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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."
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Manicheans believe(d) in ethical dualism, but not all "good-vs-evil" ventures are Manichean, or even Zoroasterian.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This whole vid is well worth your time (seriously, make a note to watch the whole thing today if you haven't), but the last section (starting at 14:20) is particularly striking in how few war deaths have occured since the invention (and rapid development/manufacture) of nuclear weapons.
As horrible as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were they have also served as severe deterrents against nuclear usage in war since.
Unfortunately they won't deter true terrorists that are willing to die for their cause. I can imagine that a container can get loaded with a nuke and then delivered to the port of Los Angeles, New York or Amsterdam where it will go off.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If that is true was have reduced the amount by 10's of thousands.
Japan was trying to surrender. It just wasn't willing to surrender unconditionally, which is what the US government demanded.
But, in general, I agree. Nuclear weapons have probably been the best thing ever invented for bringing relative peace to the world. Of course, one day, they'll be used again and millions will die, but, until then, they've probably been more beneficial than harmful.
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.
Re " 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.""
Japan was defeated, seeking a way to surrender into 1945 and the US had a 2 versions of a new weapon to test on undamaged, populated cities.
The "experiment" part was to find two cities that still remained intact in Japan.
The US "patriotism" was a cover to stop a re emerging France and the helpful UK from placing conditions or laws on US mil and civilian nuclear expansion after 1945.
The US did not want to have to share any control with the UK or be forced to pay some France patent for early nuclear work.
The UK wanted to offer a lot of tech to the US but for that early deal wanted equal say in nuclear use, policy and profits after the war.
The only secret was how the UK was cut of out late design work and had to race to secure its own methods, experts and designs before the US removed UK top staffs clearances.
Thankfully the UK had Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... who was able to secure the UK manufacture, design and raw materials away from the US just in time.
The UK had its MAUD Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... later used the Tube Alloys codename https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and with Canadian help was able to break free of US nuclear restrictions.
Churchill's Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics (Friday 20 September 2013)
http://www.theguardian.com/boo...
The main lesson the UK, Canada, Australia and France learned was that the US would take their early nuclear work and ideas but it was a one way deal.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I wish the same effort of the Manhattan project or the moon race was replicated for things like a cure for some cancers, or clean energy, or food, and all the other things we desperately need. And it doesn't have to be a single country effort.
No one should have to apologize for their ancestors. It's meaningless at best.
Every time they get used, there's even a chance of them bringing absolute peace to the world, for a few million years at least.
You can't hide nuclear tests all that well. Where and when should this test have taken place?
I am not ignorant, although it appears that Wikipedia may be incomplete on this point.
I don't have the sources in front of me, but there were multiple Japanese attempts at surrender negotiations before the second bomb was dropped. As I recall, the later ones dropped all of the other conditions--they only wanted their emperor preserved.
But I don't have the primary sources handy so--for the sake of argument--let me just concede that as well. Let's say Japan wanted territorial integrity and a bunch of other stuff as well. Do you still think that bombing them again three days later was the only way? Backed-into-a-corner, the American war machine literally had no other options whatsoever? I would suggest that, at minimum, one option would have been to give the Japanese government a little more time to investigate the bombing and educate their leaders and advisers about it. Three days is an incredibly short amount of time, especially pre-satellite, pre-internet and with fog of war chaos everywhere.
> There are still nine nuclear nations that, between them, have stockpiled 16,300 weapons.
Nine may be right, but 16300 seems low. Anything under 19,000 is delusional or doesn't include nukes declaredly stored in a totally disassembled state.
USA ~6500
USSR ~7000 (Their start was partly espionage based, but significance of soviet in-house effort is much underestimated in the west. They had many scientific geniuses and very tiger-ish organizers/managers among their ranks and got practicable H-bomb even before USA.)
Britain ~400-500 (Partly with US help, partly in-house developed)
France ~350-400 (In-house developed A and H bombs after being denied US tech. Quite impressive for a country which, at the time, wasn't much industrialized and especially lagged in heavy industries.)
China ~700 (Got soviet fission bomb blueprints before the two countries fell apart.)
India ~110 (First explosion in the mid-1970 as the Smiling Buddha civilian earthworks project. Abandoned for 20 years due to intl' outcry, then restarted as military nukes project)
Pakistan ~70 (Actual souvereign capability doubted because USA somehow maintans a degree of control over those devices, or at least publicly claimed to be able to take physical control of them via spec-ops missions, if needed in case of an islamist coup.)
Zionist entity ~220-400 (large, but uncertain numbers due to US coverup and no one but Mordechai Vanunu dared to talk about them)
North Korea ~9-12 (primitive nukes with unreliable yields, designed and built without computers after to an unsuccessful US cyber attack, but anyhow they can explode and that's what matters)
Dishonourable mentions:
Apartheid South Africa - received fission bombs from the zionist entity in exchange for 550 tons of yellow unranium ore and hosting the zionist neutron bomb test in the Vela incident. Cuban troop landing prevented nuking of Angola. All the 6+1 nukes were dismantled and exfiltrated to the USA as the apartheid regime fell.
Kazakhstan - inherited several hundred nukes from the fall apart of USSR. Gave them up all in exchange for security guarantee as part of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Now they are on russian leash and licking Putin's feet to survive as useful minions, becasue the treaty ain't worth its pulp paper. (Cue the Ukraine below!)
Ukraine - inherited ~2500 nukes from the fall apart of USSR. Gave them up all in exchange for security guarantee as part of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Treaty was violated in 2014 by russian invasion, Ukraine is now being partitioned and the treaty patrons USA, UK, France, China do nothing.
Morale of the story: if your nation wants to live, obtain nukes and never give them up, no matter what. Eminent pupil of the lesson: North Korea. Dunces: Iraq, Libya, Syria (this one gave up chem WMD rather than nukes, but same logic). What happened to those donkeys? They got slaughtered to make sausages. Next dunce: Iran, as they just gave up 90% completed nukes in exchange for a piece of stamped paper with, which they can't even cleanse their posteriors, because muslims use water for that purpose. Soon they will be bombed back to stone ages by Tel-Aviv.
I'm pretty skeptical of those numbers (I'm also skeptical that the Japanese disengagement happened as fast as you imply), but I'll concede all of that for the moment--this is still a false dichotomy. You're still begin from the conclusion "the second bombing was justified, because otherwise X" and working your way backwards. It's simply not intellectually honest.
Think about it for five seconds and see if you can come up with an alternative that doesn't vaporize 40,000 civilians. Here's one: let's say we drop the second bomb on top of Mount Fuji. Just to bluff and say "hey look, we've got so many of these damn things we can waste 'em, just to give you a show." I do believe that would have made our point pretty clear. Nuking another major civilian population 3 days later is simply not necessary by any stretch of the imagination, even if we concede all kinds of stuff up front.
(I hope I don't have to reiterate disclaimers into every post: yes, I understand it was a different time with different rules and a far different enemy than anything we've faced recently. The point isn't to beat ourselves up about it; the point is simply to have the moral and mental clarity to call a spade a spade.)
we don't NEED another Manhattan technological solution - there's plenty of water, food, power and medicine for everyone already
what we do need is a Manhattan-level reorganisational solution - reduce inequalities, eliminate profligate waste, distribute intelligently.
but those with the beans don't want to give 'em up easily, regardless of how they came about getting them beans
and the Citizen decision has fucked us all sideways, because our voices have been muted to the extreme, disenfranchised by the almighty corrupting influence of corporate lobbyism
The list of military leaders who thought the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary if not outright barbaric is quite long.
Some choice quotes from that link which itself is a summary of a much more thorough analysis.
"[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender..."
-- Admiral William D. Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff
"The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan..."
-- Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet
"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..."
--- President Dwight D. Eisenhower (then General Eisenhower)
"The war might have ended weeks earlier, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."
-- General Douglas MacArthur
You can't hide nuclear tests all that well. Where and when should this test have taken place?
In 2015, you're right...
In 1945, you're wrong...
However, the OP is mistaken, Germany was on their way to developing a nuke, but frankly were 2-3 years away. Japan wasn't even close and frankly wasn't even sure what it was when it hit them.
Every time they get used, there's even a chance of them bringing absolute peace to the world, for a few million years at least.
Cute, and lots of young people have been brought up to think that, but it isn't true.
All the nukes of the world wouldn't wipe us out, the idea that we can destroy the world several times over is just propaganda.
There is an illusion today among younger people that somehow our world isn't full of evil people,
Basically... yes.
This is one of the things I don't like about the anti-nuclear parties in the UK, like the greens. They say they'll scrap the deterrent and then go on a campaign worldwide telling people how they don't need nuclear weapons. Well, I'm sure Putin will see the error of his ways when being educated by the greens, and won't at all be rubbing his hands with glee about the weakening defensive capabilities of NATO.
The genie is out of the bottle and you can't invent it.
(uninvent?)... but again yes.
Not only that, but unlike in fantasy books where we might like to read about the long lost skills of the ancients, that isn't happening. Technology is advancing at a fearsome pace, and there are plenty of "dual use" technologies escpecially when it comes to things like medical isotopes.
Laser isotope separation is a thing, and a very useful one, but also promises to be able to separate fissile isotopes with vastly greater efficiency than gas centrifuges. The basic tech is based on precision lasers (another immensely useful tech) and high speed electronics, and those are only going to get better and better.
My ancient broken eeepc also has more computing power than the Americans could ever have dreamed of while they were creating the bomb originally and simulating things. Not to mention that algorithms originally developed to simulate such things have been and continue to be developed to a vastly more advanced state because they're useful for all sorts of things, for example machine learning, which has mathematical properties very similar to many physical systems.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They did have seismographs in 1945.
The Samurai rather commit harakiri than surrendering, its all about pride and honor
Japan being the land of the Samurai, thinking of surrendering is itself a blasphemy, something which is much worse than death itself
The talk of "Japan's surrender attempts" is nothing more than heresy, a fabrication by those who subscribe to historical revisionism
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You plan to launch these Nuclear Weapons at whom exactly? Terrorists don't have a home and I assure you, on a long enough time-line, Terrorists will get their hands on something Nuclear and detonate it.
That Country will be looking for someone to blame.
As for World Wars, we should be looking at China. I'd place every Penny I own that China would be the instigator for that War.
No one should have to apologize for their ancestors. It's meaningless at best.
There's a difference between ancestors from hundreds of years ago and your grandparents' generation.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There is an illusion today among younger people that somehow our world isn't full of evil people
In an age where you can watch people being beheaded or tortured to death by ISIL on your phone, I find this hard to believe.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Real nukes are complicated and delicate systems, it takes lots of practice to get one working and more importantly maintain it in a functional state.
I think the rather more realistic fear is that terrorists will steal a bomb, not make one themselves. And, so the argument goes, the more nuclear bombs there are to steal, the easier it becomes to steal one.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I like how the submitter tries to sound intellectual by using terms like "Manichean" despite writing garbled phrases like "leaves civilizational scale death-becoming a technical possibility."
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).
The USA has not been in a military conflict with someone during how many of those wars? In fact, it's been a constant low-level state of world war ever since WWII.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The USA has not been in a military conflict with someone during how many of those wars?
That was a horrible thing to write. What I meant to write was "The USA has not been in a military conflict with someone during how many days since those wars?" The answer is pathetically low. We've been in a conflict with someone basically the whole time. Endless war is the new normal, and you didn't even notice.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
While I hope nuclear weapons are never used again, I find the annual "feel pity" for the Japanese sentiment to be misplaced. Could someone cite the number of people (in the millions) who were killed due to Japanese aggression starting in the 1930s? As set forth in Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, 300,000 Chinese were raped, tortured and killed in that city alone. A Japanese paper covered a contest between 2 officers to see who could kill 100 Chinese the fastest with swords. Pearl Harbor, Bataan death march, POWs killed can be added to the toll.
I do not blame today's Japanese for those acts anymore than today's German's are responsible for Hitler. I do object to the implication that the atomic bombings were pointless and that these ceremonies are not put in the context of historical facts.
The Trinity Test site is open to visitors twice a year. It's a very surreal experience. You can still find tiny bits of trinitite on the ground there.
I also find it fascinating how many people today are debating whether or not dropping the bomb was necessary. What is the point of such a debate? You can't change what happened. Nobody has the cajones to use one now. It's all bloviating.
As a prosperous city in a free country. Had the war gone differently, it might have ended up in a regime that would have looked like North Korea, or been a battleground on which a much larger number of civilians would have died in combat.
Any good final-year engineering or physics student could make a gun-type bomb and expect it to work first time.
Germany was not working hard on developing a nuke, since their top nuclear scientists (deliberately or otherwise) made a miscalculation that said a nuclear bomb would have to be about a hundred times its actual size. They were looking into radiological weapons.
While the Japanese weren't anywhere near close to detonating a nuke, and I don't think they had the materials anyway, they did have nuclear scientists and a couple of atomic bomb programs (one for the Army, one for the Navy). Neither went very far, but the Japanese did indeed know what had happened.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Unfortunately they won't deter true terrorists that are willing to die for their cause.
Did you mean, they won't deter true terrorists that are willing to kamikaze?
Well, maybe the key is to not kill their leaders and instead negotiate with them.
There is an illusion today among younger people that somehow our world isn't full of evil people,
Evil is a thing you do. It's a verb. There's no division into 'good' people and 'evil' people - this is not a Disney cartoon with handsome, prancing heroes and dastardly villains with sycophants as offsiders. There's no musical cue or colouring choice to guide you into knowing whose arrogance and misogyny and murdering you need to contextualise as the forgivable failings of the good and whose wrongdoing arises because they are evil.
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.
Stalin was an ally - at least for a while. So was Osama Bin Laden. And Saddam Hussein. And the US.
A million people died in Iraq. A million. At this point, nobody as proffered a credible reason why a million people were killed. Were they all teh evil?
Evil is a thing you do. It's a verb. There's no division into 'good' people and 'evil' people
Well, you're welcome to your viewpoint, but I disagree...
this is not a Disney cartoon with handsome, prancing heroes and dastardly villains with sycophants as offsiders. There's no musical cue or colouring choice to guide you into knowing whose arrogance and misogyny and murdering you need to contextualise as the forgivable failings of the good and whose wrongdoing arises because they are evil.
What a wonderful way to whitewash the whole subject and remove any responsibility... Everything is relative in your world, everything is ok...
Thankfully there are rough men (and now women) who are willing to stand up and do what is required, so you can sit there in your safe, warm house and make such absurd comments.
It's an example of a gross failure to estimate casualties via a major failure in intelligence gathering.
The common cause was not "stop Hitler, defeat the Japanese". While that may have been a cause initially, Hitler was already history and the Japanese offered surrender several times, but accepting it was dragged out by the US because Japan was the only enemy left in the war that could be nuked without fear of retribution. The sole purpose in the end was not to defeat Japan, but to demonstrate to the Soviets that the US has a big, deadly weapon...and not just one, but two and that they work. The hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians paid with their lives just so that the US could make a point! Sadly, neither the US government nor many other governments have learned a single thing from this sheer insanity.
Evil is a thing you do. It's a verb. There's no division into 'good' people and 'evil' people
Well, you're welcome to your viewpoint, but I disagree...
Too bad. You don't get to redefine concepts that are millennia old to suit your purposes.
this is not a Disney cartoon with handsome, prancing heroes and dastardly villains with sycophants as offsiders. There's no musical cue or colouring choice to guide you into knowing whose arrogance and misogyny and murdering you need to contextualise as the forgivable failings of the good and whose wrongdoing arises because they are evil.
What a wonderful way to whitewash the whole subject and remove any responsibility... Everything is relative in your world, everything is ok...
Are you so stupid that you replied to my remarks without reading them?
Thankfully there are rough men (and now women) who are willing to stand up and do what is required, so you can sit there in your safe, warm house and make such absurd comments.
Who are these rough men you are talking about? ISIS?
Too bad. You don't get to redefine concepts that are millennia old to suit your purposes.
Neither do you, and you're wrong. You saying you're not doesn't make it so.
Are you so stupid that you replied to my remarks without reading them?
Pot, meet kettle... You didn't actually reply to what I wrote, you simply attacked me...
My point stands, everything is relative and ok in your world, you don't have any sense of right or wrong, good or evil...
There are indeed evil people in the world, it isn't just a verb, it is also a noun.
Who are these rough men you are talking about? ISIS?
I'm not surprised you would say that, given your rainbow happy world view.
Try the US military, the UK military, etc...
Please, go back to your hippie liberal coffee bar and leave the real world to those who live in it.
Neither do you, and you're wrong. You saying you're not doesn't make it so.
Would you like me to quote from ancient manuscripts to prove that doing evil things is what makes you evil, not your race or tribe?
Are you so stupid that you replied to my remarks without reading them?
Pot, meet kettle... You didn't actually reply to what I wrote, you simply attacked me...
Because you claimed that my assertion: that evil is an action (i.e 'sin' to give an older name) is somehow relativism, whereas your claim is that: the following is okay: murdering, raping, blowing the arms off kids, electric shocks through the scrotum, claiming that a village is a military base at the UN and then blowing it up, even though it's a village, bearing false witness about the presence of WMD manufacturing facilities in another country. Killing 1 million people. These things are OK, in your mind, because of the team that did them.
THAT'S relativism! You claim that younger people today don't understand evil and don't know what evil is. How utterly ironic: you should introduce yourself! You applaud murder and genocide. Introduce yourself to these kids, and then they will know the face of evil.
Who are these rough men you are talking about? ISIS?
Try the US military, the UK military, etc...
No thanks. I prefer my marriage go ahead without being blown up, my kids retain their limbs and my scrotum unwired.