I know this is just a meme, but I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about something I think is super interesting. Physicists didn’t build the bomb (edit: nor were they particularly responsible for its design).
David Kaiser, an MIT professor who is both a physicist and a historian (aka the coolest guy possible) has done extensive research on this, and his work is particularly interesting because he has the expertise in all the relevant fields do dig through the archives.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read him, but he concludes that the physics was widely known outside of secret government operations, and the fundamental challenges to building an atomic bomb are engineering challenges – things like refining uranium or whatever. In other words, knowing that atoms have energy inside them which will be released if it is split was widely known, and it’s a very, very, very long path engineering project from there to a bomb.
This cultural understanding that physicists working for the Manhattan project built the bomb is actually precisely because the engineering effort was so big and so difficult, but the physics was already so widely known internationally, that the government didn’t redact the physics part of the story. In other words, because people only read about physicists’ contributions to the bomb, and the government kept secret everything about the much larger engineering and manufacturing effort, we are left with this impression that a handful of basic scientists were the main, driving force in its creation.
That’s how it is in almost every field, isn’t it? The ones who designed the space shuttle were not the same ones turning wrenches and welding on the actual vehicle.
Yeah, I thought it was well known that Scientists discover new things, engineers do things with what’s discovered
Well, I should’ve said “build or design,” maybe.
But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it’s just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.
It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.
The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he’s ever written.
No, the real engineers design and supervise everything. High skilled technicians assemble everything through the engineers guidance
Put another way, everyone in science and technololgy stands on the backs of giants.
Not Aperture Science! They do all their science from scratch - no hand-holding.
Nuclear bombs are actually extremly simple from a physics standpoint.
Make Uranium dense. Boom.
Sort of but ,its also reasonably well promoted that 130,000 people worked on the project. I suppose people think they are all physicists?
I think people see it the same way a movie is made by the director, even though a ton of people work on it, and, according to Kaiser, that is a misunderstanding of how it happened based on the information made available by the government.
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?
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.
>and still had the balls to do it
i.e. to prove they were evil lol
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.
>It was a show of force.
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".
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.
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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.
In my mind, Oppenheimer figured out this when he said that:
are you really both-sidesing the literal nazis?
We never nuked the Nazis…But even if we did, are you saying that the Nazis being Nazis would’ve justified vaporizing every civilian man, woman, and child in a city or two?
Whether or not you’d say it was justified is a different beast altogether than having to be the one that made it possible in terms of responsibility.
Tangentially, many firing squads will have only one person have a real bullet(s) while the rest have blanks so that they don’t all have to feel responsible for ending a life. Even that is setting justification aside.
The belief was that the bombs would save lives compared to an invasion on both sides. There’s been a lot of retrospective analysis, but most of it agrees with that assessment. An invasion of Japan would have been absolutely ruinous for Japan’s civilian population. But it’s still a question of whether the ends justify the means in a lesser of two evils situation.
I can see that viewpoint and not argue against it, that might be totally right. I’m trying to point out that agreeing with it and being the person or one of the main people who made the bomb possible are very different.
Being ok with the decision as a member of a country at war and being ok with the decision as someone who made the bomb are very different.
> > > the Nazis being Nazis would’ve justified vaporizing every civilian man, woman, and child in a city or two > >
- The bomb didn’t “vaporize every man woman and child”.
- 175 000 Volksturm (civilians pressed into service by their government, including women and children) died fighting the Allied advance into Germany. Dropping the bomb to end the war early would have prevented these deaths.
- This isn’t to mention the number of civilians who died as a result of being too close to the fighting. 125 000 civilians died in the Battle of Berlin alone.
- Also consider the number of soldiers who died on both sides which wouldn’t have happened had the war been ended early. The US produced so many Purple Heart medals (given to those who are killed or wounded while serving) in preparation for their invasion of Japan that they’re still using them today.
So yes dropping the bomb to end the war in Europe early would have been justified. Now please stop being a literal nazi apologist.
>Literal Nazi apologist
Holy fuck…how about you don’t use words that you so obviously don’t understand.
apologist
“both sides were as bad as each other” is very obviously a stance in defence of the nazis, so i don’t know what you think “apologist” means
Good thing I never fucking said that and would never agree with the statement. The point of the comic is that our lack of perspective taking and dehumanization of others enables terrible atrocities. That factor of dehumanizing propaganda exists on both sides but I’m not taking the comic so far as to equate us to the Nazis (again, not who we nuked in the first place) That’s obviously a gross oversimplification.
You’d get more from the comic if you put Germany and Japan on the left. The mechanic of dehumanization oscillated out of control until we felt justified wiping out entire cities of Japanese. But if you’re the one responsible for the atomic bomb, the atrocities of foreign soldiers would likely give you little peace as your invention vaporized kids in playgrounds…and babies in strollers and wombs…mothers who just wanted this stupid war to be over so their husband could come home and they could raise a family.
Next time, just ask a question before putting your dumbfuck words in someone else’s mouth to justify calling them Nazi apologists.
“Are you saying both sides were as bad as each other ?” No, of course not. “Oh, my bad.”
^ That’s how this should’ve went.
so you just don’t understand the implications of the original message you posted?
otherwise please reply with a justification of how:
- Nazi propaganda that sought to justify the holocaust was equivalent to allied propaganda
- Nazi censorship of truth that aimed to hide their death camps from the world was equivalent to allied censorship of truth
- The Nazi’s wicked despot who was quite literally Hitler was equivalent to any leading figure on the allied side
- etc.
you made an incredibly silly argument, but the even sillier thing to do right now is to stand by it
just ask a question before putting your dumbfuck words in someone else’s mouth
you not understanding the implications of your own argument isn’t my problem, friend
You’re assuming that Hitler would have just surrendered after seeing the atomic bomb, but there’s no actual indication he would have. He was fucking nuts. At some point there was an actual race to Berlin, the Wehrmacht was completely annihilated, women and kids were on the front lines and still no surrender. He would have sacrificed every last German before surrendering
We’d be having the exact same conversation about how the Japanese would’ve never surrendered had we not the proof otherwise.
