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Regarding the WWII Meeting of Bohr & Heisenberg
HarlanC writes: "The NY Times has an article (registration required) discussing the famous meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941. The conclusion is that Heisenberg revealed to Bohr the existance of a Nazi atomic program in an attempt to obtain assistance from Bohr. The Times of London article is here (long registration process required)" The play "Copenhagen" was based on a fictionalization of this meeting, it was much better than "Proof", I assure you.
"Alsos", by Samuel Goudsmit, (ISBN: 1563964155) describes the top-secret team that followed Allied forces into Europe to find out how close the Germans were to having nuclear weapons.
I strongly recommend the book Heisenberg's War by Thomas Powers. It provides a much deeper background into this meeting (and the entire German nuclear arms program) and is quite readable. Here's a bn.com link to the book if you want to avoid amazon.
After a war there will always be mistakes that happen or things that almost happened that could have changed events forever, but they didn't. It's interesting to note, but it's all history. Though an important part of history we all know what happened after WWII (Allied Powers Won).
Leave it at that.
Now, I've only read "Proof", never seen it produced, but...what was wrong with it?
Was it the math (I have a limited math background; just enough to get a CS degree)? Because otherwise I thought it was quite enjoyable...
heh heh heh.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Otherwise, the world would be facing a unified Europe, ruled by faceless bureaucrats headquartered in a continental European country, and America would be the only country that could go toe to toe with them.
It is always the same thing... each day we are being more and more controlled. I would like
to read the article, but unfortunately I can't - registration required, you know...
Now I am in doubt. What is the difference if my
name appears in another big corporate database,
anyway? The government, that is the one thing I don't trust have all this information...
Dawn...
Of course, once they figured out they were in Copenhagen, it was impossible to determine what went on. Doesn't make for a very thrilling movie, either.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I'm quite glad I got the opportunity to see Copenhagen recently at the Wilshire theater in LA, the play kicked ass. At least I thought so. My wife was too busy being distracted by the druggie making weird gestures in the on-stage seating; plus she wasn't big on the whole science aspect and said "well couldn't they have just done that whole play in 5 minutes and be done with it?" Oh well. Definitely not for everyone, but almost definitely for the /. crowd! If you've got a chance to see it, it's cool.
How are they certain Heisenberg was in Copenhagen AND he was there in 1941 at the same time?
Both Proof and Copenhagen were disappointing. It seems the standards for "play of the year" (both won) aren't quite up to the "Long Day's Journey Into Night" days or even "Glengarry Glen Ross".
You sure you're not thinking of Schroedinger (sp) there? =)
It doesn't matter what happened and if someone decided to sabotage the bomb in German or not.
The Reich would not have been able to build an atomic bomb because they couldn't have set up the infrastructure without it being bombed to support the atomic bomb creation.
In Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" he goes into alot of detail about how much industrial infrastructure was needed to make the Uranium and Plutonium for the 3 American atomic bombs.
And don't forget the amount of money and metals it took to make the equipment. The United States built 2 cities of 50,000 people each, one at Oak Ridge and the other at Hanford.
Germany didn't have the manpower, materials or bomb-proof infrastructure during the war to produce an atomic bomb.
Thanks for the posting.
Isn't it interesting that Bohr was frightened that the Nazis would have such a weapon only to see it used to butcher Japanese civilians five years later by "the good guys"?
Perhaps he should have been frightened, period. Perhaps the whole lot of them should have been clockmakers, like Albert said.
Of course, that part goes unmentioned in the NYT article, because that might call into question just who really *did* use those horrible weapons, and it might have to be stated that it wasn't everyone's favorite boogeyman of the 20th century. We can't have people thinking about the realities of the past; no, interesting what-ifs make for much better propaganda.
Karma points aside, the moderation system is meant to give posts that are useful to others a higher rating. This has been a very imformative article to me as I can be bothered with the registration. Just because it's cut and past doesn't mean it's not of value. Can we forget about Karma for one minute and instead try and moderate posts based on how useful they are?
I managed to get a transcript of the letter from Bohr to Heisenberg, here it is:
Dear Werner,
Ever since your last visit, I haven't seen my cat, Fluffy. You haven't seen her, have you?
Sincerely,
Neils
We were *fighting* fascism, mmm?
For my engineering/chemistry professor last year i needed to write a Biographyon this man. My biography is pretty in depth and a worthy read if anyone is interested. It can be found @ http://artlu.net/essays/wernerbio.html Enjoy, AJ
-------
artlu.net
The author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb is Richard Rhodes, not David Rhodes. The book is within view on my bookshelf.
Of course. The Americans shouldn't have developed nuclear weapons even though they had the technology to do so, and their rivals had active weapons programs. Then, once available, they shouldn't have used them, even though their use was not outside the norms of war at the time, and even though they brought the war to a prompt end. America should destroy its remaining weapons, and then there will be rainbows and bread and roses, and all of humanity can gather around the campfire to smoke pot and sing folk songs.
War is hell, period. But it's a fact of life. Get over it.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb,
Thomas Powers provides lots of interesting detail, citations, background. From reading various sources, I see Heisenberg as badly misjudged and misrepresented. I think he was basically a good guy in a very bad situation and, integrating all the available material, it feels like he basically did the Right Thing, and played a key role in keeping the German nuclear program working in directions other than building a bomb.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Slashdot seems to tolerate the posting in full of articles from other sites, even though doing so denies the original site the ad revenue from the page views that would otherwise go to it. So it's not only copyright violation, it's likely to really piss people off. I'd hate to lose Slashdot as a resource, which could happen when some hostile party demonstrates that this is a repeated pattern.
But some people may not be registered, you say. Yes, and Salon charges $30/year for their premium service. I know, let's cut and paste all their good articles so that people don't have to pay ...
and so the site goes broke.
The worst part is that copyright violators get rewarded with good karma. This is backwards, these people are endangering Slashdot itself.
The "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was written by
Richard (not David) Rhodes, for which he won a
Pulitzer Prize. Doesn't exactly inspire great
confidence in the NYT's QA program...
Shortly after WWII, Werner Heisenberg was held captive by the British government at Farm Hall along with several other top German scientists. The British secretly taped the conversations at Farm Hall, and these tapes were declassified in 1992. (It took prolonged and strenuous efforts by several historians, and members of the Royal Society to persuade the government.) Heisenberg was at Farm Hall when the US dropped the bombs on Japan in August of 1945. When he heard the news, he was astonished that the US had separated sufficient U235 from U238 to obtain critical mass. He was also surprised that the US also made a plutonium based bomb. (The methods used to extract U238 and Pu were made by a chemist working under Enrico Fermi in Chicago. Without the knowledge provided by that chemist, the US would not have had either bomb for perhaps another year.) Since Heisenberg was surprised, we may assume he simply did not know how to get enough weapons grade uranium. Nor could he make enough and separate enough plutonium for a bomb. He had enough uranium to make a small nuclear reactor. Which he did create in a cave in southern Germany. The US army found the cave and removed the materials. The assessment by US scientists was that the reactor was never put to use. Apparently war efforts hindered Heisenberg's attempt to get all the resources he needed. And, towards the end of the war, the effort was abandoned. It is likely that Heisenberg knew he could not make a bomb and persuaded the Nazi government to allow him to make a reactor instead. Whether he had only technical reasons for the change in policy is unknown. He may have had moral reasons for preventing the Nazis from getting a bomb, but there is no public source of information to support that hypothesis. In 1941, he may have wanted to make a bomb, or knew that the Nazis wanted him to make one. In either case, I think he went to Copenhagen to ask/tell/warn Bohr about the Nazi plans. During that evening, he and Neils Bohr went for a walk. Bohr's wife, Margerethe, reported that they both left the house that evening in a good mood. The walk in the dark was short, only a few minutes. Neils Bohr came back quickly, and in a foul mood. Heisenberg followed him back inside. They did not talk about much later that evening. Later in the war, Bohr's family secretly got into a boat at night and left for England, and then America. Heisenberg stayed in England for some time, as a "guest" of the British government. In 1947, he was allowed to visit Bohr, and his British handler went with him. During that meeting, he and Bohr agreed that "we both came to feel that it would be better to stop disturbing the spirits of the past." (From Heisenberg's memoirs.) Bohr and Heisenberg continued their friendship after 1947, and until Bohr died in 1962. Bohr kept that friendship even though most Allied scientists shunned Heisenberg.
Well, considering that your story is old as fuck, and this one is 2 days old, I don't see the problem.
Hari Seldon's Psycho-History.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
Many people feel that saving approximately 1 million American lives was more important at that time than a percentage of the populations (both military and civilian) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You should also consider how many Japanese would have been killed without the surrender (nuclear weapons are not needed for massive destruction...see Dresden for instance).
Do you seriously think the Japanese would have hesitated to kill any number of American civilians if they had the means? It was a vicious war, and both sides were concerned about victory (and survival) above all else.
Perhaps he should have been frightened, period. Perhaps the whole lot of them should have been clockmakers, like Albert said.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps we should praise the brilliant inventors of nuclear weapons, since those weapons have apparently halted the practice of "world war". Peace is a good thing, right?
Regardless, not pursuing the a-bomb wasn't an option...someone would have. Most would agree that the US has been a model citizen as a nuclear superpower. At least we have tremendous safeguards surrounding the use of such devices.
Of course, that part goes unmentioned in the NYT article, because that might call into question just who really *did* use those horrible weapons, and it might have to be stated that it wasn't everyone's favorite boogeyman of the 20th century. We can't have people thinking about the realities of the past; no, interesting what-ifs make for much better propaganda.
Sounds to me like you've absorbed quite a bit of propaganda yourself... ;-)
Personally, I'm worried that nuclear stockpiles will be cut to the point where world war becomes 'thinkable' again.
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I just saw Frayn's play "Copenhagen" last night in SF and really must urge all of you to see it if you can. Regardless of what truly motivated Heisenberg the issues raised are far more reaching. I walked away with the following: -we sometimes lack the perspective to understand our own motivations -mechanistic thinking is flawed, we should move to a a more systemic approach (the aspect of Heisenberg's Uncertainty theory applied similarly as in Fritof Capra's work "Turning Point") my 2cents. thoughts?
He was an OSS operative.
There's nothing that specifically indicates this, of course. But look at the human site of the game. Here was a man who worshipped Einstein, who had many other associations with Jewish scientists, and who himself narrowly escaped academic blacklisting when the Nazis took power. And somehow he ends up as scientific chief of a major German weapons project!
There's actually a well-documented meeting with an OSS agent in Geneva. Official histories state that Heisenberg was there to give a talk, and the agent, Moe Berg, was there to determine the progress of the German bomb effort and (at his own discretion!) terminate Heisenberg. Supposedly Heisenberg told Berg that the project wasn't going well, and Berg took his word for it and let him live. Not, in my opinion, a very plausible story.
OK, no evidence at all for this theory. But it's worth thinking about.
Additionally, at the time they had most of the resources of continental Europe at their disposal if they wished.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Surely Schroedinger would not have used his own cat for the experiment.
Are you suggesting that if the Nazis got the atomic bomb before the united states did that the world would be a better place? I'm sure everyone in london would disagree with you... as they wouldn't be here now. And the argument can be made (and has, often) that the loss of life in pacific theater was reduced because the japanese were forced into surrendering by overwhelming power. It certainly reduced the loss of life by americans, and that was the military's FIRST goal. SECOND is to keep civillian casualties to a minimum. In truth we can never know how big the butcher's bill would be if the united states had invaded japan instead. But given the willingness of so many japanese soldiers to not surrender even if it meant certain death, the toll would have been immense. However, there was never any doubt to the outcome. Over the course of the war the united states only sent 1/5th of its war material to fight japan. The two bombs just served as a wakeup call to the militarists who were running japan at that time. They were the ones who refused to give an unconditional surrender, and that is why the united states had to drop the second bomb.
Free as in *BUUURP!*
As for working capital and manpower, the Nazis were simply stealing or forcing much of what they needed.
hey shitface, this article was posted earlier today. It isn't my fault if the event happened a while ago.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Someone had to say it, why not me?
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Copy good stuff that people spend many long hours developing and release it for free. Have they ever had an original thought? They just copy OSes (starting with Unix), and apps.
I agree, an excellent and fascinating play.
Would that have f**king made the g*ddamned f**king s**tty plays any f**king better?
Actually, Japan didn't give up until Russian declared that it was going to enter the War against Japan. Yeah, we nuked them once, and they didn't give up. We nuked them a second time, and they still didn't give up.
Honestly, as far as I know, we didn't have anymore nukes, and so if not for Russia, Japan would have continued the war.
Of course, commies are evil, and Hitler is the boogieman. Or maybe getting so fixated on one organization's and one man's evils blinds us to the numerous other crimes against humanity... such as the Israel occupation of Palestine by means of USA military aid, USA money, and USA propaganda.
Having seen Copenhagen and Proof, I feel that the superior drama was most assuredly "Proof." However, from a techno-geek's standpoint, I can see why the submitter might enjoy Copenhagen more.
'hagen was definitely more cerebral & technical, and used physics as a metophor for ethical struggles.
Proof was a much more personal play about a woman's relationship with her father (and indeed, the world around her.) The math is simply part of the plot, not interwoven with the primary thrust. I saw both original casts, and both were phenominal, but the interaction between Mary Louise Parker and the cast was one of the most thrilling dramatic performances I've ever witnessed. She was incredible.
As a coincidence, the young male lead in Proof was played by Ben Shenkman, who was the young rabinical guy in "Pi."
While I loved Copenhagen, and I love Robert Westenburg (one of the male leads) I felt Proof was the far superior play.
Re-Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
Mission objectives for Sgt. Blascowitz:
- destroy experimental german nuclear powerplant
- fight off radioactive zombies (they happen to look like micheal jackson)
- rescue scientist niels bohrenstein
Here's my story. Some friends of mine had a house in 1994 in college. They told me about all kinds of strange things. One time, they were downstairs and there was a loud pounding going through the whole house for about 3 minutes. Another time, one roommate thought he heard another in the next room arh=guing with someone, no one was in the room. A few times, they would leave and come back and all the doors were open. I only lived there for one summer and had only one thing happen to me. I was in my room alone and just got this creepy feeling. After a while it got worse until I HAD to get out of the house, I was petrified. I HAD to leave. The worst thing though, happened at the end. We had all left for home for two weeks but one guy stayed. He was alone in the house for about two weeks. He was acting weird for a few days after we got back. At this time we had all moved out and he was still the only one there. I caught him outside "praying" once in the back yard. A few days later, he killed himself. He was in probably the worst room in the house. We found a note that was mostly illegible. I just remember one line. "God is God, You're not God" I actually haven't thought about that place in a while, but we were talking about it the other day. I just realized today that our friend died this week seven years ago. Have you ever heard of something like this?
Schroedinger didn't have a cat.
Or did he?
:-)
Niz.
Moe Berg was a Major League baseball player. I don't remember what team he played for, but he was a catcher.
In the early forties (before Pearl Harbor), he was a member of an exhibition baseball team that went to Japan. It is believed his real purpose for being on the team was to spy on Japan for the US.
During the the war, Berg was an OSS agent. IIRC he had a genius level IQ.
besides your valid points, I will also point out that the Japanese Army had few equals when it came to butchering civilians... In just a few weeks in Nanking, they killed more chinese civilians (through beheadings, torture, and rape of children followed by murder) than both the allied atomic blasts killed, and their total toll on civilian populations around the world is much, MUCH higher than any reported allied caused civilian death tolls (depending on how you view russia, and whose "ally" they really were).
In any case, huge numbers of civilians were killed around the world (FAR outstripping battlefield casualties), in very large part due to German and Japanese policy. It was not a very honorable war, on any side, but the stakes became too high to expect much compassion.
IMO, it is a wonder that Japan is not a charred cinder annexation of China, as retribution for WWII. (They should be sending thanks to Taiwan every day, for helping to divert national aggression.)
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
USA Today ran (and printed) an article about Dave Thomas and Fark. Apparently, one too many moms fired up AOL and headed over; the site is very much down. It's serving pages now, but nooo cgi!
Let's hear it for mySQL!
Wait, I thought the real reason Truman dropped the bomb was to scare the Russians out of joining the war?
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
You're making it sound like there was months between these events. Hiroshima was August 6th, the Soviet Union declared war on the 8th, the Nagasaki bombing was on the 9th, and the surrender was on the 14th. That's a total of 8 days from start to finish. I think that's an amazingly fast response time. The Japanese military & leadership had to evalulate the damage, try and work out the responses they could do, all in an enviroment where all normal communications had been cut off.
One of the reasons that we study history is to learn from our mistakes. If we did not ask the "what if" questions, then we would not be able to analyse other potential problems in our procedures, chains of command etc.
For example, you may go out drink driving and get home safely. Hopefully, when you've sobered up you realize what a stupid thing it was to do (based on the "what if I hit someone/killed myself/got caught by the police/etc") and make a consoius effort not to do that again.
You're high. Copenhagen was mildly interesting but way to contrived. And they never touched on quantum at all, which I find improbable. But most importantly, Proof had much more engaging characters and better acting (I saw the JJL version) even if the subject matter wasn't as highbrow.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
I wouldn't worry about nuclear stockpiles becoming so small it makes war "thinkable" again. For the most part in our current international situation no country could "win" a game theoretic scenario involving a nuclear exchange unless the exchange was very limited and they were a rogue state anyway. The problem with nuclear weapons (this is coming from memory - any PoliSci grad students out there want to correct?) is that they offer very little in the way of political options. You can wipe major cities, but you can't hit targets of interest - which is why you need so many if you want to try to take out the other guy's nukes. Contrary to popular belief, it's hard to take out important military targets with nuclear weapons.
They can only really be used in open international conflict once. That first use defines the fear and deterrence. After that, they're only really usabe when they aren't used.
Oh yeah, unless you're a terrorist. Which is why the NPT is so important, and always has been. It's not, contrary to thought, to keep countries from getting nukes, but to keep stupid individuals from getting nukes.
it was to show them what we had, so they would think twice about continuing the war after Japan surrendered to us.
Stalin knew well before it was actually dropped. I forget the name of their spy, but it is pretty well documented for anyone wanting to dig into it.
"the best safety of the frontier...will be secured by total annihilation of the few remaining indians" L Frank Baum 1890
The Sunday Times and The Times have always been separate publications. Nowadays Rupert Murdoch owns them both, and has been combining some of their operations. But that's a recent development.
The Sunday Times registration process has an amusing flaw. Tried to tell it I was born in 1830. Not acceptable. 1890? Nope. 1899? Get serious. I meant to try "1900" next, but typed "2000" by mistake. That was acceptable! Apparently 1-year-olds read the Sunday Times, but not centenarians!
People keep asking that.
We had the resources to make 3. What if Nazi Germany beat us, and made one first?
I think what would have happened is that we would have immediately nuked Berlin or some other such German country, instead of Japan.
I don't think we would have lost. I think that if Germany developed the bomb first, it would have pushed us even harder; not only is it possible, our scientists would have thought, here's how to make it better. Faster. Cheaper.
We would have responded in like.
One small capacity nuke could not take out the US. Germany probably would have targeted something in Russia, a much bigger threat, and much less likely to have a nuke to retaliate with.
Of course, this begs the question, what was the Russian nuclear capability of the time?
I imagine the cold war would have taken a much different turn, as stockpiling of nukes would be much less desireable. Would we have turned to genetic and biological weapons instead?
GPL Deconstructed
Of course, that part goes unmentioned in the NYT article, because that
might call into question
No, it is the articles in a good newspaper are written to convey information, not to drill simplistic moral diatribes into our brains.
Or would you like to be criticized yourself for leaving "unmentioned" the battle of Okinawa, at which over two hundred thousand people were killed. Surely that is as important a "reality of the past." Because you have left it out, does that make your post "propaganda"?
Are you sure that there would have been an invasion on Japan? The Japanese were already in negotiations with the USSR when we dropped the bomb.
He actually said "I would have been a locksmith", not a clockmaker.
Something to think about: If he had lived 50 years later and been a locksmith, he would have been Phil Zimmerman.
It was to prevent the Red Army from invading Japan and influencing the post-war climate.
The Red Army's entrance met with stunning successes, and it looked as though Japan would collapse any minute. Truman worried that unless he did something dramatic he would have to share the glory (and influence in the region).
The "million American lives" excuse came much later when criticism started to surface.
Despite the after-the-fact romancing (of a guy who would very probably have delivered the Nazis an atomic weapon if he could have) there's good reason to believe that the only thing preventing Heisenberg from developing the bomb were his own miscalculations. Not the least of which was his determination that the amount of fissionable material required to create a critical mass was much greater than was actually required (there's a fascinating theory vs. engineering story behind that, but you can probably look it up.) This calculation led him to believe that any atomic weapon would be enormous and hard to deliver.
After the war Heisenberg was taken to a detention center in the UK where he was surveilled with listening devices. When the he learned that the US had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, he was stunned, and (IIRC) initially remarked to his co-detainees that we must have found a way to deliver a colossally huge bomb or something of the sort.
Some have theorized that Heisenberg was both extremely clever and extremely loyal to the German people-- so much so that he deliberately foiled the Nazi research effort, then faked disbelief in order to mislead the Allied eavesdroppers. Personally, I think he just blew it.
But you're right. Judge for yourself.
From what I understand USSR entering the Pacific war had more effect on the United States than it did on Japan. The US saw that Japan wouldn't surrender unconditionally and with the USSR in the theatre they'd want Japan split like Germany. Since Japan's demands for the emperor staying in power as a figure head weren't that unreasonable to the US, the US caved and let japan surrender conditionally to the US and the US only before Russia could really get involved. Else we'd have a North Japan and South Japan. Because the war ended when it did we only Korea and Vietnam split and Russia got the Kuril Islands. So it wasn't as bad.
Hmmm, here's an interesting question.
How many Indians and Pakastanis would be dead right now if they *didn't* have nuclear weapons?
Will the Pakastani. and Indian nuclear weapons prevent death and destruction, or inevitibly create it?
yeah, but I like the part about smoking pot though.
Why don't we all smoke pot and design some nuclear weapons? We can use computers now to do all the hard number crunching. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That's probably somewhat misleading. The US didn't suffer "strategic" bombing late in the war like Germany did. What about 1943?
tell that to the Axis Powers who destroyed my Allied Teams radio tower on Return to Castle Wolfenstien last nite!
"In science there is only physics, all the rest is stamp collecting." Ernest Rutherford
There is a very nice German made for TV movie called Ende der Unschuld (= end of innocence). It deals with the German attempt of creating a nuclear bomb and the scientists at Farm Hall.
Actually german industry *increased* production in 1944 and was at it's peak. (a testament to the genius of Albert Speer, nazi war armaments minister) despite allied strategic bombing.
As for the figures in 1943 I imagine the U.S. still had a lead - however I could be wrong and I bet the farther back you go (1942,41) Germany probably had a lead at some point int he early stages of the war.
Yeah. Dave Rhodes wrote Make Atomic Bombs Fast!.
Sorry.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
At the time the bomb was dropped there were two amphibious operations planned: OLYMPIC, the invasion of southern Japan in late 1945, and CORONET, the invasion of Kyushu, Spring 1946. Preparatory carrier air strikes were already being done.
Allied casualties (US/UK/Commonwealth) were projected in the tens of thousands. Japanese civilians were being instructed in the use of satchel charges and sharpened bamboo sticks for use in repelling the invaders.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I have a feeling that if all of our world leaders smoked enough pot, they probably wouldn't feel the need to have large arsenals of nuclear weapons.
In fact I believe at various times they actually had three going (of course as with everything in WWII Japan the Army and Navy had one each; would you believe the Army had its own *submarines*!). As far as producing a weapon goes they actually got further than the Germans.
There is a good Japanese book that has been translated into English (The Day that Man Died or something like that) that deals with the Japanese programs as a lead up to its main topic of the bombing of Hiroshima. Appropriately, I bought my copy from the USS Arizona memorial site on a visit to Pearl Harbour !
No, I am not interested in claims of a Japanese nuclear test at the end of the war in China; I'll believe it when I see the UFO come out of Hanger 18...
"Isn't it interesting that Bohr was frightened that the Nazis would have such a weapon only to see it used to butcher Japanese civilians five years later by "the good guys"?"
What's more horrible, the US building and using an atomic bomb, or school children being trained to defend Tojo's Japan with bamboo spears? Doesn't the fact that it required not one but TWO nuclear attacks before the Japanese decided to surrender give you pause about possible justifications?
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
1.) The US submarine force had what was essentially a total blockade of resource-poor Japan since May. They face destruction by slow starvation. No surrender.
2.) The first bomb in early August (after three months of the previously-mentioned blockade). Three days go by with no surrender.
3.) The second bomb. Still no surrender.
4.) The Soviet Union delcares war on Japan and starts a big land-grab in Asia. They now face a potential invation from two fronts (one of which all too willing to feed an army into the meat-grinder that the Japanese are trying to turn their islands into)
So what's the next step? For the Japanese army, the next step was a coup, an effort to depose Hirohito's government and prevent him from airing a surrender announcement. After all, how many more bombs could the US drop? Can't be more than one or two...
There is a misconception about Japan that still persists to this day (as can be seen in your opinion) that they have Western ideals and a Western way of thinking. This is not true today and it sure as hell wasn't true in the 1940's. Just because defeat is inevitible isn't necesarily reason for them to surrender.
However, targeting the other side's military infrastructure strongly implies that you have adopted a first-strike policy, because the other side's weapons systems would not be there for you to attack if you followed a second-strike policy. (I.e., their weapons would already have beren launched against you.) In the latter case, you'd likely target population centers and civilian infrastructure.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Ah, yes, but was the American way the only one? Given America's massive economic resources and freedom from air attack, the massive expenditure and facilities on the Manhatten project in a sort of scattergun approach made sense. But if you're Germany, smaller and under constant attack but with superior scientific traditions, what is to say that a more analytical approach might not have produced the same results?
On the Luftwaffe 1946 web site there are some very speculative but very interesting possibilities of how the Germans could have (a) been designing a totally different type of bomb (b) come up with a way of producing plutonium that did not require the full-blown nuclear reactors at Hanford.
See "http://visi.net/~djohnson/armament.html"
A stable,unified and democratic Europe is in the interests of the U.S. The U.S. was brought into the two world wars in large measure because a non-unified Europe fueled the creation of undemocratic powers whose military aggression eventually threatened the U.S. Arguing that U.S. security is served by fostering a fractured, bickering Europe is arrogant and blindly foolhardy.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
How reliable is the source of information ? Witnesses, again ?
He worked at Berkeley.
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Most would agree that the US has been a model citizen as a nuclear superpower. At least we have tremendous safeguards surrounding the use of such devices
... From wet, wet Copenhagen.
Are you joking?? AFAIR US is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons against another country during war. (The justice of this is of course negotiable, and I somewhat agree with you that it probably was the best solution.)
Furthermore the US is most probably the country with the largest amount of nuclear tests in the world... Also in fairly recent times! That doesn't really count as a "model citizen" in my book.
- Henrik
They made two cores. One was used at Trinity, the other at Nagasaki. Those two cores were all the US had available for a couple months. The Pu came from Hanford Washington. The Hiroshima bomb was a gun type Uranium bomb, which was so simple it didn't require testing. Which is why people are more worried about enriched uranium getting to terrorists than they are about Plutonium. U is much easier to make a bomb out of.
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The invasion planners estimated a far, far lower number, 50,000 or so.
If we'd agreed to let them keep their Emperor a few weeks earlier, the Japanese would've surrendered. We held out for unconditional surrender but, after dropping the two bombs, relented and accepted their surrender and allowed the emperor to remain on the throne..
Eisenhower and Marshall both opposed use of the bomb. In 1962 Eisenhower reiterated his belief that it wasn't necessary and that neither was invasion , that Japan was done and would've surrendered within weeks without either action taking place.
This is all documented (in Richard Rhodes's book, among many other places).
There was no atomic bomb being close to developed, you can get some accurate information. here
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
According to the Farm Hall transcripts, Heisenberg had miscalculated the neutron mean free path, and he was off be an order of magnitude or more in his estimation of the critical mass. He realized his error, and was able to recalculate correctly, only after learning of the Hiroshima bomb. The Germans wouldn't have been able to make their bomb without a correct estimate of the mean free path and hence the critical mass, which Heisenberg didn't have until after the war in Europe was over.
Has someone been playing too much wolfenstein or do you really think the nazis made tesla-shooting 'Lopers'?
-
"Perhaps we should praise the brilliant inventors of nuclear weapons, since those weapons have apparently halted the practice of 'world war'. Peace is a good thing, right?"
We only have relative peace. Here are some wars (just off the top of my head) conducted after 1946:
Korea.
Vietnam.
6 day war (Israel vs Egypt[or arabic countries])
The Gulf War.
The Balkans.
Pakistan vs India.
Tchechnia.
Tens of civil wars in Africa.
IRA vs Great Britain
Afghanistan.
Or did you mean wars that took place in the US?
Just because they aren't fighting in your backyard, doesn't mean they aren't fighting.
Peace is a good thing, but don't think for a moment, that we have a global peace.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
There is a misconception indeed, and you persist in it. Japan was not unwilling to surrender because insufficient force had been
displayed, but rather because the demands were
not made in a way that made it reasonable for
Hirohito to accept them. At the same time, the
social structure of Japan was such that while
the Emperor had not declared the war effort
over, the country would fight a useless
impossible battle to defend their country.
If the US had listened to the advice of its
own anthrolopologists employed at the time to
study japanese culture (see, for example The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), surrender
could have been obtained with no further bloodshed at all. Unfortunately, the leaders
of their time chose to disbelieve this information and fit the behavior of the Japanese into their own model of thinking, which said that
they were impossibly, irraitionally resolute, and would only surrender if impossible force and
arms were displayed. This worked, but other workable courses were yet available which were not tried.
-josh
Both America and Nazi Germany committed to the development of an expensive, problematical weapon
with possible "war winning" potential. The German rocketry programme cost reputedly as much as the Manhattan Project, and achieved far less. It is a historic irony that Nazi Germany founded the technology which allowed the American A Bomb to be married to a rocket.
Robert Goddard's tin toys can not be considered the ancestor of the ICBM.
Hopefully, these books don't give any credence to the myth that Heisenberg and his team were secret anti-Nazis who deliberately decided not to develop a Nazi bomb. The post war interrogations prove that the German chose a path that didn't work. A complex project like the A Bomb required a multitude of decisions. The Allies tried THREE ways of refining weapons grade uranium, gasesous diffusion, magnets and centrifugal. Only the US could afford, as a country secure from invasion or attack, to speculate on the bomb.
The best book on the subject is probably Robert Jungk's "Brighter than a thousand suns". A good book on the effects of the a bomb dropping is "Miracle of Deliverance", author forgotten unfortunately.
It is NOT just a matter of "registration required" but rather COOKIES required, which means that those users behind Junkbuster (and other cookie-clocking) proxies can NOT see the article, period.
How many times do we have to point this out before someone listens?
And how is it, sir, that you know which theory I speak of? Your post assumes there is but one theory of multiverse. This is incorrect. There are many theorys about multiple universes, in fact, the very theory ITSELF, if true, dictates that there MUST be more than one theory of multiverse, because a different conclusion could, and therfore must, exist! Feynman, therefore, is not the end all, be all of multiverse theory.
As for the statement that you "prefer reality to Star Trek," I assume you meant this reality, because, according to a theory of multiverse, there exists a universe where Star Trek IS the reality. :-) Something to ponder!
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
They already had lost over a million men at Stalingrad, what could be worse? They were going to fight to the last man, this after Stalin had already offered previously to surrender vast tracts of Western Russia to the Nazis.
And had nuked American cities ?
"Oh those poor Americans in the WTC! What? Those thousands of people nuked in Japan? War is hell, get over it."
Why do you have to be so patriotic and defend shitbrained homicidal military actions done years before you were born ?
By the way, the German nuclear program wouldn't have succeeded in time even if there was no project Manhattan. I thought this was common knowledge.
My Grandfather was on a troopship bound for Japan when the A-Bomb was dropped. He remembers the speeches they were given about high projected casualties. Intelligence had determined that the Japanese were hoping to draw out the Soviet negotiations while focusing their forces eastward. The Soviets likely wouldn't have complained, because they did NOT want to enter the Pacific theater. In fact, the allies were angry at them for their refusal to do so. The opposition would have been fierce and largely perpetrated in a sort of urban guerilla warfare (weapons and instructions were distributed to civilians in preparation). Anyway, my original point was that my Grandfather is convinced that he would not have survived had the US not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That impression was reinforced when he saw the villages in China and the Phillipenes that the Japanese had burnt and slaughtered. Additionally, the Nanjing Massacre was a horror story for American GIs to hear about. Knowing that a power capable of such a massacre had struck your homeland was a powerful motivator, and a terrifying challenge. I would likely not be here today but for the bomb.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
"but rather because the demands were
not made in a way that made it reasonable for
Hirohito to accept them. At the same time, the
social structure of Japan was such that while
the Emperor had not declared the war effort
over, the country would fight a useless
impossible battle to defend their country."
I would have gotten into that, but I got distracted away from the computer by stuff. Part of the problem is that each side more or less viewed the other as uncivlized barbarians. At the very least, I don't think the Allies would have accepted the somewhat-less-than-unconditional surrender they got until after they saw first-hand how strong Japanese convictions were on the matter.
On the other side of the lines, I don't think the Japanese could trust the gaijins to keep their word on those conditions to surrender until after they saw the Allied willingness not to destroy them outright with impunity. After all, they surrender so easily, how much honor could they have?
"If the US had listened to the advice of its
own anthrolopologists employed at the time to
study japanese culture (see, for example The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), surrender
could have been obtained with no further bloodshed at all."
If the Japanese military listened to their own experts, they would have seen that Pearl Harbor was a Bad Idea (tm), and that the Americans wouldn't be so soft as to be willing to roll over and surrender the Pacific after an initial, crippling blow.
(Aside: Kinda makes me wonder if bin Laden had similar such people voicing concerns like these, or if he just had yes-men like in recently-released videoes.)
It seems like there was a general lack of respect on both sides of the conflict that only a climatic battle for the islands could solve. It could have been some big meat-grinder of a campaign, churning out some unknown number of military and civillian casualties until (or if) one both sides lost the stomach to carry on, or it could have involved the unveiling of some new super-weapon that has enough destructive potential to give both sides a reason to take a step back and look at what's happening. In our history, the latter happened.
... and it still took a month for the formal signing of the surrender...
A general mistrust and misunderstanding of both sides leading to some pretty ugly conflicts. It happened to the US and the USSR in the 1920's, it happened here in WWII, it seems to have happened between the US and the Muslim world, and it may even be happening between the US and the PRC.
1: Germany DIDN'T get the bomb. We defeated Germany without the use of atomic weapons. The bomb was totally irrelevant, in the end, to the course of the Eurpoean war.
2: Japan was in negotiation to surrender when we dropped the bomb. We were holding out for the removal of the Emperor. In the end, we decided to let them keep the Emperor, so they would surrender to us and not the USSR.
3: The projected casualties number for a land invasion of Japan was created after the fact. See previous posts. We dropped the bomb to get a one-up over the USSR, not to defeat Japan.
Why your bullshit was modded up I can only attribute to the effective brainwashing of US social institutions, but your "insights" only reveal just how far your head is up your war-mongering ass.
If you want to talk about history, explore the economic situations that the US manufactured in the 30s that gave rise to the expansionist elements of the Japanese imperialists. Look honestly at US policies regarding hard goods such as steel and the like and you'll find that, like China today, the US's aggressive postures created a situation where the extremists could thrive, and the Divine Wind could drive a normally xenophobic people into world-conquering frenzy.
No one excuses what the Japanese did to Nanking, or any of their imperialist "protection" of "Manchukuo" (now echoed in Afganistan?) Still, that is no cause for the casual destruction of innocent civilians; your thinking is no different than bin Laden's if you believe otherwise.
"Proof" is also a great 1991 movie out of Australia that starred Hugo Weaving (aka the future Agent Ssssmith) in one of his first movies.
A real good little black comedy, as long as your tastes don't run towards Harry Potter, Nickelback and whatever other soylent green the corporate entertainment machine has manufactured for you today ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
I just finished reading "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer. Speer was Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments and War Production. Thus any program to develop an atomic bomb was under Speer's ministry. He said that they were working on one, but due to Hitler's poor leadership and executive decisions, it never got the priority it should have. Speer claimed that Nazi Germany could have produced an atomic bomb by 1947. That of course, he said, was inconsequential because the United States produced theirs by August of 1945.
While this may be a bit off topic, Japans surrender wasn' necessarily due to the Bushido code. It is often said, that the translator relayed the message of complete surrender incorrectly to the Japanease emperor. When given the ultimatum by the Allies, the Japanese government responded with an announcement that it was witholding immediate comment on the ultimatum, pending 'deliberation' by the Imperial government.
The Japanese News agency translated the japanese words 'withlding comment for the time being' to 'deliberately ignore.
They weren't as stubborn as we thought.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
A very similar story was on /. about a year ago. You know, the pepople in charge of posting stories to /. should know the site's history as well or better than the average reader (me).
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
... This book points up the fact that Heisenbergs' graphite moderator was heavily contaminated with Boron, Which Fermi was very careful about.
The boron content made it impossible for H. to duplicate Fermi's successes with natural uranium.
The Big Question Is: Did Heisenberg know about the boron contamination, and its implications, or did he not understand its importance, or did he not understand about neutron absorption at all?
He actually built a reactor similar to Fermi's. (It is talked about in the book.) That we found it is how we know about why it didn't work.
But was it built that way on purpose, just to fool the Nazis, (No one would have noticed the boron unless they were an excellent physicist) or did he fsck up and miss it?
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Who do you think protected your very ass over last 40 years ?
Was it "good will of Soviet people" or was it US military that prevented Soviets from expanding their empire ?
"no further bloodshed at all. "
And why would we care ?
Japanese were one of the most cruel people around ( 30% POWs died in their captivity while 3% died in German POW camps.)
American Scientist had a really good article on this back in 1996.
Heisenberg had estimated that a ton of U-235 was needed to reach critical mass, which was, of course, a huge overestimate. This is the reasoning he gave in a conversation with Otto Hahn immediately after being surprised by the news of Hiroshima (the conversation was secretly taped by the Allies):
"If I have pure 235 each neutron will immediately beget two children and then there must be a chain reaction which goes very quickly. Then you can reckon as follows. One neutron always makes two others in pure 235. That is to say that in order to make 10^24 neutrons I need 80 reactions one after the other. Therefore I need 80 collisions and the mean free path is about 6 centimetres. In order to make 80 collisions, I must have a lump of a radius of about 54 centimetres and that would be about a ton."
Can you see the mistake in his logic?
About the surrender or otherwise of Japan: Marc Ferro (who is a French historian specialising in modern history, particularly focussing on WWII and Russia specifically) has reportedly found evidence to suggest that the Japanese were willing to comply with the available terms for surrender surrender a long time before the bombs were dropped. They apparently told Stalin about this at the time of Yalta, but it was not in the interests of the USSR to forward the message (they would probably have preferred the US to get dragged into a war with Japan whilst the USSR concentrated on Europe).
Roosevelt refused to consider anything but 'unconditional surrender', in any case, so who knows if, even if this is a fact and the USSR had acted otherwise, it would have made any difference? Background reading suggests that even within the US military a number of people were both conversant with Japanese culture and fairly vocal about it, and furthermore that at least some of these had reached the right conclusions as to the sticking point against surrender.
So... what went wrong in this communication process, really? Stubborn refusal on the part of those leading the process to look past their mutual prejudices? Simple lack of trust? Or maybe the 'Japanese won't surrender' solution simply looked more believable. All rather academic at this point, since the bomb was dropped and appeared to work rather well. But there's probably a lesson in there somewhere for today's Fearless Leaders.
Disclaimer: It's 6am here. I dare anybody to speak lucidly at this time of the morning.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
She was correct. If people weren't good at heart, they wouldn't have handed over that lying kike bitch to the Gestapo.
In future PLPs, I want the number 242 in there. Please!
The Germans never *had* a bomb program.
They were doing some studies on nuclear materials with a view towards military applications, but had no specific usage in mind. The 'bomb program' was created by lazy journalists and editors who (in 1945) conflated 'nuclear' with 'bomb' in that same way they do with 'computer' and 'Wintel' today. The myth of the 'bomb program' has persisted despite the utter lack of evidence that Germany was pursuing a bomb. (Almost every study of the 'bomb program' has started with the assumption that it existed, which is poor logic and poorer scholarship. Very few have started from zero and seen what conclusions come from examining the evidence without bias.)
The myth of the 'ethical scientists' is largely the same face saving nonsense that came postwar from almost every German who had any affiliation with the Party or the Military.
In future PLPs, I'd like to see the number 242 in there. Please!
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"Many people feel that saving approximately 1 million American lives was more important at that time than a percentage of the populations (both military and civilian) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Many American people...
"Most would agree that the US has been a model citizen as a nuclear superpower."
Most Americans...
"both sides were concerned about victory (and survival) above all else."
Both sides?
This was a WORLD WAR not a World Series.
There were other participants.
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
> But if you're Germany, smaller and under constant attack but with superior scientific traditions, what is to say that a more analytical approach might not have produced the same results?
Germany's superior scientific traditions were lost when all the best minds went to the other side of the ocean just at the Nazis were taking over. Many of the people who made the bomb fled Germany and Italy.
Also, German scientists were mostly theoreticians, not experimenters or engineers. Remember, these were the theoreticians who came up with quantum physics *theories*. They had hardly any "analytical approach" at all. When it came to making the bomb, among the hundreds of thousands of people working on the Manhattan project, the Americans employed hundreds of engineers for every theoretical scientist. Of the several hundered people employed by the Nazis to make the bomb, the people were mostly scientists and technicians. Most of the German engineers were working on the V2 and non-atomic bombs.
> On the Luftwaffe 1946 web site there are some very speculative but very interesting possibilities of how the Germans could have (a) been designing a totally different type of bomb (b) come up with a way of producing plutonium that did not require the full-blown nuclear reactors at Hanford.
The Nazis never made one atom of plutonium. They did not know how. Even if they did know, they did not have the resources. After the war, German scientists were astonished to discover how much the Americans knew about plutonium, how much the Americans made, and that one could make a bomb out of it.
on this linkd el inger&open=http://www.nbi.dk/Welcome.html
http://ntserv.fys.ku.dk/afg/default.asp?menu=af
you can read all the papers on the subject.
What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion
soory it was the wrong URL here it is:
http://www.nbi.dk/NBA/webpage.html
yours
eske
What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion
The war was basically over when US bombed Hiroshima, US soldiers had orders to raze around 50 cities in Japan, and they were doing quite a job using Napalm, because most Japanse housing was made of tree so there were massive firestorms from the napalm. Using the A-bomb over hiroshima was just and excuse to see what it could *really* do.
And for some numbers, the hiroshima A-bomb contained 5000 Kg of ordinary explosives (just to implode over the uran to start the reaction), 25 Kg (around 50 lbs) of Uran, out of which 2 Hg was part of the atomic reaction (about 0.5 lbs). And the explosion took place around 600 meters above Hiroshima, that is about 1800 feet. And had the devastating effect that I'm sure everyone has seen one or an other picture of.
Conclusion, the A bomb is about 18 000 000 times more powerfull than any other known explosive. And remember this was more than 50 years ago, todays atomic weapons are much much more advanced and dangerous.
-J
Paraphrased from Mark Harrison, "Resource Mobilization for World War II: The U.S.A., U.K., U.S.S.R., and Germany, 1938-1945," in Economic History Review XLI, no. 2 (1988): 175-177, 187, 190.
Very good point, but Korea and Vietnam (to a lesser extent) had more to do with Communist China than the USSR. And China would have probably been taken over by the communists even sooner without WWII.
The resounding defeat of Japan really just created a power vacuum between China and the US which played itself out in Korea especially.
Now, if a ground invasion of Japan happened, China would have demanded, and probably gotten, it's piece of the pie (much like France did in Europe). With the communist revolution, it's likely that the US wouldn't be able to hold on to any of Korea or Indochina and maybe even would have lost Japan.
...should read Jorge Volpi's In search of Klingsor - it's a truly great novel by this young Mexican author. I don't know if it has been translated in English yet - the Spanish title is En busca Klingsor. The book is about a young intelligence officer named Francis Bacon (!) who's sent to post-war Germany to investigate the German's atomicbomb program and the mysterious lead scientist behind it named Klingsor. The meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg is in it too.
It's really a fascinating book and I'd recommend it to everyone interested in either physics, nazi's, WWII or conspiracies.
If I was him I would have just built some caravans in citys like paris and warsaw and stuff and moved em across the autobahn to rush the manhatten project.
Vaughn "Its always darkest before it goes pitch black."
First, slightly off topic - how 'right' we were to drop the nukes on Japan.
Oh, we were so righteous, weren't we? Saving all those lives by doing it, and forcing the Japanese to surrender, eh?
Considering they were willing to surrender. We said, "No, thanks.", nuked them for *no* *other* *reason* than to show off to Russia, and then said, "Okay, you can surrender now."
Yes, yes, the Japanese commited atrocities during the war. Pearl Harbor wasn't one of them, sorry. We were already in the war - we had pilots in British planes, we were sending them destroyers, munitions..
No, Japanese atrocities were commited elsewhere, like China, and of course, in the treatment of prisoners of war.
But what did we do? We rounded up Japanese Americans and put them into concentration camps, complete with inward-facing machine guns, starvation and disease.
*shrug* Sovereign nations have but one duty above all else - to protect their citizens. I don't think there's a country that has ever existed that hasn't resorted to questionable means to do this on occasion. But please, take a look at our own past before you people start screaming, "Waah, atrocities! Atrocities!"
Anyway, back to more on-topic things. Germany, getting the bomb before us. It'd have to be several years ahead of us for them to have done any damage. By the time we had the bomb (And indeed, awhile before that), they would've had quite a difficult time delivering it to U.S. soil.
More likely, if Germany would've achieved nuclear capability before us, they would've chose a closer, less risky target, such as Britan or Russia. Indeed, given Hitler's annoyance with Britan for holding out so long, and his personal rivalry with Stalin, I don't think we would've had to worry about the first strike being on our soil.
"If you want to talk about history, explore the economic situations that the US manufactured in the 30s that gave rise to the expansionist elements of the Japanese imperialists. Look honestly at US policies regarding hard goods such as steel and the like and you'll find that, like China today, the US's aggressive postures created a situation where the extremists could thrive, and the Divine Wind could drive a normally xenophobic people into world-conquering frenzy."
Yes, we were cutting back on steel and oil into Japan in the 1930's. Now, was that because we're generally not nice people, or do you think that maybe, just maybe this has something to do with the way they were an aggressor forcefully expanding their empire into mainland Asia since 1932?
"their imperialist "protection" of "Manchukuo" (now echoed in Afganistan?)"
Hrm... dissidents in Manchuria disrupting a rail line going through Manchuria, causing the Japanese to decide to deploy troops, and state-sponsored dissidents in Afghanistan launching an attack on US soil and killing thousands of civillians? Yeah, I can see all the similarities there... WTF?
I don't believe in 6am. I mean, _I_ certainly have never seen it.
Awesome comment! Mod this one up!
He knew that we had it, or he knew Truman was prepared to use it?
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
The U.S. could achieve wholesale destruction of German and Japanese cities using conventional bombs. This was possible because the U.S. had complete and total access to the skies over Japan and Germany by the second half of 1944. Germany and Japan did not have this advantage.
Had Germany had an atomic bomb, it could have snuck it over London at night and destroyed the city, which was something it was clearly unable to do with conventional weaponry due to Germany's inability to fly large numbers of aircraft in enemy airspace.
Likewise, Japan could have used a small submarine in San Francisco harbor to place an atomic bomb, however they were totally incapable of hurting an American city with conventional bombs after 1942.
At least they have plenty of geothermal and hydroelectric energy resources. Reykjavik is the city with the clearest air I've ever seen, including other skandinavian and canadian coastal cities.
There's some confusion here about gun-type designs vs. spherical implosion systems. Trinity was the first test of spherical implosion, using plutonium. Hiroshima was a gun bomb, with two subcritical pieces of U-238 forced together with a gun-like arrangement.
Incidentally, those aren't the only possible geometries, just the simplest ones. Linear implosion was developed in the 1950s. Other geometries have been developed, but are still classified. As greater compute power has become available, it's become possible to simulate, and thus design, more complex implosion geometries.
This is a major argument for export restrictions of "supercomputers". Still, all the major developments in nuclear weapons were made in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Every desktop machine today has orders of magnitude more power than the supercomputers of the nuclear establishment in 1970. It's not clear why we still have "supercomputer" export restrictions at all.
Heisenberg wrote a book called "Physics and Beyond". Or maybe "Physics and Philosophy". One was the sequel of the other, I don't remember which. Anyway, in a big part of the second book he talks about his days of working on the nuclear stuff, and makes it seem like he was trying to work on a nuclear reactor and not a bomb. He says that this is why he was cleared in the post-war trials, and that the evidence showed this pretty clearly. But he wrote the book when he was pretty old. Maybe he was trying to convince himself of something, since he was headed for the grave.
fun, fun, fun en the autobahn.... ...meet david bowie and iggy pop
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planches d'orcadia
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the U.S.A's interstate highway system was a defence project under FDR?
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