Posted by rbanffy 3 days ago
" Fermi writes that "The results of this experiment was [sic] somewhat discouraging" presumably because of the absorption of neutrons by some unknown impurity. So, in December 1940 Fermi and Szilard met with Herbert G. MacPherson and V. C. Hamister at National Carbon to discuss the possible existence of impurities in graphite. During this conversation it became clear that minute quantities of boron impurities were the source of the problem. "
In contrast, the first allied nuclear reactor was a literal pile of uranium and graphite on a squash court.
[0] The Bastard Brigade (great book on all of this)
Why did they use metallic uranium instead of the stable oxide?
Were there other approaches discussed or used in Germany around the time?
This was a _fortunate_ combination, the way I see it.
Happening again with Russia.
The two cities were already on a "to be bombed" list and were the 73rd and 74th Japanese cities to be utterly destroyed by bombing.
So, Yes - they were literally used to test the bombs.
The "and make sure no such war happens again" is more of a post WWII retcon of the Cold War era.
They certainly killed less people than the bombing that had already occurred - the destruction of Tokyo alone likely killed more people than either atomic bomb.
There's no real consensus in the alternative history conjecture space, and no way to resolve the theories floated, Gar Alperovitz (for one example) made the argument that
* that Japan was already defeated at the time the decision to use the bomb was made, and that US intelligence already knew this;
* that Japan had been suing for peace and was ready to surrender without an invasion;
* that the real reason the bomb was used was so to demonstrate its power to the Soviet Union, in an attempt to exert more influence on them in the postwar;
* and that Japanese Emperor’s surrender statement invoked the bomb only as a politically-acceptable “excuse” for his people, when actually he surrendered primarily because of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
These claims are more about politics than anything. Its an attempt to retcon history to vilify the US. The Japanese had never been invaded and that was a huge point of pride. They were training the civilians for a guerrilla war. Just because you can find a person in the Japanese government who wanted to surrender at that point (and there were) doesn't mean that's the decision that would have been taken.
PS That 3rd point is especially specious...if it were true, no 2nd bomb would have been used. PPS Stuff like this is why historians don't like nor will engage with hypotheticals or the alternative history folks. Its clearly politically motivated, not a good faith attempt to understand history.
It took two bombs to get Japan to surrender. “A surrender is in play” means zilch.
An attempt to vilify ... the side that eagerly deployed nuclear weapons on civilian targets? I'm from the US and I'm not someone who is blind to pragmatism but your argument here just seems completely absurd to me. We clearly committed an atrocity with somewhere between minimal to no legitimate justification.
Then again, after seeing the adjacent comment about avoiding soviet involvement it occurs to me that perhaps we inadvertently did them a favor in a roundabout way. Japan probably would have lost a lot more than the kuril islands otherwise.
>Stimson wrote in his diary afterwards that after his briefing, Truman felt “the terrible responsibility that such destruction placed upon us here and himself.” [1]
[1] “Memorandum of Conference with the President, August 8, 1945 at 10:45am,” in Stimson diary (8 August 1945), Henry Lewis Stimson Papers (MS 465), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
You can certainly choose to believe that the decision makers were eager to use nukes and didn’t consider other paths, but you have to acknowledge that opinion is coming entirely from your own intuition and intentionally excludes all contrary evidence.
"Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."
And on top of this, the Japanese had been negotiating their surrender with the ostensibly neutral USSR hoping to get more favorable conditions with their assistance. And the US had been secretly intercepting these cables and knew all about it. [2] And on top of this the US had also already created another secret agreement with the USSR such that they would declare war on Japan on August 8th, which would end any real hope for Japan. We nuked them on August 6th, and then again on the 9th.
It was completely unnecessary.
[1] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28466-document-47-trumans...
[2] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28458-document-39b-magic-...
The diary is full of revealing quotes like "Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."
For some timeline the US had secretly arranged for Russia to declare war on Japan on August 8th. We nuked them first on August 6th, and then again on the 9th. The goal was to get them to surrender to the US before the Soviets made significant inroads in Japan.
Do you think what they reveal is the truth? Was the diary meant to be published and become "a source"? Was Truman informed about everything important going on in the US? About the reality (the truth) of the Manhattan Project? Did he even need to know? Wasn't it preferable for him to simply believe in order to play his role?
Just some questions to ponder as to the quality of this source and what can be deduced from it.
No one was eager. This sort of lie destroys discussion. This site is only about discussion, so please don't keep trying to destroy the only thing the site is about.
There are no moral winners in war.
But it remains true that if Japan or Germany had had the bomb, they'd have bombed civilians without compunction, discussion, or regret.
« This is alternative history, not real history. »
Okay, but "real history" is full of lies, so that per se cannot be an argument against "alternative history". Which is not to say that "alternative history" is truthful, it can be just as full of lies, or even, in certain cases, be the flip side of the very same lie.
Your fighter pilot anecdote sounds like Hollywood: Good US boy scared to death by insane fanatical Japanese cranks up a lie that is then believed by the highest state leadership, alright… We can smell the propaganda here, can't we.
What defrost said wrt Alperovitz sounds very reasonable:
• Japan already defeated – FACT
• Japan had been sueing for peace (since around May, I think) – FACT
• real reason for "The Bomb" was to impress Soviet Union (and the world at large, I think) – FACT
• "The Bomb" only an excuse for emperor, real reason was Manchuria – arguable/doubtful, but not important; key is points 1 and 2
Now, in his book "Hiroshima revisited" (free PDF available), Michael Palmer takes a scientific look at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki evidence and concludes that it does not support the notion conveyed by US propaganda that a novel "atomic bomb" was used.†
Rather, it appears these cities were democratically firebombed like dozens of other Japanese cities, using napalm, which is clear as day from the medical evidence. Palmer, who is an MD, also notes that there is a conspicuous absence in the medical literature about napalm injuries.
In fact, the forensic evidence (medical, physical and other) totally and absolutely contradicts the notion that any extraordinary weapon such as the "atomic bomb" was used.
But there was more than napalm (a heinous weapon) that was dumped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (like on dozens of other cities before). Various "special effects" were used, and notably mustard gas, apparently to fake radiation effects.
† [URL deleted in this repost (in an attempt to avoid automatic censorship) but you can easily google it yourself]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions_...
Plenty of the survivors of the nuclear bombings and the fire bombings writings went on to be published. You can read them yourselves but generally speaking the fire bombings were way, way, worse.
Also, people who are ready to surrender don't need to be nuked twice.
- Heinrich Himmler
“I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.”
- Oliver Cromwell
“It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab.”
- Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer
- kstenerud
The question remains whether in fact Japan "needed" to be nuked even once - it's unknown whether the ongoing city by city destruction would have resolved WWII.
Further, did they "need" to be nuked a second time so quickly (within three days)? That second nuke was not to force a surrender (just as the first wasn't) - the two bombings were two live tests of two separate weapon designs untested in the field of war.
Apparently so. Most people will run up the white flag after being nuked once, you see.
It was important to make them think that we had a whole stockpile of them. Otherwise, twice might not have been enough.
The theory makes no sense
The things that happened: (a) Hiroshima bombed on Aug 6th, (b) USSR declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria on Aug 8th, and (c) as the Cabinet gathered on Aug 9th to discuss the terms of surrender, Nagasaki was bombed.
Here's Yozo Kudo, general secretary of the Japanese National Association for the Assessment of Air Raids and War Damage:
————————
INTERVIEW: Why U.S. air raids continued until day of Japan’s surrender — THE ASAHI SHIMBUN² — August 14, 2023 — Yozo Kudo, 73, secretary-general of the national association of groups recording air raids and war damage
The United States carried out air raids from Aug. 14 to early Aug. 15. More than 1,000 aircraft, including 825 B-29 bombers, attacked targets nationwide. It is believed to be the largest number of aircraft deployed for (a string of) air raids during the Pacific War.
Q: Which cities were attacked?
A: Targets included Osaka, where Osaka Arsenal and Kyobashi Station were bombed, Akita’s Tsuchizaki district, Isesaki in Gunma Prefecture, Kumagaya in Saitama Prefecture, and Iwakuni and Hikari in Yamaguchi Prefecture.
When small-scale bombings are included, about 30 locations were attacked. Many people were killed. But casualty counts vary, and the exact number is unknown.
Q: Why were air raids conducted on the day of the surrender or the day before?
A: Japan’s delay in accepting the Potsdam Declaration was in the background.
The government informed the Allied powers on Aug. 10 that it would accept the declaration on condition that the emperor’s rights of sovereignty would not be changed. But arguments within the government and military became tangled over a response from the Allied powers. Some said the emperor’s status was not guaranteed, and an agreement was not reached for some time.
The United States on Aug. 10 stopped air raids on urban areas by B-29 bombers to prevent an adverse impact on peace negotiations. The following day, air raids by B-29 bombers were suspended altogether.
The United States once waited for an end of peace negotiations, although it continued some air raids by other bombers. But Japan did not produce its conclusion for some time, and the United States decided to carry out large-scale air raids on Aug. 14-15 to urge Japan to accept the Potsdam Declaration.
Henry Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces, had wanted the grandest possible finale, according to a history of warfare by B-29 bombers.
The U.S. military initially considered an air raid on Tokyo, which would have a strong psychological impact on the Japanese government, but eventually decided to target several areas outside Tokyo.
Japan decided to accept the Potsdam Declaration at a meeting in the presence of the emperor on Aug. 14. But it took time before U.S. military officials on the ground were informed of Japan’s decision, and air raids continued until the early hours of Aug. 15.
————————
That doesn't give a clear answer as to the motivation of these anewed US terror bombing raids against civilians. There is no military reason, as with all previous attacks on civilians. Just sadism? Or maybe the raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not impressive enough?
If any documents were ever created about this debate, they've probably been destroyed, and those involved have taken it to the grave with themselves. So I suppose technically we can never know for sure. But I think the cynical view is far more well supported. Or at least I think the cynical aspects were the majority of the logic behind it. And it was not only about control of Japan but also about sending a message to the USSR as the US undoubtedly saw the outlines of a new West-East world order emerging after WW2. And all the way up until the 80s [1] our dominant political philosophy was that we could win by intimidation and demonstrations of force, nuclear in particular.
------------
Wow, loving LLMs when digging into topics now a days. GPT was able to direct me to Truman's diary entries which are public record. [2] I take back the weasel wording above. Truman himself was quite clear on his intention and desires:
"Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."
- President Harry S. Truman, July 18th 1945
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet#Impact
[2] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28466-document-47-trumans...
That was particularly painful for Churchill to accept at the end when he had to hand over Poland to Stalin. Poland was the reason Britain officially entered WW2 in 1939
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal
> We and France are to-day, in fulfillment of our obligations, going to the aid of Poland, who is so bravely resisting this wicked and unprovoked attack upon her people. We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace, but a situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel themselves safe had become intolerable. And now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage
(Chamberlain, Sep 3, 1939)
Stalin was fully aware well before Potsdam, Kurchatov was already working on it for years.
eg: (one of several) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
Post Cold War declassified information states that the Russians freely acknowledged that Fuchs gave them the fission bomb.
Every time I re-read it, it makes me want to take up nordic skiing. It is absolutely up there on my list of greatest true stories ever told with Touching the Void, The Emerald Mile, and a select few others.
https://www.abebooks.com/Winter-Fortress-Epic-Mission-Sabota...
Norsk Hydro was founded as a hydro power plant + nitrogen fertilizer production company (the nitrogen production needing lots of electricity, and the hydro plant to provide said energy...) but around WWII, pivoted to light metals, and built aluminum and magnesium factories with German company IG Farben, in order to support them in the war, as they were partially under Nazi occupation by then. That all went south but then after the war they kept on with the aluminum business.
The company went on to become experts in aluminum extrusions, and were then contracted not just for the base metal but also to manufacture the first bonded aluminum bare chassis for the S1 Lotus Elise in 1995, which went on to be the basis for the Tesla Roadster.
As a snowboarder I was reluctant, but got into it a few years ago. We pull our young daughter in a chariot with skis about 10km into a little cabin by a river with a wood stove.
Cheese, salami and hot chocolate and we make the return loop. Three evenings a week all winter long is a great way to spend time outside.
That measurement fed a computer model, but if I'm reading the article right, most of the work was actually based on wartime records on heavy water and graphite. Anyway, the model showed they would have needed twice the uranium and heavy water they actually had.
Its also suspected Heisenberg didn't want the design to work (its the given reason why he wasn't killed by Berg). But it was still a reasonable possibility during the war that the Germans could have made it work.
Phew, that underground mission was more important than I thought!
It's full of fun anecdotes and asides...like when they 'found' tuns of uranium ore in NY...or the aforementioned acquisition of silver from Treasury.
There are classic bureaucratic things...like when they issued a check for millions and specified 'no questions asked.' Then the guy called with questions. Or how Groves' people and Treasury tried to figure out how many ounces were in a ton.
The Germans tried to build a reactor, not a bomb, or am I wrong?
Two isotopes were used for fission bombs in WWII: Uranium 235 and Plutonium. More than 99% of naturally occurring Uranium is Uranium 238, which will not sustain a chain reaction necessary for a bomb. There are only trace amounts of Plutonium in nature, but it can be produced in reactors that use U238 for fuel. So, to make a fission bomb you need to either separate U235 from U238 or build a reactor to create Plutonium.
It's worth noting that the shortage of heavy water was no accident. The Allies sabotaged the heavy water production facility in Norway that Germany relied on[1].
________________________
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage
Germans also didn't have anything resembling a workable bomb design.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
"Economically feasible" meaning maybe, perhaps, theoretically possible but even if so astronomically expensive in time, money, and physical resources.
It took the UK/CA/AU Tube Alloys group to find ways to make a weapon more practical, and multiple letters, attempts, and a one on one press the flesh tour to convince the US nuclear types that a weapon was both possible and achievable.
Some time later Mark Oliphant visited the US in person and walked key people through a circles and arrows on chalkboard breakdown of how such a thing would be actually possible.
Also, Tokyo Bay.
For the Axis powers, it would be an even easier sell of course.
At least if any of them could believe - or even imagine - that it actually could exist or be as devastating as it was of course. And frankly, unless you saw the footage of an actual Tsar Bomba, how could anyone?
For the first bomb ever made to immediately jump to Tsar Bomba size, or for it to utilise an understanding of fallout and contaminants that didn't exist prior to the Castle Bravo tests seems ... unlikely.
Were both judged infeasible for different reasons? Perhaps uranium purification challenges and the implosion required for plutonium?
The Frisch–Peierls memorandum changed that understanding ... provided that reading of the FP-memorandum was convincingly conveyed to people that made things happen, what Einstein put to paper (and was ignored) and that Oliphant pushed through in person.
Little Boy on Hiroshima was a gun design, a grossly inefficient McGyver that used some 64 kilograms of enriched uranium to successfully convert less than half a gram to energy.
Fat Man on Nagasaki was an implosion device - a necessary design change due to simply not having enough uranium or an enrichment pipeline to sustain the needs of a gun design.
The first device detonated, at Trinity in the USofA, was an implosion device, created to test the more difficult design.
Further, there was an abandoned / discarded "Thin Man" device IIRC.
These were all alternative implementations that were pursued after the FP-memorandum was pushed about to make the case that weapons were apparently possible rather than not yet achievable - the prevailing belief in the US prior to Oliphant doing the rounds.
These weapons were, however, as different as their monikers imply. Little Boy was a uranium, gun-type weapon, whereas Fat Man was a plutonium, implosion-style weapon. Two types were needed because there was only enough uranium for one gun-type weapon, and the U.S. government knew it would need to make more than one weapon.
A clean reminder that logistics is everything.
Also cool that the author is married to Sean Carroll.
IIRC one conclusion they/some of the scientists drew was that the culture of the Nazi regime - the paranoia, fear, and violence - made a project on that scale impossible. Enough talented, high-ego people could not work together on project that large and demanding.
Also, IIRC, when the Hiroshima bomb was announced, many couldn't believe it. They had been working on a power generation reactor as a first step - though I'm not sure the OP fits that story?
Also, maybe Heisenberg didn't want to succeed? Has that ever been resolved to some degree?
https://www.whatsonstage.com/shows/outer-london-theatre/farm...
(how many nations had 14,700 tons of silver lying around)
It shouldn't be. In WW2, in 1942, Germany did essentially control all of Europe, save only the UK. And at the height of its power, Germany's vast industrial machine produced roughly on par with the UK. Not the entire British Empire, just UK.
It turns out that the Nazis were complete incompetent buffoons when it came to economic management. Their grand master plan for Europe was to overrun the east, not for some vast rich treasure trove of minerals to fuel an industrial juggernaut, but to plop down more homesteads to feed their inefficient agricultural economy. And even if the Nazis had a grand plan to become an industrial juggernaut, they still faced the prospect of the industrial juggernaut par excellence, the US.
The war machine is what changed that - that and not being reachable by enemy bombers, and hence not bombed to bits.
Germany started middling and ended destroyed.
Germany required like 10 percentage points more of its labor force in agriculture in 1939 than the US did, and that still wasn't enough to make Germany self-sufficient in food; the US was of course one of the major food exporters in the world (in neither case were agriculture workers more than a third of the population, I should note). US agriculture also had largely mechanized in the 1910s, albeit many farms did switch back to draft animals during the 1920s and 1930s due to the collapse in agricultural prices, making animal feed grown on your own farm cheaper than buying fuel for the tractor. Europe agriculture largely didn't mechanize until the 1950s, after WW2.
Let's try this another way, during WWII the US built warship tonnage equivalent to all the rest of the world's navies combined...in just 1943. Then the US did that again in 1944. At one point, the US hit a Japanese fleet with 17 fleet carriers at once. Keep in mind the Japanese only built 9 fleet carriers total and that was considered the most powerful fleet in the world at the beginning of the war.
This is the key to understand WW2. The oil, and the iron ore (Sweden, hence Norway). But mostly the oil. All the rest about ideology etc in Western/Anglo historiography is distraction at best (but actually rather deliberately misleading). Like "Hitler sought world domination" and similar junk, this is just ludicrous, we can simply take a look at the map and take note of who had already secured world domination.
The lack of oil had already been painful for Germany during Britain's first "World War", having to rely on horses to a much larger extent than the enemy, and the importance of oil had only risen with motorization.
telling that your example of actual concrete economic output was many years into the war, eh?
From the Farm Hall transcripts, it seems that Heisenberg was "happy" to have been working on a reactor and not a bomb, but from context, this seems less like an objection to the principle of working on a weapon and more like gratitude that the Allies couldn't hang him for working on an atomic bomb. Recall that the conversations took place after Germany had been utterly defeated and the scientists were prisoners at the mercy of the British--prisoners in a gilded cage, but prisoners nonetheless.
Why would they have done that? Hadn't they themselves been "working on an atomic bomb"?
Wernher von Braun wasn't hanged either although he'd been working on a "device" that actually ended up working. He was even "invited" to continue his work in the USA, bringing along his entire team.
This makes me think about the pervasive classification and paranoia in the "defense" contractors supporting the US Department of "Defense". Any information that's classified, even at the lowest "confidential" level, is only provided on a "need-to-know" basis. And unclassified projects are sort of looked down on, so there's a perverse incentive to classify more than necessary. This "secretive, isolationist approach" seems like it probably prevents a lot of groups from "sharing information or resources", in the article's words (though it concludes that wasn't the biggest problem facing the German effort).
When sharing classified information that someone might not need to know might be a crime, and might get your clearance pulled even if it's not, the incentives run strongly counter to sharing information. Consequently, I confidently claim that there are very, very few people in a position to serendipitously make significant discoveries that involve combining two or three different classified facts.
(I don't actually know this, because I don't know any classified facts.)
Maybe this is part of the sclerosis that causes the US defense-industrial complex to "basically produce useless junk", in the words of Les Earnest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ych6pvLMKCU), and which prompts Sergey Tovkach to say, "There isn’t a single Western drone that’s proven itself effective in this conflict." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM). Maybe that's why Russian propaganda in 02024 reported that Ukraine had to withdraw the USA-made M1A1 tanks far from the front (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCIN-t3VxJ0).
You said the scientists thought that: « Enough talented, high-ego people could not work together on project that large and demanding. » However, this is flatly and totally contradicted by the successful A4/V2 project, within the Wehrmacht, which did end up producing a working product (and not just a fictional narrative), despite the career ambitions of SS and industry people who showed up as soon as "success was in the air" (as described in the book on Peenemünde by executive Walter Dornberger).
See Anathem for more on this.