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Twilight of the Bomb
merbs writes: On the 70th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb, Motherboard's Brian Merchant toured its crater with one of the last living Manhattan Project scientists. Here's the inside story of the road to the bomb, with the 90-year-old Murray Peshkin—the youngest man to work on the Project that built the bomb, and the first to set foot in its crater. From the story: "There are still nine nuclear nations that, between them, have stockpiled 16,300 weapons. And this network of decades-old nuclear armaments, some of which are still aimed at various strategic choke points around the globe, leaves civilizational scale death-becoming a technical possibility. Before all that, though, the atom bomb was one of the most successful science experiments of all time. It was the product of billions of dollars in government spending, hundreds of the world’s top scientists working in concert, in secret, in a city built from scratch in the desert, and a bygone patriotism united by common, Manichean cause: stop Hitler, defeat the Japanese."
There is an illusion today among younger people that somehow our world isn't full of evil people, that another Hitler or Stalin won't emerge, that world peace is at hand and that only small regional conflicts far away will happen in the future.
WWI was supposed to be "the war to end all wars", and it was horribly out done by WWII just 20 years later. We've had, more or less, 70 years of world peace since then, depending on how you look at it (there were a whole lot of regional wars during that time).
I don't like nuclear weapons, I hate them, they are horrible things that I wish had no use. But if wishes were fishes we'd all eat for free, and wishing for them to all go away misses the point. If just one evil power has them, then we all need them, or rather, a few reasonable and responsible powers need them.
Oh sure, the total number might go down, we might get down to 1,000 each for Russia and the US, maybe 300 for UK and France, etc. But we just aren't going to zero. The genie is out of the bottle and you can't invent it.
Murray Peshkin does not have to take pride in his work, but he should not feel that he is party to a war crime either
Lets not be deluded. Killing 80 000 civilians in one go (and many many more because in the aftermath of the bomb ) is a war crime. Curtis LeMay was man enough to recognise that strategic bombing, that is the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets to break the will of the enemy was a war crime. And he would have ended as a criminal had he not been on the victorious side. History and law is written by the victors always. And many times this skews the moral analysis of the events.
Lets not be deluded. Killing 80 000 civilians in one go (and many many more because in the aftermath of the bomb ) is a war crime.
It is only a crime if you lose...
No, that isn't sarcasm... it is the truth... what is a "crime" is determined by the winner...
There are really no rules in war, either you win, in which case anything you did is ok, or you lose, in which case it doesn't matter how nice you were about it...
Every time, every time this knee-jerk excuse comes out. As if we had exactly two options in the entire universe. Because if we didn't nuke them or immediately invade them then... what? They were poised to invade California?
Give me a fucking break. There more than two options on the table. For example, they considered an option to invite Axis observers to watch as little boy was harmlessly detonated in the desert, but they turned it down because they were eager to see what kind of damage the thing would do in the real world. I'm not out to vilify the USA here--the rules of war were different back then and no one hands were clean (certainly not the Japanese.) The atomic bombs weren't the worse thing that happened in the war, and on the whole I think we behaved better than the Axis powers. And our ultimate aims were obviously much more noble.
But this brainlessly patriotic excuse is just so fucking pathetic. I could grant all of the premises, including the false dichotomy. So, for the sake of argument, I concede Hiroshima. And now... what of Nagasaki? Three fucking days later? Because their initial response to Hiroshima was almost an unconditional surrender but there was some question marks about the dispensation of their emperor, that justified another nuke?
It was wrong. Get over it. Jefferson was a great president even if he fucked up on slavery. And WWII was a good war even if we were clearly, at times, more ruthless than we had to be. But 70+ years later, this intellectual dishonesty is pointless and downright embarrassing--no different than the stubborn Japanese refusals to fully acknowledge their atrocities in China.
There was a belief though that the US only had the resources for a single bomb. The US expected an instant surrender, but it took time for the realization of what happened to sink in as much of the damage was similar to that of fire bombing and direct damage from the blast was not as large as damage from the ensuing fires. Ie, it looked like a repeat of the Tokyo attacks in some ways, which definitely cemented the view of the US as evil aggressors for targeting civilians directly.
Flip things around. If the Germans had gotten the bomb first and dropped one over the top of New York City would the US have surrendered?
It took two nuclear weapons to convince Japan to surrender.
No, it didn't. Japan was close to surrender anyway. The government felt that the situation was hopeless and a negotiated surrender would be the best option. The military was still holding out, but even they knew that there was little chance of reaching a stalemate by that point. Moves were afoot to negotiate with the US over terms, and of course the US knew that because some members of the Japanese government were talking to them to see what kind of deal might be possible.
Of course we can never know for sure if Japan would have surrendered without the bombs, but that in itself is a false dichotomy. A demonstration of the bomb, with Japanese military officials invited to see it, was considered by the US. It's hard to justify why that was not even tried first, before moving directly to the bombing of civilians.
The reason was simply that the US wanted to know the effects of atomic weapons on cities full of civilians, because it assumed that in the future other countries would also develop the bomb and might attack them with it. That's why they did two in quick succession, to test two different bomb designs. Again, if you disagree you have to justify the use of a second bomb only three days later, before the Japanese had time to really understand what had happened and make the political moves necessary to surrender.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
the firebombing of Dresden and other European cities and the nukes on Japan were truly barbaric acts, purposefully designed to kill large numbers of civilians, each of these events slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians in a very short time.
Perhaps, but you weren't fighting in 1941... you didn't see and experience Germany on the rise, sweeping over most of Europe, seemingly unstoppable...
The West at that time was quite frightened of Germany and was willing to do whatever it took to stop them, including firebombing cities.
Even in 1944 when it appeared we were winning, there were small signs that Germany might have an edge and make a comeback... The V1 and V2, the ME-262, the ME-163, and other weapons that were way beyond anything we had.
It is so easy, in 2015, to judge what was done 70 year ago, but since you didn't live through it, you really have no idea what it was like... My Grandfather fought for Canada in WWII and he has shared many stories with me, and I've talked to other vets over the years who also served... their viewpoint is worth far more than your Monday Morning Quarterback take on it...
Of course we can never know for sure if Japan would have surrendered without the bombs, but that in itself is a false dichotomy. A demonstration of the bomb, with Japanese military officials invited to see it, was considered by the US. It's hard to justify why that was not even tried first, before moving directly to the bombing of civilians.
Yes we can. The attempted coup by members of the military after it became known that the Emperor was contemplating surrender after the bombs were dropped shows that there were those perfectly willing to continue fighting even though there was no hope of defeat. The fact that you had Japanese soldiers walking out of jungles 10, 20, 40 years after the war; the countless islands where, out of 15000-20000 defenders you had survivors numbering less than 100; when Japanese soldiers would clutch primed grenades to head or chest sitting next to a loaded rifle or placing the muzzle of their rifle into their mouths at the first sight of a US Marine rather than risk a dishonorable surrender gives argument to the fact that plenty of Japanese would have willingly continued to fight, with many more following them along the path to death and destruction.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil