this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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I've read somewhere that he never regretted building the bomb, because he believed it prevented more wars/deaths from happening. Maybe I can find the article
Edit: Found it. https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.derstandard.de%2Fstory%2F3000000180215%2Fzehn-fakten-ueber-j-robert-oppenheimer It's german though. He even sued an author who wrote a play where oppenheimer was struggling with his doings
I think he was right in that belief. Invasion of Japan by US forces would be far more deadly and devastating to both nations in terms of lost lives.
Apparently the purple hearts manufactured in anticipation of such an invasion during WWII are still awarded today with about 120k still in stock.
After the absolute horrors of Saipan and Okinawa an invasion of the main islands would have made Stalingrad look like a playground
Uh huh.
So why did they need to drop two?
Japan was unwilling to surrender for a long time even though Japanese cities got bombed on a near daily basis near the end of the war. The US gambled on, for a lack of a better word, the wow-factor of the atomic bomb. They guessed correctly that Japan’s leaders would assume that there’s no way in hell the US could produce another one of these “special” bombs. They dropped the second one to basically say: “Hey, we got a huge stockpile of these things so we can do this as long as you like”. Or to put it simply: It was a show of force. When Nagasaki got hit Japanese leaders were in a council meeting about the Hiroshima bombing and the Soviet’s declaration of war on Japan and even after the news arrived in Tokyo half the cabinet was still insistent on their own terms of surrender. They didn’t know how many more bombs America had and that fear played a huge part in Hirohito’s decision to end the war after more than 14 hours of debate that day.
Exactly. Simply having enough fissile material for a bomb was a huge limiting factor for building a bomb. It took several years of refining for the US to have enough for the Trinity Test, Fat Man, and Little Boy. Any physicists in Japan at the time had to have known that fissile material was a limiting factor, given that the theoretical concept of an atomic bomb was well-known physics by the time. The second bomb was to prove Japan couldn't count on the US having exhausted all their fissile material on the first bomb.
Yes, it was, but not for Japan. If they had given Japan more than three days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki to think it over they'd have likely surrendered, but defeating Japan wasn't really the point. It was a show of force for the rest of the world (especially the USSR) to say "we are the new rulers of the world, bow down and submit or we'll glass you too".
The first one to prove that it exists, the second to prove that America had the resources, manufacturing, and still had the balls to do it again even after seeing what it did. America dropped one to get the world's attention and respect, and again to establish horrifying dominance. "I can do this all day" energy.
i.e. to prove they were evil lol
Unconditional surrender was not assured the first time. It was the second time. The Japanese do not give up easily.
The conventional ordinance dropped on Tokyo killed many more people than Little Boy killed in Hiroshima. The Japanese barely surrendered after the nuclear attacks. I would suggest listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History miniseries Countdown to Armageddon if you want to know more.
lol wtf does "barely surrendered" mean? It was an unconditional surrender that happened less than 2 weeks after Hiroshima!
Again, the first bomb is debatable and I'm not interested in arguing about that. But the second was unjustified. 3 fucking days
The Japanese were prepared to fight to the last man, woman, or child to defend the home islands. They were geared for war in a way that is hard to understand from a modern perspective. They were propagandized heavily.
The other thing to recognize was that the USSR had declared war on Japan the day before Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki. This violated the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact. Before this there was hope that the Soviets could advocate for better terms for Japanese surrender. The Japanese Supreme Council was firmly opposed to ending the war. After Nagasaki, Hirohito intervened in the council and ended the war.
This is propaganda. The Japanese aren't bug people. They wouldn't actually fight to the last man, woman, or child.
Unconditional surrender was not the only option for an end to the war. There were three days between the bombings. That's not enough time to hammer out any kind of agreement - hell that's not even enough time to confirm the devastation of the first bomb!
Hiroshima was debatable, but Nagasaki was absolutely a war crime. Between both bombings over a hundred thousand civilians were butchered (some estimates over a quarter million). Imagine all the children that burned to death in twisted shrieking agony, babies that had only been born that year turned into lumps of roasted flesh, innocent lives murdered for the sake of a battlefield test for America's toys to establish America as the new king of the world.
The problem with that is, Japan was willing to fight on after the first bomb. They tried labelling it a natural disaster at first; if the second bomb wasn't dropped, they probably wouldn't have surrendered. Sure they could have waited longer to confirm that, but then there's more troops dying on both sides while they wait - more unnecessary deaths.
Okay, so the Japanese lost lives in every major battle, with the deadliest battle being the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. During the two-month battle over the island, over 100,000 Japanese soldiers died and 12,000 American soldiers died.
For comparison, in the three days between the bombs anywhere from 129,000 to 226,000 civilians were killed.
There is no comparison and no justification.
I read somewhere the shock was more due to the bomb being way more powerful than anticipated... I am not certain though.
I can imagine him saying that, and I can imagine long drunken nights staring into a mirror before he did his best to move on.