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Feds Attempt To Censor Parts of a New Book About the Hydrogen Bomb
HughPickens.com writes: The atom bomb — leveler of Hiroshima and instant killer of some 80,000 people — is just a pale cousin compared to the hydrogen bomb, which easily packs the punch of a thousand Hiroshimas. That is why Washington has for decades done everything in its power to keep the details of its design out of the public domain. Now William J. Broad reports in the NY Times that Kenneth W. Ford has defied a federal order to cut material from his new book that the government says teems with thermonuclear secrets. Ford says he included the disputed material because it had already been disclosed elsewhere and helped him paint a fuller picture of an important chapter of American history. But after he volunteered the manuscript for a security review, federal officials told him to remove about 10 percent of the text, or roughly 5,000 words. "They wanted to eviscerate the book," says Ford. "My first thought was, 'This is so ridiculous I won't even respond.'" For instance, the federal agency wanted him to strike a reference to the size of the first hydrogen test device — its base was seven feet wide and 20 feet high. Dr. Ford responded that public photographs of the device, with men, jeeps and a forklift nearby, gave a scale of comparison that clearly revealed its overall dimensions.
Though difficult to make, hydrogen bombs are attractive to nations and militaries because their fuel is relatively cheap. Inside a thick metal casing, the weapon relies on a small atom bomb that works like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Today, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the only declared members of the thermonuclear club, each possessing hundreds or thousands of hydrogen bombs. Military experts suspect that Israel has dozens of hydrogen bombs. India, Pakistan and North Korea are seen as interested in acquiring the potent weapon. The big secret the book discusses is thermal equilibrium, the discovery that the temperature of the hydrogen fuel and the radiation could match each other during the explosion (PDF). World Scientific, a publisher in Singapore, recently made Dr. Ford's book public in electronic form, with print versions to follow. Ford remains convinced the book "contains nothing whatsoever whose dissemination could, by any stretch of the imagination, damage the United States or help a country that is trying to build a hydrogen bomb." "Were I to follow all — or even most — of your suggestions," says Ford, "it would destroy the book."
Though difficult to make, hydrogen bombs are attractive to nations and militaries because their fuel is relatively cheap. Inside a thick metal casing, the weapon relies on a small atom bomb that works like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Today, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the only declared members of the thermonuclear club, each possessing hundreds or thousands of hydrogen bombs. Military experts suspect that Israel has dozens of hydrogen bombs. India, Pakistan and North Korea are seen as interested in acquiring the potent weapon. The big secret the book discusses is thermal equilibrium, the discovery that the temperature of the hydrogen fuel and the radiation could match each other during the explosion (PDF). World Scientific, a publisher in Singapore, recently made Dr. Ford's book public in electronic form, with print versions to follow. Ford remains convinced the book "contains nothing whatsoever whose dissemination could, by any stretch of the imagination, damage the United States or help a country that is trying to build a hydrogen bomb." "Were I to follow all — or even most — of your suggestions," says Ford, "it would destroy the book."
That sort of censorship is just going to blow up in their face!
when people try and censor stuff that is already public. We see it here, we see it with snowden (im not talking classified stuff) but if this person got the information without looking at classified materials, who do they think they are to tell him to not publish?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
No Amateur is going to read a book and build a bomb.
And actually, the Military tested this idea a while back. Interestingly, the amateurs had postgrad level education (sub doctoral), and actually succeeded.
However.
All the knowledge was publicly available already. No special books needed.
The problem isn't the bureaucrats in question, rather the culture of fear and secrecy in which our government had steeped these last several decades. This problem needs to be addressed at its cultural roots, starting with your family and friends -- Tell them fear will do infinitely more harm than the things we're, as a society, afraid of.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
war is ugly
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
wait until the IRS audits your publication profits.
So, the take away from this is... what? Any author gets to decide what information does or does not constitute a breach of national security based on what the effect of its deletion on their book sales would be? I for one would sleep more soundly knowing that that information wasn't in his book than I would knowing he was going to get a big fat royalty check.
Ok. Let's say they censor it. So, what is gained?
Terrorists can't get a hold on these "secrets"? Please. Care to take a look at the thermonuke club? Half of them doesn't have a government suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and the other half doesn't give a fuck who gets that information as long as the price is right.
There might be some overlapping, though.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How dare the government abridge our 2nd amendment rights. Who will join me in a Hydrogen Bomb Open Cary campaign?
The only way to ensure our freedom and safety is that every man woman and child has the comfort of Mutually Assured Destruction.
I remember seeing pics and descriptions of the Hydrogen Bomb in high school. Never bothered to examine the design again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... has the basic design. So what's the rub?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
"Dr. Ford hasn't been heard from for several days."
Interesting book, and awesome FREE MARKETING courtesy of the Feds! There's really nothing in this book that countries like Iran, NK, etc don't already have. He should publish both, one censored "inside" the US, and an uncensored version outside the US. Then people might even buy both of them...
I don't see your interpretation. It's stating plain facts in an emotional way, but I think it's gruesome rather than cool.
as a real secret any more, if there ever was. If the "secret" is based on scientific research, it's been published and is reproducible and all the relevant people already know about it. If it's engineering, anyone can figure it out. Probably the only thing that's "secret" any more is the Coca Cola formula.
They're specifically making the point that Hiroshima was an atomic bomb, and stating the devastating effects of it. They're doing this to paint a mental picture of how much additional power is in a hydrogen bomb.
they already have access to FAR better instructions than this. ISIS controls whole universities, and has chemical engineers, physics doctorates, etc in their ranks. Abu Malik may be dead, but there are many others we don't know about.
I was trying to figure out what this had to do with Slashdot, then it hit me.
Of course. Fat Man.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
What kind of small, hateful person says "women, children, and other civilians" instead of "people" or "civilians"?
How fucked do you have to be to value the life of one person more than another because of their sex or adulthood?
I got two of his books ("The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb") and have read them both a few times. Lots of really good information in there, but both were written pre-9/11. He's written two books since which I literally ordered a few minutes ago while reading about this.
women, children, and other civilian
That comment is kinda sexist
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Put a torrent up of the book, and tell fed.gov to go fuck themselves. Silly fascists seem to think that H bombs are still super secret tech.
Hate to say it Feds, but 60+ year old tech is hardly a secret.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
You manually submit a book to the government for review and then become upset when the gov does exactly what you asked?
Although the yield of the Weapons is contested. Radio Chemical analysis of the byproducts presented show there was a thermonuclear explosion, whether a fizzle or otherwise.
http://fas.org/news/india/1998/05/980500-conf.htm
RCM analysis:
http://www.barc.gov.in/publications/nl/1999/199907-01.pdf
Was it a successful weaponization?
Not known.
Was it thermonuclear?
Yes. Because RCM produced isotopes which are present in larger quantities in TN explosions.
Is India weaponizing or producing TN weapons?
Yes. They are enriching enough Uranium to make lots of TN weapons.
http://press.ihs.com/press-release/aerospace-defense-terrorism/ihs-reveals-new-potential-nuclear-enrichment-site-india
I don't know why Slashdot lets posts in without any verification.India probably has thermonuclear weapons, if Israel has them. India btw, declared that they possess Themonuclear weapons. I don't see why everyone else's claims are accepted at face value and the only country to ever publish an RCM analysis is discredited.
Now, I am open to the fact that the yield may be below expectations, but only the designers of the device will know that. There are dissenting voices in India, as well, but it's usually brought up when there is pressure to accede to CTBT or some such lunacy by the politicians. Just like China's anti-aircraft carrier missile or their stealth aircraft are used to get more funding.
That single act of 'murder' probably saved more American and Japanese lives than any other single thing done during the war. It took major balls to make the decision to drop the bomb and it was fucking heroic.
Nonsense. The US dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a military base . That was because they wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
"U.S murdered"
No. Killing the enemy is not murder.
"Were I to follow all .. of your suggestions," says Ford, "it would destroy the book." Oh no! When you put it that way, it would be awful to have wasted all that time putting the book together! I mean if we're going to weigh the possibility of making hydrogen bomb construction easier, thus endangering the lives of millions/billions of people in the future, versus some author having spent time putting together a book and then having it be a big waste of time, we have to side with the author. I mean seriously, how self-centered do you have to be as an person to make that argument?
To answer the other questions here -- Assuming the information is already available elsewhere doesn't mean anything because: (1) It's possible that the author is exaggerating (for his own 'I want to publish' reasons) how available that information is, and (2) it saves villains the work of finding and putting that information together on their own - information they might've overlooked.
But, I suspect Slashdot is going to stick with the old "let's make all information available" arguments, proving why they don't and shouldn't actually work in geopolitics. I remember a lot of those crappy arguments flying around when some scientists were talking about publishing the genetic sequences of highly-virulent and deadly strains of flu. Keep working on your quixotic quest to make a deadlier 21st century, Slashdot.
There is also this (much a intro sentence here is just a copy/paste job from this article anyhow).
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03...
"PHILADELPHIA — For all its horrific power, the atom bomb — leveler of Hiroshima and instant killer of some 80,000 people — is but a pale cousin compared to another product of American ingenuity: the hydrogen bomb."
Guess all the stories about the British, Canadian and German scientists contributing must be false, the USA did it single handedly?
Way to attempt to rewrite history NY Times.
If you tell yourself that often enough, is it true?
Many feel the Japanese would have surrendered anyhow.
"It took major balls to make the decision to drop the bomb and it was fucking heroic.:
How come when it happens to you it is not heroic?
The design of the bombs is not the problem. Getting fissile material to build the trigger is the problem. Even a large corporation could probably not enrich uranium without attracting attention. Unless the book contains some method that Joe Sixpack can use to leach highly-enriched uranium from tailings or something, it's not a threat.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Actually one seriously has to question how much Truman knew about what he was authorizing, and what was Groves and his ilk overstepping their bounds. Truman's diary has repeated mentions that he doesn't think it should be used against civilians, and people who he talked to at the time reported similar.
(Truman's first public statement after the bomb was dropped, said while the second bomb was being dropped on Nagasaki).
The next day, Truman receives the first reports and photographs related to the bombings, and the scale of what was done becomes clear.
.
One really has to question what sort of information Truman was given and what exactly he thought he was authorizing. Hiroshima was anything *but* a military base. It was one of the least militarized cities in Japan, which is why it had been so little touched by conventional bombings. Its war industries were on the periphery and were little damaged by the explosion. Groves' targeting committee prioritized it precisely for the reason that it would visibly kill so many people and because it was largely untouched thusfar; the committee ruled out purely military targets (what Truman actually wanted) as they didn't consider them to be showy enough as demonstrations of the weapon's power.
Truman's underlings were mixed on the subject of the bomb as well. Bard (undersecretary of the navy), for example, was adimant that the US should not use the bomb on cities. He thought it not only morally abhorrent, but totally unnecessary, as he and many others felt Japan was already on the verge of surrender (the post war Strategic Bombing Survey would later back him up on this point).
But, it ended as it ended.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
lol we know that isn't the case because the US had to drop a second bomb and even *then* the Japanese didn't want to surrender. When the Emperor finally threw in the towel the population of Japan was in tears and many didn't believe it was actually the Emperor because there was no way he would ever surrender. They were throwing themselves off cliffs at the thought of surrender.
Oh, bullshit. Hiroshima was no more a "military base" than were any number of American cities.
A total of some 40,000 military personnel were present in the city. The rest of the approximately 350,000 population were civilians.
The number killed was very approximately 100,000. It is plain that not even the majority could possibly have been military personnel.
((Whoosh!!!))
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Not sure why all the fuss about this book, when instead of building a thermonuclear device you can just order one ready made... I hear Iran will be shipping them to countries around the globe any day now. Pretty sure I'm in the test market area!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm more concerned about the effect this has on peoples' perception of our foreign policy. If people understood exactly how easy it is to build a Uranium atomic bomb (I understand we're talking about hydrogen here), they might feel very differently about being ok with Iran saying no to UN or IAEA regulator snooping.
Hydrogen bomb knowledge is still not exactly common (like the uranium bomb knowledge is) so I can understand and even support their interest here. This isn't even about domestic consumption, anybody here could figure it out how to find the info if they really wanted, it's about foreign power
Attention mods- The summary should read:
"The big secret the book discusses is...[REDACTED]"
Regards
Your Friendly Government Official
I know how suspension bridges work. I probably could build a small one, but any lengthy span would be well beyond me.
I know how internal combustion engines work. It would take a year of training on the tools before I'd be able to make one that even sorta worked, and then it would be at 1900s-level functionality.
I know how nuclear weapons work. Several types, in fact. But I cannot make them.
1) I could build a gun-type weapon, given the material (200lbs of 90% pure U-235, a 76mm artillery barrel, and some regular explosives), but I could not create the equipment to refine uranium.
2) I could probably build a reactor to generate plutonium, with massive effort and a significant risk of poisoning myself, but I could not build a working implosion bomb with it. It would take a year's training in explosives just to be able to build an existing design, and those designs are tightly secured.
3) With the materials, I might be able to upgrade an unboosted fission weapon into a boosted one. Maybe.
4) A fusion weapon is completely beyond me. You could stick me in Lawrence Livermore with all the parts in front of me, and without some Ikea-like instructions you aren't going to get anything.
We are protected from homemade gun-type weapons by the scarcity of uranium and the immense difficulty in refining it. Remember, this is something that was beyond the capabilities of most nations a scant 70 years ago. A dedicated nation-state or perhaps certain multinational corporations could pull it off, but not without detection.
We are protected against homemade implosion-type weapons by the complex engineering necessary, the esoteric nature of the specific engineering knowledge needed (nuclear physics and shaped explosives are not a common dual-major), and by the absolute need for testing before use. The former prevents fringe groups from succeeding; the latter prevents the non-suicidal from trying.
We are not protected by lack of general knowledge on nukes, because no such lack of knowledge exists. I learned half of this stuff from school textbooks, and the other half from Wikipedia. Anyone driven to find more can easily do so.
Don't tell that to someone like Charles Manson.
Many feel the Japanese would have surrendered anyhow.
I call BS. Before the atomic bombs, Japan's strategy was to basically arm every citizen and make the invasion of the mainland such a bloody, costly quagmire for the Allies that they would negotiate favorable peace terms. Even the Wikipedia article on Surrender of Japan has a deeper understanding of the issue than whatever you're making up. Even after Hiroshima, the Supreme Council voted against surrender. They thought that maybe the U.S. only had one bomb, or that it lacked the will power to use it again. After Nagasaki (and the Soviet invasion), the Supreme Council still didn't want to surrender, so they tortured a captured U.S. P-51 pilot, and he told them that the U.S. had at least 100 atomic bombs (he was lying). But the cabinet still split on whether to surrender. It took the emperor basically begging the cabinet, for the sake of the millions who were about to be slaughtered, to persuade them to vote in favor of surrender.
Modern navel-gazing revisionist historians really don't appreciate how truly warlike and blood-soaked the entire Japanese culture was before 1945. They were obsessed with killing and torture. The Japanese surrender and subsequent disarmament fundamentally transformed the entire nation.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
War also never changes.
#1 - Afaik, a hydrogen bomb is a practical application of FUSION using FISSION, right (or wrong)?
#2 - The FUSION is achieved by implosion done by the atomic bomb(s) being 'set' around another nuclear pile, right (or wrong)??
(TIA on those, as I've always wondered if I was correct on that much @ least, or not...)
* NOW the "big one":
How on earth do they 'fire an electron' into the unstable U-238/Cobalt (or other unstable isotope)? Is THAT done by using a large electrical charge?? See, afaik @ least, electricity works by moving electrons across the surface of a wire (only surface) & thus, would 'fire electrons' into an unstable pile of fissionable material... or, is it done with something like CRT's used on their sweeper/flyback arm??
APK
P.S.=> No "severe physics geek" here, but I've always wondered if my assumptions were correct on the points I noted above - feel free to 'set me straight' please where I am off (or even way, Way, WAY off) & thanks again... apk
Now they are the only ones who produce bad ass rally cars for sale....
Up until only very recently :)
who will speak of the bombing of Hiroshima with words of merit and brag. Praising the atomic bomb as the "Leveler of Hiroshima" is so unbelievably small, petty, and hateful.
| Guess all the stories about the British, Canadian and German scientists contributing must be false, the USA did it single handedly?
a) British & Canadian scientists contributed significantly to the fission bomb project. They did not contribute significantly to the successful fusion bomb projects in the USA and USSR.
b) German scientists did not contribute significantly to the US nuclear weapons projects unless you count former Germans expelled or driven out because of Nazi ideology.
Well on form for the U.S military to make enemies out of civilians. You truly are a hateful people.
women, children, and other civilians.
Women, Children, and Adult Males. Interesting that not a single military person was killed. At least according to your re-statement.
Learn to love Alaska
The wording is clearly chosen to be meritorious. Not exactly a tasteful way to speak of killing 80 000 civilians.
There's a big difference between uranium and a working hydrogen bomb. The US won't use nukes unless someone else detonates one first.
That isn't how it worked out for Hiroshima.....For all our talk about how we are morally 'better' because we are a 'democracy', remember we are the only country that has use a nuclear weapon on an enemy.
Also, this author probably doesn't have a security clearance, so pretty much all the sources of info he is going to have access to is going to be by definition declassified. Unless he was getting some of the engineers who work our current batch of nuclear weapons drunk and taking notes, it seems pretty unlikely that he has any privileged info. You can learn quite a bit about nuclear and thermonuclear devices if you know which physics papers to read. The physics for hydrogen bombs and stars are the same thing.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The number killed was very approximately 100,000. It is plain that not even the majority could possibly have been military personnel.
Clearly. However, the most important thing is to compare the Bombs to the estimated casualties of Operation Downfall--a hell of a lot more Japanese people would have been killed by the Allied invasion.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Oh, the entire culture was obsessed with torture and killing. Do you realize how racist this sounds?
-josh
Wiki is not a source of truth, it is a source of editable information often edited for purposes of propaganda. A quick google search finds more articles disproving Wiki than I can count. Here are the first three.
Claiming that killing people saves lives is delusional to the point of insanity. Unfortunately this insanity is alive and well, though today we claim "we must kill all the Muslims to get peace" instead of those "dirty Japs". The only way to justify the delusion is to invent your own version of history, which never happened. Don't worry, I learned the same lessons in public schools and had to learn to think on my own to see the delusion.
If you have doubts, ask yourself if we ever had to land a single troop in Japan to get them to surrender? Check your history! Japan was completely blockaded. They had no ships to defend a convoy, no local production of petroleum, and could not defend themselves from any form of bombardment we were already attacking them with. We had planes fire bombing them at will, without an atomic bomb. There was no reason to invade them, it was only a matter of time before they surrendered. Then ask yourself why we dropped those bombs on non-military targets, because you won't be able to come up with a real answer for that either!.
That is right, we dropped the a-bomb because the US didn't give a shit about human lives or suffering. Our Government had no problem bitching about the Germans with their Jewish concentration camps, but yet we locked up whole families of Japanese Americans in our own. Oh, I know.. we didn't kill the people we put in jail so we were good guys right?
If you want to justify it, at least be honest about the reasons we bombed two cities full of civilians and not military targets. We are the bully that beat up the sickly kid, and people like you laugh about it. Fucking disgusting!
He is writing a book about "basics", not providing blue prints for everything required. If you at least read the summary you would see the point, but alas even reading a summary seems to be beyond your ability.
A non-combatant in a country you are at war with is not an enemy, and deliberately killing them is murder. Go take a look at the massacres of Vietnam and how those were treated at the time and as history.
Though, bombing a tank factory and killing a non-combatant janitor is not murder, as you targeted a military target and the death is collateral damage, not a murder. Dresden and the Tokyo bombings killed lots of civilians. Hiroshima was a military target, killing 20,000 Japanese troops. That there were 2 times that in dead civilians doesn't make it murder.
But Nagasaki was a terrorist target. It was smaller, and had only a token military presence. The targets were "civilian" facilities that were making war implements. The factory that made the primary torpedo used in Pearl Harbor was destroyed, as were other factories and metal works. But almost no military were killed. The point was to terrorize the Japanese into surrender. Hiroshima "should have" caused a surrender, which was given with unconscionable conditions. It was a mass killing of the main Japanese force assembled to repel an American invasion from the south. But the Japanese wouldn't give in. So Nagasaki was proof that any place left so far (mostly) untouched would be reduced to a parking lot before an American invasion would lose American lives fighting the Japanese on home soil. It may have been necessary to end the war and killed far fewer Japanese civilians than an invasion, but it was still not a military target.
Learn to love Alaska
the trucker that built one a few years ago?
What kind of small, hateful person says "women, children, and other civilians" instead of "people" or "civilians"? How fucked do you have to be to value the life of one person more than another because of their sex or adulthood?
This isn't pretty, but human life isn't equally valuable and there are nearly infinite ways this can be quantified. First, it's subjective, and second, only a handful of reasons a rational person would agree with. Some examples:
Children generally have more time in front of them and therefore are being robbed of more when killed. If you had to choose between the death of a five year old or a 90 year old, which would you be inclined to choose?
If you believe in justice/punishment/retribution/etc., older people are more likely to have committed acts in their life that are worthy of punishment, while younger people are less likely. Obviously that doesn't necessarily mean they deserve to die or that there's actually a connection between their sins and their death, but again if you had to choose between an aid worker and a serial killer being killed, which would you choose?
If the Earth were about to be hit by an extinction event and only 10000 people could be saved via sci-fi-method-of-your-choice, would you select people at random or choose the best-of-the-best with respect to the successful continuity of the species?
If someone points a gun at your head and says, "I'm going to kill you," you are legally justified in killing them in self defense, which indicates at that moment your life is more valuable than the gunman's. Were it not, you'd be expected to simply run away, try to talk them out of it, or use other non-lethal means to stop them.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Is because an H Bomb is the only way you can deliver a payload atop a missile. an A bomb of any yield would be far to heavy.
Not very fucked at all actually.
Women and children are valued more because they are worth more.
Women can have kids in the future and may even be pregnant now, and children can grow up into adults.
Unfortunately the truth doesn't have to be politically correct.
Molybdenum shell, purified carbon, plutonium pitted trigger, uranium 235, high speed rectified wave electronic switching, plastic explosive. Construct quantum container and overflow the quantum equivalence.
About as racist as saying that ALL American culture is obsessed with guns and McDonalds and Apple products.
Also, children generally have less of a say as to their country's political actions. In democracies, adults can vote. In non-democracies, adults could decide to protest (often risking arrest, imprisonment, or death) or engage in outright rebellion. Depending on their situation, the adults might have a small say in what their country is doing, but it's still something.
Children don't even have this. You can't expect a three year old to march on his nation's capital demanding that the President-For-Life step down because of his militaristic maneuvers. You can't think that a five year old would cast a vote for the opposition party, risking his life and pre-k education to voice his political opposition to the majority party's policies.
The worst-case-scenario with kids is that they can be (at a certain age), taken by force and drafted into a quasi-army, but that still is the adults turning the kids into soldiers, not the kids deciding for themselves that strapping bombs to themselves would be fun to do after they are finished at the playground.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It was one of the least militarized cities in Japan, which is why it had been so little touched by conventional bombings.
Not exactly. There actually was an important military base in the city (headquarters of the Japanese 5th Division and the 2nd Army Headquarters.), as well as many industrial targets, and it was an important port city. Keep in mind that Japan had converted most private enterprises and even many homes into places of war materiel production. There was no such thing as a non-militarized city in Japan at that time. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and several other cities had not been bombed only because they had been taken off the bombing list some time before. The idea was to keep some prime targets "pristine", so accurate bomb damage assessment could be done afterwards. Everyone was well aware there would be massive civilian casualties.
Truman knew exactly what he was doing, incidentally. It was true he had moral qualms, but it was reported his Secretary of State told him "What will you say, Mr. President, at your impeachment proceeding, when the American people learn that you had a weapon which could have ended the war and did not use it?" The US leadership also feared the planned invasion of Japan by the Soviet Union, with the real threat of Japan being split into a communist and democratic zones similar to Germany. The bombing was seen as the quickest and surest way to end the Pacific war
Many in the US leadership and military brass had also been wildly optimistic about the "imminent collapse of Nazi Germany", after which the fighting had gone on for half a year still. History is fairly clear that the Japanese were unlikely to surrender before the bombing. Even after the two atomic bombs were dropped and the Soviet Union joined the war, the Japanese military leadership was still evenly split about whether to continue the war. It took the emperor to make the final decision. Even after the emperor publicly surrendered (without ever using the word 'surrender' or 'defeat' in his speech), a small group of Japanese officers actually mutinied and invaded the palace, fortunately not succeeding.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
You wish. If Truman wanted to avoid civilian casualties, he would have considered Japan's face-saving attempt to surrender while keeping their Emperor. Instead, he nuked them into submission....and then Japan keep Hirohito anyway, who kept his title until his death in 1989.
But at least it's a change of imperialistic hackery for you, after spending years insisting that Sweden can't promise it wont hand Assange over to the U.S. for the "intelligence crime" of running WikiLeaks with one side of your mouth. Only to then insist that Sweden can't extradite for intelligence crimes with the other.
Would you consider it racist to say the ancient roman culture was obsessed with torture and killing?
I have no clue if Japanese culture pre 1945 was obsessed with torture and killing, but saying it was could only be considered racist if it was indeed not true.
That their culture was steeped in something does not mean that every individual is obsessed with it. American culture is obsessed with a bunch of people named Kardashian, but all I know about them is that there are several of them, and I think one of them is named Kim or something.
And racist or not, yes, Japanese culture was obsessed with killing and torture. It had been for a very, very long time.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
So the author submits a book which he doesn't believe is legally required to be submitted. Then when changes are suggested he cries "censorship" and ignores the changes, with apparently no legal ramifications whatsoever. That doesn't sound much like censorship to me. The case involving the Progressive was indeed censorship (and prior restraint at that), but this seems more like an attempt to garner some publicity and "authenticity" for the book. But then again maybe I'm too old and cynical about these things.
Make cheese not war 8:)
Except facts and history do not agree with you.
Fact is that Japan offered to surrender BEFORE the bombs were dropped. They had one condition, that their emperor would not be harmed. The US required unconditional surrender.
The US wanted to a) test the effects of radiation on humans (primarily civilian targets were chosen), and b) the US wanted to drop the bombs as a demonstration to (their allay), the Soviet Union.
Not a position piece, but plenty in there to support the above assertions:
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...
it wasnt 80K civilians first of all, a large number of them were working towards supporting the war effort.
If someone hit detroit in the 40s and took out GM, would you say they took out civies? no they were building the machines of war!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
well, if you said prior to 1900 (as we are doing in the case here, but 1945) you would be correct.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Oh, the entire culture was obsessed with torture and killing. Do you realize how racist this sounds?
How does that affect the validity and truthfulness of his statements?
Truman had to make one of the toughest calls ever made in human history. It's easy to second guess today. But put yourself in his shoes. I believe he weighed the information that he had and made the decision that he thought best, knowing full well that history would both praise and condemn him.
No one could possibly be happy about the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But no one is happy about all the lives that WWII claimed before that time and would have claimed had the war gone on. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of Enola Gay, famously said (rough quote) "I deeply regret the loss of life, but I do not apologize."
This was/is not a simple issue with a simple answer.
Some might say that a young child has less invested in them than a young adult and is thus cheaper (as in resources and time) to replace. I'd save the 5 year old over the 90 year old, but make it a 5 year old and a 20 year old and it's not so clear. I'm going AC because this will certainly be an unpopular view (and may even be considered a troll) but I am being serious. I'm not saying I could do it if you made me choose, just that it might be reasonable.
Cheese it, it's the Feds!
Everyone hide your Beryllium-Pollonium detonators and your K-alpha reflector cavities, and act natural, for God's sake!
Have you ever read a single thing about World War II? Seen a History Channel show about it? Anything? I'd recommend it. It's fascinating, and you are in serious need of the education.
So what you're saying is that a culture is a race? The blacks in Detroit are going to find this might inconvenient.
SETEC ASTRONOMY
Industrial infrastructure producing weapons and ammunition is also a valid military target as it goes towards depriving the enemy of the ability to wage war.
strikes again.
Well, children should really be "worth" less, since they have had less invested in them. An adult with an education has had hundreds of thousands of dollars invested, and is likely a contributing member of society. A child of four years has cost nowhere near as much, is a drain on society for many years still, and much more easily replaced.
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
If we [the world] invested the same effort and money into space exploration as we do in making weapons, we'd be already exploring the nearest galaxies.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
it wasnt 80K civilians first of all, a large number of them were working towards supporting the war effort.
Everyone always is.
What do you think your taxes are used for? Do you think it would have been possible to deploy troops in Iraq or fight against ISIS without them?
You are supporting a war effort, does that mean that it is OK for ISIS to kill you?
seven feet wide and 20 feet high
Doh. I made mine six feet wide. No wonder it didn't work!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"one of the least" != "no military component". You're absolutely correct that "There was no such thing as a non-militarized city in Japan at the time". Hiroshima had been a city that refugees had been fleeing to. It is simply true that for its size it was one of the least militarized cities in Japan at that time.
In something that's rather sickening, and one *hopes* was accidental but suspects that it wasn't, the US had been leafletting Japan in the weeks leading up to the atomic bombings, warning them to evacuate "Otaru, Akita, Hachinohe, Fukushima, Urawa, Takayama, Iwakuni, Tottori, Imabari, Yawata, Miyakonojo, and Saga" There was no mention of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Anyone who listened to the US leaflets walked into the bomb zone.
Byrnes (claimed source of your quote) was an atomic bomb radical within the government. He wanted to threaten to bomb the Russians to get better success in the postwar negotiations too. But if you search for your quote online you'll find only half a dozen hits. It appears to be an urban legend. Claims that "The US leadership also feared the planned invasion of Japan by the Soviet Union" are somewhat true. The US had been trying for a long time to get the Soviet Union involved, but started having misgivings. Various people were concerned to varying degrees about the potential of Soviet involvement.
You're free to disagree with the US military's own postwar analysis of the Japan situation (the Strategic Bombing Survey). But that would be what most people would call "revisionist history".
The fact that there was a coup attempt after the emperor tried to surrender just drives home how little effect the atomic bombings had. The War Cabinet had steadily been shifting more to the side of the doves but was split down the middle, three-three on whether to accept an unconditional surrender. The emperor had been working in secret to negotiate an unconditional surrender, including making preparations to send his son to offer it, but had been delayed by Potsdam. After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, there was literally no change in the view of any of the members of the War Cabinet, it remained a three-three split. The hawks considered it just another entry in the list of horrors that Japan was experiencing. The Potsdam declaration had been made just two weeks earlier. There hadn't been an imperial conference since the Potsdam Declaration to discuss it. The Imperial Conference on the 9th-10th. It was at this conference that the emperor made clear that he had wanted to accept the Potsdam terms. But it is clearly documented that he already had by that time supported accepting the Potsdam terms, even before the bombing.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Again, ((Whoosh!!!))
In case you're curious, that's the sound of the point flying right over your head.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Women and children are presumed not to be combatants. Killing a combatant or potential combatant (i.e. a man) contains an element of self-defense. Killing a non-combatant is just murder.
"Killing the enemy is not murder."
Debatable.
Seeing American TV Series as 24, homeland, the 100, ... Seems to me that "killing and torture" is the american culture.
[Citation needed]
Keep in mind that the Strategic Bombing Survey's postwar analysis is not "official history". It's easy enough to find many dissenting opinions, so I don't think it's fair to call it "revisionist history" either way.
From the Wikipedia article covering the controversy of the atomic bomb attacks:
According to historian Richard B. Frank,
The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender.
The U.S. Department of Energy's history of the Manhattan Project lends some credence to these claims, saying that military leaders in Japan
also hoped that if they could hold out until the ground invasion of Japan began, they would be able to inflict so many casualties on the Allies that Japan still might win some sort of negotiated settlement.
And if you want to go straight to the source:
Kichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest advisers, stated, "We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war." Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief Cabinet secretary in 1945, called the bombing "a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war."
It also goes on to discuss the opposing viewpoints, such as the Strategic Bombing Survey that you mentioned, as well as others.
So, in fairness I should refrain from saying that "the Japanese were unlikely to surrender before the bombing", and instead state "many of Japan's military leaders wished to continue the war". As to what would have really transpired with a different course of action, it's obviously a matter of speculation. My feeling, and that of many historians, is that it may have been extremely difficult for Emperor Hirohito to break the cabinet deadlock like he did had it not been for the two atomic attacks and the entry of Russia into the war against Japan.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Depends on the situation. If you're at war with another tribe, which has a significant chance of wiping you out, you want just enough women to maintain a healthy gene pool, but as many men as possible to do the fighting. If you're a primitive society with a high mortality rate, a 1-year-old child isn't very valuable, because it's unlikely they'll survive long enough to become fertile. If you're a modern society, it doesn't matter much whether you have mostly men or women, because baby-making ability isn't the limiting factor: most of the resources go into raising the child, and anyone can provide them.
No, they were negotiating surrender. They were just not offering unconditional surrender, and the American leadership demanded.
Women can have kids in the future and may even be pregnant now,.
Not on their own they can't.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Do you know how racist it sounds to accuse Nazis of being bloodthirsty savages that burned entire villages along with it's populace?
> Her work is read only by fellow DoD scientists ...
and the NSA, Mossad, Unit 8200, GRU, GIGN, MI-5 (6?), Vatican, Society of the Nine Unknown Men, Sanhedrin, Bilderbergs, Trilateran Committe, Antarctic Neu-Schwabian reptoid HQ, the Vogon-Dogon surveillance mothership and her pet dog, who is actually a Canine Galactic Republic secret agent in disguise...
It seems ironic that he would find the wiping out of another 100,000 people by atom bomb too horrible when the conventional bombing of Tokyo killed that many during Operation Meetinghouse on March 9-10 1945.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
People sometimes get pictures of the conventional Tokyo bombings confused with those of Hiroshima.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
What does his complexion have to do with this?
For example: http://nuclearweaponarchive.or...
With regard to "thermal equilibrium" we have from the above, Quote: "[Note: Many descriptions in the open literature exist dating back to the late seventies claiming that energetic X-rays from the primary are absorbed by the radiation casing (or plastic foam), and are re-emitted at a lower energy - implying that some sort of energy down-shifting mechanism (like X- ray fluorescence) is at work. This is a misconception. The lining of the casing is in local thermal equilibrium with the energy flux impinging on it, and re-radiates X-rays with the same spectrum. The X-ray spectrum softens simply because the photon gas cools as it expands to fill the entire radiation channel.] In physics a closed container of radiation, like the radiation case, is called a "hohlraum". This German word for "cavity" (which has the obvious English cognates "hole" and "room") has been attached to the study of the thermodynamics of radiation since the last century in connection with blackbody radiation. German physicists early in this century used it as a theoretical model for deriving the blackbody radiation laws from quantum mechanics. Energy in a hohlraum necessarily comes into thermal equilibrium and assumes a blackbody spectrum. This is important for obtaining the necessary symmetry for an efficient implosion. Regardless of how uneven the initial energy distribution within the casing is, the radiation field will quickly establish thermal equilibrium throughout the casing - heating all parts to the same temperature."
Hans Bethe said they made complicated bombs in those days. Hmmmm...
E Proelio Veritas.
It has been calculated that if the war had continued for another three weeks, as many people would have died as died in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the Japanese weren't going to capitulate, you can be quite sure the war would have gone on for far longer than three weeks.
Oh lovely cash, is there nothing you cannot lay a value upon! Wait though, the adult will have already contributed a possibly significant portion of their productivity so will have a reduced future value compared to the child, maybe you should consider the futures market?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Like in the Twin Towers?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't due to a history book on the subject. In fact, I know it wasn't because I also know that a crucial part of the Pakistani nuclear program was stolen by a Pakistani nationalist, Munir Ahmad Khan while working in The Netherlands a NATO country stockpiling US warheads at the time.
My conclusion is that if the US 'feds' are so protective of information regarding nuclear weapons that to me would appear as general public information, their efforts are obviously misdirected or maybe have been for some time.
So is American culture. It doesn't mean all Americans are killers.
That's a mildly interesting corner case ... war between belligerents being declared where?
The Feds have been trying to censor this information for decades, notably when The Progressive published an article in the 70s. They've lost every court case at every attempt, so this is no different. It sounds like a bunch of bureaucrats at the DOE trying to justify their salaries, so don't expect anything to come of it. It's a charade, and nothing more.
Tried to get the book for $18 unlimited access. Got this instead: "Offer to be added to cart is no longer valid, please refresh previous page."
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Dear Ms. Streisand,
You can find the entire book at http://cryptome.org/2015/03/building-the-h-bomb-kenneth-ford.zip
Thanks for your attention
Tom Clancy published 'The Sum of All Fears' in 1991. In the afterword, he mentions how it was frighteningly easy to piece together, from public domain data, how to build a multistage thermonuclear bomb. How he was couriered design specs for fabrication devices for the asking. How he felt the need to obfuscate some details, even though he knew there was no point, just to assuage his conscience.
As he points out, it's physics, and it's engineering.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Not sure why this was voted down as this was exactly what I was thinking.
A 20 or 30 year old represents a large investment of resources in society. Also, a young adult is far more productive than a child. If children as a group or adults as a group magically vanished from society, society would be come to a halt if you lost the adults, whereas losing children would be a much smaller waste of time and money.
Except facts and history do not agree with you.
Fact is that Japan offered to surrender BEFORE the bombs were dropped. They had one condition, that their emperor would not be harmed. The US required unconditional surrender.
The US wanted to a) test the effects of radiation on humans (primarily civilian targets were chosen), and b) the US wanted to drop the bombs as a demonstration to (their allay), the Soviet Union.
Not a position piece, but plenty in there to support the above assertions:
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...
I did not know about the offer to surrender with conditions. I do not see a lot of evidence for (a) being a significant factor, but can certainly believe that (b) was a consideration.
if Syria falls entirely and Iraq falls to ISIS, Iran will have two boarders to try and control against an equally tenacious enemy.
How do you figure that Iran would have two "boarders" to deal with if ISIS takes both Iraq and Syria? You know that Iraq sits BETWEEN Syria and Iran, right?
Hiroshima was 80,000 casualties of which 20,000 were soldiers.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Hiroshima was anything *but* a military base. It was one of the least militarized cities in Japan, which is why it had been so little touched by conventional bombings.
One quarter of the casualties from the direct bombing were soldiers. The city served as the headquarters for second general army, the 59th army, and two divisions. Aside from the aforementioned 20,000 military casualties, the bomb also beheaded each of those commands. The city population was approximately 345,000 and there were 40,000 soldiers stationed within the city for a total of 385,000. The bomb killed 20.7% of the people inside the city, 17% of the civilian population, and 50% of the military population.
Another militarily significant feature of Hiroshima that is often overlooked is its status as a transportation hub. Destroying facilities in Hiroshima would greatly impede Japan's ability to move soldiers and material around the mainland. This is one of the things we learned very quickly from the bombing campaign against Germany. Going after transportation targets was a very good way to take down the enemy's ability to produce war material as well as move troops around to defend against offensives and the USAAF general in charge of the atomic bombing was Carl Spaatz who was a huge supporter of transportation bombing who was transferred to the Pacific Theater after the war in Germany was concluded.
Say what you will about the other criteria for target selection, Hiroshima had plenty of military strategic benefits to bombing and it's rivers made it unsuitable for LeMay's firebombing,
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Go look it up. I don't remember if that was the article that told you how to build one at home. The really hard part of that was the centrifuging, where you put the solvent and uranium in a bucket, and spun around as fast as you could in your living room for half an hour....
mark
Thanks for the quote. I wasn't aware Truman had a diary.
If you tell yourself that often enough, is it true?
Many feel the Japanese would have surrendered anyhow.
"It took major balls to make the decision to drop the bomb and it was fucking heroic.:
How come when it happens to you it is not heroic?
Many feel the Japanese would have surrendered anyhow.
The Japanese don't believe that, so why would their enemies believe it?
What do they mean by "would have surrendered anyhow"?
Are they saying that if the Allies had pursued the war with only conventional weapons that eventually the Japanese would have surrendered? That is correct, they would have surrendered eventually because the Allies had far superior military forces. And judging by the rate of progress at the conquest of Okinawa, that would have taken years to accomplish. It's clear that the Japanese War Council's intentions was to fight with a "until the last man" policy.
I don't consider fighting to the death a form of surrender.
So the real question is when does "eventually" happen?
People seem to forget that it was much more than a war between Japan and the USA.
You do know, don't you, that that Pacific war began with the Japanese invasion of China, and that happened years before Pearl Harbor?
You have to keep in mind that the Japanese were still slaughtering thousands of Chinese every day as well as people in other occupied territories.
How many innocent Chinese and Koreans are supposed to die while we wait for Japan to feel better about itself surrendering?
That is a serious question.
Japan had the option of surrendering at anytime.
We know that indeed, some officials in Japan began trying to broach internally how to get out of the war as soon as it began to go wrong.
Almost all of those people were assassinated of executed for treason. That there were such people does not mean that the country was about to surrender. Their deaths prove it was otherwise.
Many feel the Japanese would have surrendered anyhow.
I call BS. Before the atomic bombs, Japan's strategy was to basically arm every citizen and make the invasion of the mainland such a bloody, costly quagmire for the Allies that they would negotiate favorable peace terms. Even the Wikipedia article on Surrender of Japan has a deeper understanding of the issue than whatever you're making up. Even after Hiroshima, the Supreme Council voted against surrender. They thought that maybe the U.S. only had one bomb, or that it lacked the will power to use it again. After Nagasaki (and the Soviet invasion), the Supreme Council still didn't want to surrender, so they tortured a captured U.S. P-51 pilot, and he told them that the U.S. had at least 100 atomic bombs (he was lying). But the cabinet still split on whether to surrender. It took the emperor basically begging the cabinet, for the sake of the millions who were about to be slaughtered, to persuade them to vote in favor of surrender.
Modern navel-gazing revisionist historians really don't appreciate how truly warlike and blood-soaked the entire Japanese culture was before 1945. They were obsessed with killing and torture. The Japanese surrender and subsequent disarmament fundamentally transformed the entire nation.
What you just said ++.
Also, the surrender almost did not happen. After the decision had been made, but before the announcement, some members of the Supreme Council tried to assassinate the Emperor to prevent the surrender.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
"No. Killing the enemy is not murder."
Ah so the killing of the Jews by the German Nazis was not murder either. After all the Jews were seen as enemies by the Nazi's. Makes it all totally legitimate. It also makes everything ISIS do totally legitimate as well. And Pol Pot. And 9/11.
Fascinating logic there. When we kill them its justified when they kill us its murder. You could use it to justify any crime anywhere...
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
"That's a mildly interesting corner case ... war between belligerents being declared where?"
Mid 1980's Israeli attacks on Lebanon attacking civilian areas with bombs - bombs and planes supplied and paid for with money given by US.
In a culture based on revenge and counter revenge 9/11 is just another marker among hundreds. We get them so they get us. They get us so we get them. There is no first shot. We'll (probably) still be fighting them in 50 years..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Your first example is stretching the concept beyond the breaking point, and your others are only a little better.
The point is that its all based on context. In the end context is more about power than right or wrong. The impartial answer is that all deliberate killing is murder or that none is..
In the context of the US vs the Japanese, thousands of Japanese prisoners were summarily shot after being captured. In the later parts of the war many of the fights and battles became little more than one sided slaughters.
Hiroshima was probably justifiable in pushing the Japanese towards unconditional surrender. Nagasaki was more an experiment than anything else, its military value was secondary although it actually ended the war..
We know that the Nazis might have hit New York with a nuclear bomb, by accepting that it was justified for us to use the weapon against them we are also accepting a justification for them to have used it against us.. Its about capability not morals.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
"The impartial answer is that all deliberate killing is murder or that none is.."
That "impartial answer" is not only not accepted in military circles, but also neither in civilian law. There is a huge spectrum. "murder" is *unlawful* deliberate killing, which for example deliberate killing in self-defence isn't.
Depends, hydrogen bomb do leave behind nice glassy fields reflecting all kind of weird colours on sunset!
But Nagasaki was a terrorist target.
Nonsense.
There's a huge amount of propaganda out there on this issue, containing lots of false and misleading statements constructed with considerable cunning and a total lack of integrity (one wonders where the funding for creating that stuff comes from, now that the Cold War is over). Unfortunately, in a situation like this, once somebody makes a false statement, a lot of folks with an agenda will find it convenient to accept it as true.
However, if you study the military history, you'll find the reality is that Nagasaki was a major sea port and industrial center (including the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works), making it unquestionably a military target.
Thousands of military air raids were directed at similar targets during the war, by all the major nations. Blocking or destroying the enemy's ability to produce and / or transport military equipment is a legitimate military tactic, has been for centuries. You'll find countless examples in military history. A factory making war materials is a military target in the same way that a ship transporting those materials is, and the same is true for the docks receiving the cargo, even though civilians are found in the factory, in the ship, and on the docks. Anybody who chooses to work in such a venue in time of war does so knowing that they are working in a legitimate target for the other side.
Note that Nagasaki had already been bombed (with conventional bombs) at least five times before the atomic bomb was dropped (any good history of the air war will go into this). Due to various factors such as weather, it hadn't been heavily damaged in the prior raids, but it wasn't as if it suddenly got put on the target list.
The Japanese had years to evacuate women and children from cities like this that were obvious military targets. Other nations, such as Britain, managed to make this happen in a much shorter time (two million children were evacuated in a matter of weeks, with many more civilians being evacuated in later waves). That the Japanese failed to implement an effective evacuation was unfortunate, and shows the contempt for life, even of their own people, held by the Japanese leaders.
You're free to disagree with the US military's own postwar analysis of the Japan situation (the Strategic Bombing Survey). But that would be what most people would call "revisionist history".
There's nothing revisionist about it. Criticism of the Strategic Bombing Surveys have been going on since the documents were first released, it's nothing new, and scholars are well aware of many flaws in these documents. The strategic bombing proponents before, during, and even after the war had a strong tendency to overestimate the effectiveness of conventional bombing.
Take the example of Okinawa: it was subject to heavy bombing for a long time before the invasion, and yet the battle there (only a few months before the final surrender) ended up being the bloodiest of the entire Pacific war. More people died, in a single battle for a single island -- and not one of the largest or most heavily populated islands of Japan -- than were killed by both atomic bombs put together. Over 140k of the roughly 250k deaths were civilians.
Those facts do exactly constitute a ringing tribute for the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign, and do not provide much support for the idea that the Japanese were on the brink of surrender (whatever that means: how does one unambiguously define what it means to be "on the brink" of something, seems like those words can mean whatever one wants and are therefore meaningless ...).
You might also note that the SBS indicates Japan as having over 2 million troops in the Japanese Isles, and over 9000 aircraft, at the time of surrender. Not a trivial force, especially considering Okinawa was only defended by about 110k.
However, if you study the military history, you'll find the reality is that Nagasaki was a major sea port and industrial center (including the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works), making it unquestionably a military target.
And it made the torpedoes used in Pearl Harbor. If it were hit in 1942, it would have undoubtedly been a military target. But hitting a civilian manufacturing town (even if the civilians were manufacturing implements of war) just days before a surrender, and after talks of surrender had started makes Nagasaki more a terrorist act than Dresden, which was thought quite poorly of at the time (by both enemies and allies).
Hiroshima nuking killed about 20,000 troops. Nagasaki nuking killed less than 200 troops. Two orders of magnitude. The Nagasaki bomb wasn't intended to weaken the military's ability to fight, but was intended to weaken the public's will to fight. One is a military goal, the other terrorism.
Learn to love Alaska
Hiroshima nuking killed about 20,000 troops. Nagasaki nuking killed less than 200 troops. Two orders of magnitude.
Looking at the ratio of military versus non-military deaths does not provide a useful measure here. Over 50,000 civilian sailors died during WW2. Relatively few military personnel died on those civilian ships. The ships were still legitimate targets in the eyes of all combatants.
But hitting a civilian manufacturing town (even if the civilians were manufacturing implements of war) just days before a surrender, and after talks of surrender had started
If you look into this, you'll find the rumors regarding "talks of surrender" are greatly (and cleverly) exaggerated. Other posts on this discussion have gone into this, so I won't repeat them.
Historian Robert Maddox has more to say about this. For example:
'Some have argued that while the first bomb might have been required to achieve Japanese surrender, dropping the second constituted a needless barbarism. However, the record shows otherwise. American officials believed more than one bomb would be necessary because they assumed Japanese hard-liners would minimize the first explosion or attempt to explain it away as some sort of natural catastrophe, which is precisely what they did. In the three days between the bombings, the Japanese minister of war, for instance, refused even to admit that the Hiroshima bomb was atomic. A few hours after Nagasaki, he told the cabinet that "the Americans appeared to have one hundred atomic bombs they could drop three per day. The next target might well be Tokyo.'
Eamon Doherty has similar comments in his book.
Killings of civilians by the Germans and the Japanese in WW2 are commonly referred to as "murder".
If you look into this, you'll find the rumors regarding "talks of surrender" are greatly (and cleverly) exaggerated.
After Hiroshima, the Allies requested a surrender. Japan surrendered. The allies rejected the surrender (unacceptable terms). Nagasaki was nuked. Japan revised their terms of surrender. That one, still with terms, was accepted.
Which of those sentences are false? If none are false and they are in chronological order, the US committed mass murder to negotiate better terms of surrender.
Learn to love Alaska
Except facts and history do not agree with you.
Fact is that Japan offered to surrender BEFORE the bombs were dropped. They had one condition, that their emperor would not be harmed. The US required unconditional surrender.
The US wanted to a) test the effects of radiation on humans (primarily civilian targets were chosen), and b) the US wanted to drop the bombs as a demonstration to (their allay), the Soviet Union.
Not a position piece, but plenty in there to support the above assertions:
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEB...
I did not know about the offer to surrender with conditions. I do not see a lot of evidence for (a) being a significant factor, but can certainly believe that (b) was a consideration.
You didn't know about the offer to surrender because the actual Japanese government never made such an offer, that is neither the War council nor the Imperial council.
An individual Japanese Naval officer in Europe said he thought it could be arranged, but that person did not appear to represent Japan in any meaningful way.