[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
Gee, can you give a citation on that? The bottleneck was enriched Uranium I thought.
[/quote]
If I recall correctly, it’s from this book:
But I’ve also found this:
where it is mentioned:
“The United States produced a small stockpile of “Fat Man” bombs after the war, but they were highly idiosyncratic and extremely delicate.”
For those of you who don’t trust the Wikipedia, feel free to look it up in your Britannica.
[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
That doesn’t exactly sound like the pipeline was full.[/quote]
How many do you need?
The point was that the US didn’t have only two bombs.
Who’s going to fuck with you if you’ve got a “small stockpile” of those and they’ve got nothing?
On rereading my first post, I might have overstated the fact with my “high number mass production”, but the point was that more bombs where available had the need for them arisen.
Had the only technology available been “Little Boy”, then yes, it would’ve taken a good while for the stockpile to grow; but Fat Man was the one they’d bank on for short term inventory.
President Truman (with advisors, including Churchill) had to weigh the distinct possibilty that dropping these weapons would save millions of Lives and stop a War that stood the very real chance of continuing on for years…
George Elsey (a key foreign policy aide to Pesident Truman) wrote:
“He (Truman) could no more have stopped it (the Bomb)than a train moving down a track…It’s all well and good to come along later and say the Bomeb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn War was a horrible thing”.
Mufasa
[quote]Soldierslim wrote:
Well said Pookie, my thoughts exactly. The bombs were all about having “negotiating power” after the war.
Being a student of history has tought me one thing: don’t EVER trust your Government. Because they’re ALL lying to us, sometimes for our own good, but lying nontheless.[/quote]
Hey, especially in time of war they lie like rugs. Don’t ever trust a wartime president. A lesson for our times.
Here it was a case of out of one war and right into another, so it was important to have true militaristic frightfulness, not mere negotiating power. These weren’t no late-eighties commies comin’ to getcha, this was Uncle Joe. He made Hitler look like a piker.
But everybody else in the world got frightened too. Well on balance that was probably a good thing. For this reason we attach a lot of significance to what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in the context of world war, the casualties were insignificant and even the frightfulness was so-so.
What was shocking was the ease with which it was done.
[quote]pookie wrote:
endgamer711 wrote:
That doesn’t exactly sound like the pipeline was full.
How many do you need?
The point was that the US didn’t have only two bombs.
Who’s going to fuck with you if you’ve got a “small stockpile” of those and they’ve got nothing?
On rereading my first post, I might have overstated the fact with my “high number mass production”, but the point was that more bombs where available had the need for them arisen.
Had the only technology available been “Little Boy”, then yes, it would’ve taken a good while for the stockpile to grow; but Fat Man was the one they’d bank on for short term inventory.
[/quote]
Two was all they had at that time. I think to get anywhere we have to get right down to how many weeks it would have taken to produce a third bomb, and what the enemy might have made of that delay. If those two didn’t do it, there was little question of postponing the invasion. You don’t run total warfare on those terms.
[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
For this reason we attach a lot of significance to what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in the context of world war, the casualties were insignificant and even the frightfulness was so-so.
What was shocking was the ease with which it was done.
[/quote]
The one good thing I can see is that atomic weapons have never been used in war since.
I guess the world had to see what those things could do; all the death and destruction of the moment AND all the other deaths from radiation days, weeks, months and years later. Cancers, premature deaths, babies with deformities, etc.
[quote]XCelticX wrote:
Soldier, you sound like you do know alot about this, but you got basic facts such as the number of people killed in Hiroshima wrong by about 120,000 lives. That leads me to question your sources… but I don’t know for sure of course wether or not you are wrong, as I have never studied the war.[/quote]
Wait a minute. You start this thread with of how the U.S. strategy was off for choosing the target they did. You then suggest another target (a military station) and then you predict it would end the war. Yet…you admit that you’ve never studied the war!!! Are you really this much of an opinionated loser? What makes it worse is you’re sitting here defending all of your theories and opinions vigorously but you haven’t even studied the war. What makes it ten times worse is that your arguing with people who do know quite a lot about it from their comprehensive posts on the subject.
I’ve read more bullshit on this site lately from little boys under 20 years of age I’m starting to lose faith in the next generation. Are these the idiots that our schools are producing these days??? XCelticX you are the definition of an online forum troll. Go get edumucated, smart ass…
[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
Two was all they had at that time. I think to get anywhere we have to get right down to how many weeks it would have taken to produce a third bomb, and what the enemy might have made of that delay. If those two didn’t do it, there was little question of postponing the invasion. You don’t run total warfare on those terms.[/quote]
Consider:
The enemy doesn’t know how many you’ve got. If you’d dropped only one, they could’ve thought that it was your only one. But you drop two. They learn about the Trinity test… that’s three. No one else in the world is close to having the A-Bomb; who’d take the gamble of attacking you presuming you had no other bombs for some weeks or months?
But even so, let’s say that someone has spies real deep within your government, and they know you don’t have any more bombs. The USA is far from a pushover, even considering only conventional warfare. Your manufacturing capacity dwarfed pretty much everyone on the planet. There’s no way they can do anything in a short period of time until you get the next bombs.
At worst, you would’ve had to stall Japan for some more weeks (since a land invasion was too costly in human lives), but there was no real question on who was going to win that war.
Japan was already all but defeated before the bombings. Unless their emperor was really god, they weren’t going to win that war, A-bombs or not.
And that’s my point: Dropping the bombs was not necessary to end the war with Japan. Maybe it was deemed “necessary” to show Russia and China what awaited them if they didn’t reign in their military ambitions; but that’s not what’s claimed by most American history books.
The old Enola Gay exposition at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. used to have a plaque that read:
[i]"Tibbets piloted the aircraft on its mission to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. That bomb and the one dropped on Nagasaki three days later destroyed much of the two cities and caused tens of thousands of deaths.
However, the use of the bombs led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. Such an invasion, especially if undertaken for both main islands, would have led to very heavy casualties among American and Allied troops and Japanese civilians and military. It was thought highly unlikely that Japan, while in a very weakened military condition, would have surrendered unconditionally without such an invasion."[/i]
All that is bunk. Tens of thousands of deaths is for the immediate deaths, not a total of all the deads from those bombings.
The part about the land invasion is also crap; the US knew at the beginning of July that the Japanese were considering surrender and the terms they would accept. Had the Trinity test failed, I’m sure the Postdam Declaration would’ve been worded more diplomatically and Japan would’ve surrender while saving face. Without nuking anyone.
Maybe Russia and China would’ve been more agressive post war and they would’ve gotten bombed; I don’t know. We’ll never know. Just don’t propagandize about the “necessity” of nuking Japan and ask me to believe it.
[quote]XCelticX wrote:
Massif wrote:
3. Celtic, please don’t tell me that you are going to go on a bitchfest about something that happened 60 years ago and something you don’t understand.
LOL oh great and wise massif, please lend your knowledge…
Yea right. Tell me EXACTLY how I don’t understand what happened.
[/quote]
Here we go, smart ass. Pay attention.
You couldn’t understand what happened because you have a completely different frame of reference for their actions.
You are judging their actions by what you have experienced in the last 20 years. Unless you had gone through World War 2, and had the social and cultural experiences of the 30’s and 40’s, you couldn’t possibly understand an action that was based on a person’s interaction with these variables. The mindset that allowed this decision to be made was a result of these variables.
If I see a man who has had his family killed, I think “Poor bastard. I can’t imagine what he is going through”. Once again, I have no frame of reference, and therefore can’t comprehend what he is experiencing.
You could compare their actions to your experiences of today’s standards, but that doesn’t mean you understand them. In exactly the same way, I could try to imagine what the man whose family was killed would be experiencing, but to do so I would have to compare it to what my experiences were, which would be clearly inadequate for these purposes.
So, there you go. I told you “EXACTLY” how you don’t understand it.
PS It’s Great Saging Massif, bitch.
[quote]XCelticX wrote:
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” J. Robert Oppenheimer
I find this suggestion that the atomic bomb was ‘technically sweet’ pretty ridiculous, offensive even.
[/quote]
Oppenheimer was a complicated man. Besides being an accomplished physicist and leader, he was versed in many languages, learned them easily, and was very widely read. Besides following the physics of his day, he read the great Oriental philosophers in their original languages. He was a genius of such magnitude it’s hard for most of us to model his thinking.
One thing is certain: he never looked at anything from only one direction. Here he muses along one perspective only.
It is an important perspective in the context of his leadership, because it was a perspective shared by many of the people he led. Perforce: to the extent that any of them thought of the practical consequences of their work it was a bummer and a distraction, even given the justification of war against the Axis. This sweetness was an important refuge for those whose work was vital.
But this “sweetness” was by no means summary of Oppenheimer’s thinking on this matter.
[quote]pookie wrote:
endgamer711 wrote:
Two was all they had at that time. I think to get anywhere we have to get right down to how many weeks it would have taken to produce a third bomb, and what the enemy might have made of that delay. If those two didn’t do it, there was little question of postponing the invasion. You don’t run total warfare on those terms.
Consider:
The enemy doesn’t know how many you’ve got. If you’d dropped only one, they could’ve thought that it was your only one. But you drop two. They learn about the Trinity test… that’s three. No one else in the world is close to having the A-Bomb; who’d take the gamble of attacking you presuming you had no other bombs for some weeks or months?
…
[/quote]
In total warfare, nobody ever ceases to attack for any other than tactical reasons. The war was ongoing in the Pacific; island hopping meant the Japanese weren’t bottled up in Japan.
When hundreds of American casualties are daily news, you do not delay to end the war by whatever means. You do not do it nicely nicely. You do it now.
hehe… Hell I forgot the real topic. I just go to these threads to watch this bonehead get housed!
Oppenheimer meant for his comments to be discrete from all this discussion about total war, Japanese cultural factors, and shared occupation avoidance. The point of his statement has nothing to do with use of the bomb. The fact is, that bomb was the culmination of over 40 years of genius-level intellects breaking themselves on the minutiae of advanced physics and engineering. Curie, Planck, Einstein, Fermi, Hamilton, Bohr, Heisenberg, Lawrence, Seaborg, Oppenheimer himself, and I probably missed some.
When each of them made their respective breakthroughs, it must have been an ecstatic moment, after long pursuit, that is beyond our understanding. Einstein didn’t write his letter to Roosevelt until after his research was finished, for obvious reasons. You grossly underestimate these men, and those of any era, if you think they weren’t aware of what their progress might cause. Oppenheimer simply states that responsibility for use of their work is beyond their control and thus morally extraneous to the scientists, but that the work is completed constitutes the sole duty bequeathed them by destiny. It’s Objectivist in a way.
xcelticx you are clueless and making bold statements about something that you obviously know very little about.
To compare the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to happened to the jews is absurd.
Let me clue you in on some facts.
Little boy, the first bomb which was used on Hiroshima was made with uranium. A sizable portion of which had been recovered from a german U boat that was on it’s way to Japan when Germany surrendered.
The Japanese had intended to use this same uranium for a dirty bomb attack on San Francisco three days before the Hiroshima bomb. We didn’t know if this uranium was for a dirty bomb or an atomic one. What we did know is what it could be used for.
Another fact is we didn’t just have a whole bunch of these things sitting around so we could just go ahead and waste a few. That is part of the reason why there was such a short time between attacks. We tricked them into thinking we had more.
If we gave them sufficient warning they would have moved all of their pows into their cities. As it was a few Americans were killed in those blasts but there could have been a whole lot more.
There also was the concern that if a bomb malfunctioned it could be recovered by the enemy and they would learn how to make their own. Which was another reason for using them on big targets.
The Japanese used biological weapons in China. One of the nastier ones was fleas infected with a virilent strain of bubonic plague. To this day in Northern China there are occasional outbreaks of the strain of plague that was created and used by the Japanese.
The Japanese leaders were not the least bit shy about sacrificing their people. Just look at the invasion of Okinawa. The American generals were expecting a million American casualties invading Japan.
They certainly weren’t surrendering and we had no way of knowing what the Germans had or had not given them.
Check out this article from the BBC:
Hitler ‘tested small atom bomb’
BBC NEWS | Europe | Hitler 'tested small atom bomb'
[quote]RoadWarrior wrote:
XCelticX,
While you are talking about monsters of the time period, you need to open a few books on the NanJing Massacre and the occupation of China during the period of 1931 to 1945 (it ended basically with Hiroshima). They (the Japanese) slaughtered millions of Chinese people and tortured millions more. I think you will find few Chinese citizens of that era (or probably now) that feel bad about the bombing of Japan. Far more Japanese (and Americans/Allies) would have died without it.[/quote]
This is an excellent point and Many Chinese still hate Japan…in particular because while they have admitted to this event (Nanjing), no public apology was ever offered. It is seen as a lack of Remorse. Chemical weapon testing, human experiments, biological weapon testing…makes it seem like Auschwitz had a twin with more “volunteers.”
The other half of the equation, that you are missing is the scientific half. Blowing Japan to shreds proved that they worked. It was a completion of an experiment. The majority of existing nuclear can be picked up by a large majority of the lifters on this site. Not all nukes are strategic, most are tactical as in fired from a tank. The only problem is the “bleeding hearts” that keep them locked up.
[quote]DON D1ESEL wrote:
Oppenheimer simply states that responsibility for use of their work is beyond their control and thus morally extraneous to the scientists, but that the work is completed constitutes the sole duty bequeathed them by destiny. It’s Objectivist in a way.[/quote]
Well maybe. But didn’t he also say that the Physicists had tasted sin? From what I’ve read, most of them searched their consciences. The war was often appealed to, otherwise more than a few would just as soon have resisted this particular sweetness.
Many of them were Europeans. Most of those working on the project envisoned that the bomb would be used on the Germans. When VE Day came there was something of a subtle sea change in attitudes about the enterprise, a lot more concern with what practically they were working for.
[quote]DON D1ESEL wrote:
Oppenheimer meant for his comments to be discrete from all this discussion about total war, Japanese cultural factors, and shared occupation avoidance. The point of his statement has nothing to do with use of the bomb. The fact is, that bomb was the culmination of over 40 years of genius-level intellects breaking themselves on the minutiae of advanced physics and engineering. Curie, Planck, Einstein, Fermi, Hamilton, Bohr, Heisenberg, Lawrence, Seaborg, Oppenheimer himself, and I probably missed some.
When each of them made their respective breakthroughs, it must have been an ecstatic moment, after long pursuit, that is beyond our understanding. Einstein didn’t write his letter to Roosevelt until after his research was finished, for obvious reasons. You grossly underestimate these men, and those of any era, if you think they weren’t aware of what their progress might cause. Oppenheimer simply states that responsibility for use of their work is beyond their control and thus morally extraneous to the scientists, but that the work is completed constitutes the sole duty bequeathed them by destiny. It’s Objectivist in a way.[/quote]
Quick hijack, just gotta say diesel, from reading your posts on a variety of topics, I admire your intelligence and the way you express it. Good post!
If they didn’t surrender after the first city was leveled, how many bombs dropped in the boonies do you think it would have took?
[quote]Sifu wrote:
The Japanese had intended to use this same uranium for a dirty bomb attack on San Francisco three days before the Hiroshima bomb. We didn’t know if this uranium was for a dirty bomb or an atomic one. What we did know is what it could be used for.
[/quote]
It’s interesting to note that while they were nearly on their ass (from the armchair perspective of some posting here) the Japanese were putting the finishing touches on their third generation of submersible aircraft carriers. Called the Sen Toku Type, these displaced around 6000 tons and carried three floatplane bombers, disassembled. These had a range of about 600NM and carried a bomb load of 800Kg. They could be launched within 45 minutes of surfacing.
The Japanese built three of these boats, and all three survived the war (to be scuttled by the US after close examination). I read that the intended application was germ warfare, but maybe they had a dirty bomb in mind as well.
[quote]Check out this article from the BBC:
Hitler ‘tested small atom bomb’
BBC NEWS | Europe | Hitler 'tested small atom bomb'
[/quote]
Somehow I rather doubt it. WWII was filled with bright lights, from all accounts. Only two of them were nuclear.