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."

Comments

It is what it is

[TWX]

The United States is very good at estimating military casualties. It's necessary when war is waged on a huge scale, and good numbers are needed if the war effort is to be as efficient as possible.

The United States had a million Purple Hearts manufactured to award to the soldiers expected to be killed or wounded in action in the invasion of Japan. They're still using that stock today, after Korea, after Vietnam after Grenada, after Panama, after Afghanistan, after Iraq.

Even at the highest estimated death toll, less than a quarter of the number of people died due to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as would have been killed or wounded on just the American side of a full invasion of Japan.

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.

Re:It is what it is

[serviscope_minor]

As always the situation is never as simple as people like and hindsight is 20/20. The US was waging an incredibly bloody war against the Japanese and wanted it over. Fast, and while Japan was close to surrender, the military was still holding out, and that, after all is the important bit.They also had a new superweapon they wanted to test (though the practical effects were really no worse than the massed bomber raids). It was also clear that while the bomber raids were incredibly damaging, they didn't seem to induce surrender.

But, it's not just that.

They needed Japan to surrender RIGHT NOW, because their other allies, the Communists, were busy overrunning everything in their path, and the US government really did not want Japan to become a Communist sattelite state, so they needed immediate, unconditional surrender, so that it was done and dusted by the time the communist armies could arrive.

It was never as simple as just wanting tosee how good it was on civillian populations.