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60th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb
An anonymous reader writes "On July 16, 1945, the world's first nuclear bomb exploded at Trinity Site, New Mexico, marking the beginning of the Nuclear Age. Manhattan Project veteran Herb Lehr has no regrets: 'In a lot of respects I felt as if I had done something worthwhile. I am in no way ashamed of what I had done in any way, shape, matter or form. I did what I was told to do. I did it to the best of my ability.' Lehr will return to Trinity Site for the first time since the explosion. He said, 'I'm just interested in going and seeing it and maybe getting some memories back. Los Alamos was a whole interesting experience. It was something unique. I worked very hard down there.'"
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" ISBN 0-684-81378-5
and
"Dark Sun - The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" ISBN 0-684-82414-0
Both books are fascinating, containing depictions of both human elements and the physics/engineering side of the atomic weapons. As an example of the former, I found it very interesting to read about SAC nuts like LeMay and his concept of a Sunday Punch strategy.
The owls are not what they seem
The actual physics involved in building a bomb will be covered by any standard undergraduate physics course. Thats not the tricky bit. It gets difficult when the recipe called for a few kgs of U235 or Pu-239. Even if you could get your hands on some Uranium you would still have to process it to extract the fissile U235 from the U233, requiring all kinds of highly restricted and monitored hardware.
Lehr is correct. You're correct too. The left-liberal bent that grips slashdot has modded you flamebait and I'm sure has flamed your post as well.
They will talk of morality. 2 bombs convinced their administration to surrender and saved the Japanese citizenry from the barbarous Red Army. If only the innocent German citizenry was as lucky.
Germany was held to account for its wartime atrocities yet Japan wasn't. In Nanking, there were Japanese soldiers who were actually physically exhausted from the hours of endless carnage against an unarmed civilian population. I've also heard many other stories of unspeakable evil in Manchuria, Burma, Malaysia and other South East Asian countries by the Japanese.
In schools, Japan has removed any teachings of Japanese atrocities in WWII, but they still teach about the US nuclear bombings. The Japanese are (supposedly) a culture based upon honour. Why, then, was Pearl Harbour an unannounced, surprise attack on the US without a declaration of war? Doesn't sound very honourable to me. Neither does their denial of their murderous past.
"The development of atomic and nuclear weapons was inevitable." Says who? You? Why? Besides: Judge, if I hadn't done it someone else would won't get you to far in court. "A land invasion of Japan would have have resulted in horrific casualties on both sides." Ah, the old narative of how dropping the bomb saved lives. The only problem is that it's nowhere near certain that an invasion would have been necessary and the question of how many people such an invasion would have killed is very much up for debate, to put it mildly.
Natural uranium contains U-238, U-235 and a TINY amount of U-234. U-233 is an isotope of uranium created by neutron bombardment of thorium and is not present in natural uranium. Above should read seperating the U-235 from the U-238.
Well, the USSR's Tsar Bomba has the biggest yield of all bombs. At 27 tons though, it was damn hard to deliver. Anything large enough to carry it would be easily shot down well before it made the target. The deadliest is probably the Trident II. It has eight compact half megaton warheads and decent range.
Nope. B-29 was the first bomber that could fly really high (indeed, USAF discovered jet stream when they first flew at those heights), and japanese had no AA equipment that could deal with them at 30000+ feet.
Altough, actually most of the air raids with B-29's were done at low altitudes - japanese had 88 mm AA cannons, so they could not turn fast enough for low-altitude bombing. This saved fuel and allowed for higher payloads (and also prevented some engine troubles - flying at high altitudes caused overheating problems).
So yeah, that demo could have been done without any problems for subsequent real droppings.
http://www.fidh.org/europ/rapport/2002/che328a.pdf - a nice overview of Russian crimes in Chechnya.
P.S. Before posting, try understanding who/what you are talking about. Confusing Uzbekistan and Chechnya (and making up 'Checkizstan') is pathetic.
How do you do.
I'm Japanese.
I'm not good at English. So, I can not understand this arguments very much.
But, I have what to say.
Please know the atomic bombs' pollution.
I can not understand whether the bomb is good or bad. I'm not good at history very much. I don't know how long and to how heaevy extent Japan would keep fighting.
But, An atomic bomb brought long lasting disease. This is the fact.
Please know the atomic bombs' pollution.
Some people want to conseal this from everyone.
I think this is not good act.
Please know the facts as it is.
( Alomost people may knows the facts. If so, I'm sorry about this saying. )
Your scenario has little merit. It literally takes 2 people to do it. In subs and silos, 2 people must perform an action simultaneously. Turn keys, for instance. Seperated by a dozen feet or so. 1 person physically can't do it. And that is only after getting the proper codes from the NCA(National Command Authority. President or Joint Chief, etc).
In aircraft, it would take dozens of people. They're not flying around loaded anymore, so you'd have to get the weapons out of storage, load them, take off, etc. And then still have to get the proper arming codes from the NCA.
A rogue colonel can't do it, because he doesn't have the proper codes. It's far more than the president calling someone up and saying "Launch".
A lot of Uranium is actually found in Copper Mines. The problem is you are looking for Uranium ore that has a high percentage of the fissle U-235 that can be seperated. The normal ratio is about 500:1 but some ores are higher. Uranium is found many places in the world, Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in the USA. Read about the projects and technologies they used to seperate U-235 and U-238, it is interesting how they did it then had to scale it up 1000 fold to get enough for ONE bomb. This was before they learned to bombard the leftover U-238 with neutrons to turn it into Pu-239 which is what "breeder reactors" did. The Pu-239 was a much better bomb material.
most of the second guessing has come from succeeding generations that had the luxury of self-relection...
...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
... When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor." -- Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
"Prof. Albert Einstein... said that he was sure that President Roosevelt would have forbidden the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had he been alive and that it was probably carried out to end the Pacific war before Russia could participate." --Einstein Deplores Use of Atom Bomb, New York Times, 8/19/46, pg. 1
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..." -- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate for Change
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." -- Dwight Eisenhower, Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, [Herbert] Hoover wrote to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul." -- quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 635.
"MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed.
The first bomb had two hemispherses of Uranium that were polished smooth.
This is slightly inaccurate the first bomb (Gadget) did indeed consist of two hollow hemispheres, but it was two nickel plated plutonium hemispheres (with some gold foil added to smooth it out after the nickle blistered) and not uranium hemispheres.
The first uranium bomb (Little Boy) was a gun type system with a cannon firing a bullet of uranium into a barely subcritical mass of uranium.
This is not to say that a bomb can't be made with two hemispheres of uranium, but this was not done with either the first bomb or the first uranium bomb. The idea of converting the Little Boy bomb into an implosion design (with two hemispheres of uranium) was raised after the Gadget test as it would permit more efficent use of the uranium, but it was decided not to as this would delay the use of the weapon.
Also, as I forgot to add before I hit the submit button, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not 'mostly' civilian targets. They would be like saying Colorado Springs is a Civilian Target when it sits practically ontop of NORAD.
"At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of considerable military significance. It contained the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops." That's straight from the wikipedia page Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a page often cited by persons arguing against the dropping of the bombs.
And Nagasaki itself was a valuable military target, quoting again the same wikipage: "The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials."
The fact was that a good deal of people were evacuated from the city before the atomic bombing due to a previous bombing on the First of August of more conventional explosive ordinance.
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The biggest detonation by the U.S. and her cronies was the 15 MT Castle Bravo shot, which was actually an accident. It was only supposed to be about a quarter of that. Because it was bigger than it was supposed to be, it created a fallout disaster, including dosing up some Japanese fishermen on a vessel ironically named "Fifth Lucky Dragon" (it appears to have been fatal to one of the fishermen). Marshallese islanders also got heavy doses.
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I like this wiki better. It talks about how Japan was already devastated by firebombing, a fact which Robert S. McNamara finally admits in the recent Fog of War documentary.
"The first firebombing raid was on Kobe on February 3, 1945, and following its relative success the USAAF continued the tactic. Much of the armor and defensive weaponry of the bombers was also removed to allow increased bomb loads; Japanese air defense in terms of night-fighters and anti-aircraft guns was so feeble it was hardly a risk. The first such raid on Tokyo was on the night of February 23-24 when 174 B-29s destroyed around one square mile (3 km) of the city. Following on that success 334 B-29s raided on the night of March 9-10, dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Around 16 square miles (41 km) of the city was destroyed and over 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the fire storm. The destruction and damage was at its worst in the city sections east of the Imperial Palace. It was the most destructive conventional raid of the war against Japan. In the following two weeks there were almost 1,600 further sorties against the four cities, destroying 31 square miles (80 km) in total at a cost of only 22 aircraft. There was a third raid on Tokyo on May 26."
There was plenty enough conventional massacre by the time Fat Man and Little Boy rolled around, my friend. Japan wasn't a virgin isle of paradise when the two nukes dropped. It was a war-torn, bombed out nation. Fog of War documents it to numbing effect.
There's a lot of history that America doesn't teach its children.
The Sandia National Laboratories ham club is operating a special event station from the site. I just talked to them using 35 watts.
See here.
A few tokens of my tourist experience:
1. There is a rock shop right outside the gate, with a big sign advertising "Trinitite for Sale." If you are a rockhound, they have a nice shop, with lots of interesting stuff, but their prices are a little high. You can get Trinitie cheaper on Ebay all day long.
2. Removing Trinitite from the Trinity site is considered theft of government property, but they don't watch you too closely. :) There's still quite a few chunks of it around the back fence.
3. If you see old people visiting the site, there's a good chance that they are locals, who remember the blast. Seek them out and talk to them.
4. To me, there really wasn't all that much to see there, and yet, there was an amazing sense to just *be* there. The most impressive physical sight to me was the bowl-shaped depression in the soil, a few hundred yards in circumference, caused by the force of the blast compressing the soil.
5. Try to get a room in Socorro. When they say that the site is "near Alamogordo," they lie. You will enter from the NORTH side of WSMR.
Not quite. The Nuclear weapons Archive story about it has this to say.
The Tsar Bomba (referred to as the Big Bomb by Sakharov in his Memoirs [Sakharov 1990]) was the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed or detonated. This three stage weapon was actually a 100 megaton bomb design, but the uranium fusion stage tamper of the tertiary (and possibly the secondary) stage(s) was replaced by one(s) made of lead. This reduced the yield by 50% by eliminating the fast fissioning of the uranium tamper by the fusion neutrons, and eliminated 97% of the fallout (1.5 megatons of fission, instead of 51.5), yet still proved the full yield design. The result was the "cleanest" weapon ever tested with 97% of the energy coming from fusion reactions. The effect of this bomb at full yield on global fallout would have been tremendous. It would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%.
There was some bickering as to weither it had a yield of 50 or 57MT. The designed yield was 50MT, but the americans believed it was 57 based on what fallout they managed to sample, and shortly thereafter the soviets started using this figure as well.