CNN & US Mil Confirm Weapon Tested @ China Lake on July 4-5

a reply to: tanstaafl

Because dropping it over the ocean doesn't demonstrate anything. That was one option that was seriously considered. All it would have done is made a pretty light show, which the hardliners would have said didn't prove anything.

There was an attempted coup before the surrender was read on the air by the emperor. The hardliners were determined to keep fighting and attempted to storm the palace where the emperor was making the recording of the surrender order to the Japanese forces.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
There was an attempted coup before the surrender was read on the air by the emperor. The hardliners were determined to keep fighting and attempted to storm the palace where the emperor was making the recording of the surrender order to the Japanese forces.

They kind of keep overlooking this.

a reply to: 3n19m470

Upgrade.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
Because dropping it over the ocean doesn't demonstrate anything. All it would have done is made a pretty light show, which the hardliners would have said didn't prove anything.

Maybe, maybe not... but doubt it, and more importantly, trying wouldn't have hurt anything.

Also, doing so would have put the US in a much better 'clean hands' position, knowing we did everything we could to warn them before hand.

Also... why two of them? Why was one not enough?

That was one option that was seriously considered.

Interesting - got a link to support this claim?

There was an attempted coup before the surrender was read on the air by the emperor. The hardliners were determined to keep fighting and attempted to storm the palace where the emperor was making the recording of the surrender order to the Japanese forces.

Interesting, thanks - was unaware of the Kyujo incident

a reply to: tanstaafl

The second one was to show it was not a fluke. We could repeat the same devastating bombing. It was a way of letting them know we had more and would wipe their island off the map. Truth was, at that time, there was only 2 working bombs in existence. Wasting one on a "demo" would have left only one for actual deployment. It would have taken another 8-10 months to produce another one. They could not risk the Japanese hardliner military refusing to capitulate after the first drop, and not have a second "knockout punch" available.

People seem to forget that we did not have stockpiles of these just laying around to be used in spring of 1945.

a reply to: tanstaafl

Wellerstein has devoted his career to studying nuclear weapons and the decision to use them. He says that in the spring of 1945, the military convened a target committee, a mix of officers and scientists, to decide where the bomb should fall.

The minutes of this committee were declassified years ago — and they show it considered some far less deadly targets. The initial list included a remote military installation and Tokyo Bay, where the bomb would have been detonated as a demonstration.

But the target committee decided those options wouldn't show the world the power of the new bomb.

"They want people to understand that this is something different, and so picking a place that will showcase how different it is, is very important," Wellerstein says.

The committee settled on two "psychological" objectives of the first atomic bombing: to scare the Japanese into unconditional surrender and to impress upon the world the power of the new weapon.

www.npr.org...

originally posted by: tanstaafl

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: tanstaafl

They had the opportunity to begin negotiations with the US and work out a surrender that would, and chose to approach Russia instead. Hindsight is a great thing and gives you more options. At the time it didn't appear they wanted to surrender to the US. As far as the US government knew they planned to fight to the last child and had were trying to work out an agreement to get Russian help to fight an invasion.

So, why not the alternative I suggested? A demonstration of the bomb, rather than wiping out two entire cities full of civilians, along with the horrors of radiation sickness, birth defects for decades, etc etc?

OK. So there are differences of opinion as to whether dropping the bombs on Japan during WWII prevented more casualties in the long run than if they hadn't dropped the bombs. That's been well debated by both sides of the argument for 70 years now.

But so what? This started on this thread because someone said that the U.S. must still actively be using nuclear weapons today because they would never had stopped with just the two in 1945. How does the idea that "the U.S. should /shouldn't have dropped those two bombs or not in 1945" lend any evidence to the idea that the U.S. is still actively using nukes?

Let's say someone does a valid study and finds the U.S. did not need to drop those bombs to shorten the war. OK, then what?



By the way, my take on this is that dropping those bombs did have the effect of demonstrating how terrible nuclear weapons are. I highly doubt the U.S. was deliberately thinking about this unexpected by-product when they did it, but it is still a by-product.

It makes me wonder that if 15 or 20 years after that when the U.S. and Russia both had the capability of destroying each other, and if Hiroshima and and Nagasaki never happened, would nuclear war have looked like less of an unthinkable thing?

Without the tangible and terrible result of the bombs dropped on Japan weighing in their minds, might the U.S. or the Soviets have felt that nuclear war might be something they could successfully wage?