this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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The history behind Japan is far more complex. No one can tell what would have been the worst outcome but there were worse outcomes than the two bombs.
Though one interesting thing is that we only had 30 years between WW1 and WW2, both being horrible wars, and it has now been almost 80 years without WW3. What was the big change between the first two that made us so scared of a third?
I was in the business for a while, and I’m not going to offer an opinion about to what extent mutually assured destruction prevented a third world war and whether the risks of a catastrophic event were borne out except in the hindsight that it didn’t happen yet. My views on the questions have evolved over time.
I would point out that, had the US remained the sole nuclear power, the world would possibly not have seen a lack of a major war in Europe, and that the intention of the US developing strategic weapons wasn’t to prevent war. The US didn’t volunteer nuclear technology to the Soviets in order to create detente because we wanted to balance on a knife edge for the better part of a century. The US tried to prevent the USSR from developing such weapons, and has tried experiment hard to prevent other countries from developing them. The DPRK wants weapons so they won’t be invaded. The US doesn’t want them to have weapons because we think they’ll make the situation less stable. I’m not saying the DPRK should have weapons. I’m just saying that narratives are conveniently spun to justify the things countries want to do anyway.
MAD (mutually assured destruction) that nukes kill 70-90% of your population in 24-48 hours then kills most of the rest in a 4 year global nuclear dust driven winter. The UN has stopped 100% of the scenarios where Ww3 aka MAD happens.
The highest casualty rate I've ever seen published for nuclear war was somewhere around 40 to 50% of the population of the US. Interestingly, despite a nuclear strike of over 25,000 nuclear weapons, Russia was expected to win that one with less than 25% of their population killed.
And there is no proven scientific basis for a nuclear winter to be the results of nuclear war. Even less so today, considering that the United States and Russia have far far fewer nuclear weapons then they did in the past. Russia only has a few thousand functional nuclear weapons, most of which are not in a state that could actually be deployed in a war.
Russia likes to say they have a big and powerful military. The us likes to say "we have a weak military, please more congress money". Based in Ukraine, I think the us would win (if you can call it that) in MAD.
Also you are right that the anti ICBM capabilities has increased in each nation. Also each nation is increasing the ICBM nuke speed to render the anti ICBM ineffective. I hope we never have to find out beyond "theory"
With the first 2 bombs, there was only 1 country that had nukes, and the rate of production was slow.
After Japan's surrender, no democratic country is going to want to initiate a whole new war of a similar scale to wipe out other countries. Countries make bad decisions sometimes it'd still be insane to do that, if for no other reason than the public would disapprove.
Fast forward a few years, you had multiple countries building up nuclear stockpiles, hydrogen bombs that were orders of magnitude more powerful were invented, and you had development of ICBM's that were difficult to intercept and could reach anywhere on Earth in 30 minutes
Had Japan not surrendered, we had another nuke en route (The demon core was around already, we just had to slap it into the mechanism), and could have had a fourth reasonably quickly. (We had processed a huge chunk of the fuel for the fourth pit before we dropped our first bomb) It was just after that where the US couldn’t just keep setting them off because the timescales to generate the plutonium was measured in several weeks.
Last Podcast on the Left did a decent, though immensely gory, series on the Manhattan Project recently.
I know your question at the end is rhetorical but for anyone who didn't get it, the change that made us so afraid is nuclear/atomic weapons.
I have no doubt that had they not been dropped on Japan, they would have been used in Korea. All the theory in the world wouldn't be enough to instill the rightful existential terror nukes cause.
The difference being that with Korea, it would have already had a fusion booster, which even in early designs increased the yield by a factor of 20-100 (Edit: depending on which pure-fission generation you compare to).
Edit: Also, I feel we need some tests again that get recorded with modern equipment - the old footage seems like from another world. People should be able to see it in 8K and VR to get properly scared of them.
There is no footage of modern tests because they have been conducted underground since the 60s in order to reduce contamination of the biosphere.
That as well.
Whether dropping the bomb was morally right is sort of irrelevant. It was almost certainly going to be used, and it's better it was the early ones than later ones. Just not in human nature to understand the consequences until our noses are rubbed in it