him,
| the last few years of shows are always freely available
| through the RSS feed that's in every podcast directory.
| devilbunny wrote:
| I have heard that Carlin's historiography isn't great...
| but I will fully agree that the man is a master storyteller
| and does wonders for making insanely complex topics
| comprehensible. _Ghosts of the Ostfront_ was the one that
| sold me on him.
|
| If he's not dead-on, all the time, well, I can read more
| later and be corrected.
|
| I had no idea you could just buy his old episodes. May have
| to go buy them now.
| chasd00 wrote:
| late to the thread but just ordered The Making of the Atomic
| Bomb, thanks for the tip!
| robterrell wrote:
| I read this after seeing Oppenheimer. Just a tremendous book. I
| learned so much from his description of the early debates
| around the structure of atoms. It really illuminates the
| theorists' struggles with quantum mechanics and how, as we
| often see, progress required a new generation of thinkers.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| What do you think of the movie? For some reason, I can't
| bring myself to watch it yet. (I'm a very sensitive person.)
| mewse-hn wrote:
| I resisted seeing the movie for quite a while, maybe for
| similar reasons to you. I was certain it would be
| depressing.
|
| It was much better than I expected. This will sound stupid
| but I didn't expect it to focus on the story of the man
| himself rather than the bomb (you'd think the title would
| be a hint).
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm about an hour into "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"! Great
| so far.
|
| I recently finished "American Prometheus" the Pulitzer Prize
| winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and it was
| phenomenal. I recommend it highly. It's a great different
| perspective on the story of the making of the bomb since it's
| more focused on the man's life. Really cool.
| malwrar wrote:
| This is my all-time favorite book, I've read through it
| numerous times. The level of detail and scope of focus is
| breathtaking. Its narrative reflects to me a deeper truth about
| the asymmetric leverage that mastery of a new technology
| bestows, and the unpredictable outcomes of its inevitabile
| diffusion among humans in a barely-stable world. I can't
| recommend it enough, I feel like I learned something major
| about the nature of our species after completing it.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Sometimes it's very interesting to reflect on how
| technological advancements can redefine human possibilities
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| It feels like these two books need to be read in order
| robterrell wrote:
| Here's a movie dramatization of the Louis Slotin screwdriver
| accident with the demon core:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| Yet no body talkin' Seems suspicionious.
| darby_nine wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Nuclear weapons management is challenging. This book is a good
| read connected to the topic
| rurp wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The Japanese debating over whether to surrender or not after 2
| bombs and 100 firebombed cities is genuinely insane.
| beaglesss wrote:
| Some were found in the Philippines decades later, still with
| weapons refusing to surrender.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Like Hiroo Onoda, who remained on Lubang Island in the
| Philippines until 1974
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