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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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.