I'm still of the opinion that a longer pause could have been taken between the two drops.
Nolan's Oppenheimer
- Thread starter dahliaclone
- Start date
We've always been destined to destroy ourselves. Been writing about it for thousands of years. The sheer overwhelming mass that is humanity. We've not really changed much.
My reading of the timeline of events in August 1945 has always been something like --
Japan never thought they'd "win" the war in the sense they'd be rolling into Washington, DC or New York at some point in the future (or, as much as The Man in the High Castle likes to dramatize it, at least San Francisco and Los Angeles). They knew they couldn't win a long and protracted war of attrition with the U.S., so the goal was always to force a stalemate on terms favorite to Japan and come to the negotiating table where they could keep their "Co-Prosperity Sphere" empire together.
They envisioned this coming to be through a Japanese victory in some "climactic battle" that would not win the war from a material standpoint -- again, they knew they could never win a battle of attrition -- but would raise the cost of an American victory to such a high degree and set the U.S. back maybe years until its material advantages would win the war that the Americans... would just retire.
Not worth it for the Americans at that point, right?
You can see the obvious influence of the Battle of Tsushima there. The Japanese could not win a war of attrition with the Russians, but they made the costs so high by implementing an "efficient" strategy to the point the Russians gave up the game. The plan just had two problems they never addressed...
(1.) The raid on Pearl Harbor was a tactical victory but a strategic disaster. They felt they had to, being so afraid of the American battleships stationed there, but a few months of the Pacific War showed quickly that were "role players" in the fleet compared to submarines and land- and carrier-based aircraft. Yeah, they sunk a few near-obsolete battleships -- most of which were repaired -- but so what?
The main thing it did was piss us off. Not how you want to start a war if the whole idea is to make it so the American people grow bored or tire of the war (such as we do nowadays) and quit.
(2.) They ****** up the execution. Midway was basically their plan -- but in the other direction. Build a chain of island fortresses in the central and south Pacific protecting the core of their empire, fortify them with dug-in troops and land-based aircraft, and use their mobile carrier fleet to repel any invasions. Sure, the U.S. can probably wear that down over time, but that was going to take a while and lead to heinous losses if every time you did this you had to trade carriers at a 3:1 or a 4:1 ratio or so.
Instead they tried it themselves, ****** around and found out, and their whole plan was shot. They kept trying to do the same thing over and over again the rest of the war, but it never worked. This was still their plan in anticipation of the Allied invasion of the Home Islands -- put up hellacious resistance, make the U.S. question if this is really worth the cost, and find somebody to mediate the peace.
The obvious mediator was always the Soviet Union. The Soviets and Japanese had a non-aggression pact, Japan tolerated Lend-Lease shipments to the USSR through Vladivostok without attacking them, and the U.S. and Moscow were nominal "allies" against the Germans in Europe. Japan hoped they could force that stalemate and call up our "mutual friend" Stalin and see if he'd help them talk this out.
Again, stupid plan, but they were reaching in desperation.
August 6 = Hiroshima
August 7 = message from Truman is delivered via the Swiss embassy, which was the de facto backdoor for the U.S. and Japan to communicate, that the bombings will continue until surrender
This was something of a bluff. They had only two bombs at that point. More would take months.
August 8 = Soviets declare war on Japan (which was requested by the Allies once the war in Europe was over... thinking Soviet troops would be useful to soak up the casualties that were going to come from invading Japan, though I shudder to think of a partitioned Japan like Germany)
August 9 = Nagasaki
August 10 = Japan surrenders with the single condition that the Emperor remain sovereign
Historians still debate which one of these factors -- the destruction from the atomic bombs or the final collapse of their plan for Soviet mediation -- was the stronger influence. But it was a combination of the two. Japanese military leadership had been telling Hirohito for months that the Soviets would intervene and help broker a peace deal any day now. That became impossible to assert when they attacked.
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My H.S. science teacher was grateful for the bomb he survived a couple of the island invasions in the Pacific (only got wounded) but he was scheduled in the 1st wave for the landing on Japan and was sure he wouldn't have survived that.
Agree with your point the world would look different if someone else developed it 1st.
Reading about the invasion plans makes me pretty sure I'd never lived if the US didn't drop the bomb.
An incredible undertaking with very high casualties. Pretty sure grandpa wouldn't have survived that.
But he did see Hiroshima after the bomb. He could never put the destruction into a lot of words. Just would shake his head, spread his hands, close his eyes, and say "nothing"
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Found this interesting. The preferred format for Nolan is full frame IMAX shot on film. He had to have Kodak make a new IMAX film format for him so he could shoot scenes in black and white for Oppenheimer. There are 30 theaters worldwide who will show the movie in IMAX using actual film rather than digital, and the physical reel for the movie in IMAX is 11 miles long and weighs over 600 pounds. I'm pretty sure the DSM Science Center IMAX theater used film before it shut down.
Yup and I got my tickets already! There is only one theater in the midwest showing it in this format and it's in Plymouth, MN. Got mine for Thursday, July 20.
Reading a book about how America effected Africa and it talks a bit about the Congo and it's uranium mines. At the time it was the only place to get uranium but Leopold was using slavery to mine the metals. We knew about it and covered it up due to the need to make the bombs. Only later on did they start finding other sources for radioactive material.
My Dad was shot a couple of months before the first bomb, a few weeks before his four years would have been up. Credited medics risking their lives to save his by getting him down a mountain before the Japanese soldiers could bayonet him. (Hacksaw Ridge hit home a bit.) He was convinced that nothing short of the bomb would have gotten them to surrender. And when they didn’t surrender immediately after the first one, he thought the second necessary. He talked about nearly starving on Guadalcanal and trying to trip booby traps the Japanese had set near rations they had left without destroying the food too.
He never mentioned anything about his experiences until about a year before he died. My then four year old asked him about the scars above his heart and on his back from the entry and exit wounds. It kind of got the ball rolling on his memories.
His conviction that the bombs were necessary after years of battle is enough for me. He bore no hatred, even prayed every day for the Japanese soldiers he shot and the people who died when the bombs were dropped. It is easy to second guess things when you didn’t live them. He said when he was at training camp in California, they could hear Japanese transmissions from subs off the coast.
ISU is fortunate to have Ames Lab, due to it’s role in the Manhattan Project. Several of my sons have interned there.
My copy of "American Prometheus" just showed up today. 599 pages of text plus 122 pages of resources/notes/index. Let's see how fast I can knock this one out.
I mentioned this somewhere else, maybe in a different thread, maybe earlier in this one, but after having seen both "Band of Brothers" and then "The Pacific", and even knowing that those shows for as well done as they were can only be so realistic up to a point, that there is no doubt in my mind that if I could have made the choice at the time as an 18-year old kid in 1942/1943 that I would have signed up for the European theaters of war after seeing how brutal and bloody the island-hopping battles in the Pacific were.
I don't read books so feel free to post summaries LOL
Not a sequel or anything, but if anybody is curious about the parallel Soviet nuclear weapons program running at the same time as the Manhattan Project, this book is an excellent tale:
Stalin and the Bomb
Which theater was "easier" depends on what you were doing.
I wouldn't have wanted to have been a solider or Marine involved in the war of attrition on Guadalcanal or during the island-hopping campaign across the central Pacific to Okinawa.
But if I was in the USAAC, I would have much rather been in the Pacific. Flying B-29s at high altitude with minimal Japanese interception and AAA fire and hanging out on sandy beaches between missions sounds positively cushy compared to what the air war over Europe was like for bomber crews.
I don't know how well I would have done cooped up in a submarine for months at a time in the Pacific, too, terrified one mechanical failure could send me past crush depth at any given moment.
Summary: A bunch of people way smarter than me decided to build a giant bomb and created a city and lab out in New Mexico to do it.
I'm a big music listener, not really into pod casts, but I should try the recorded book thing sometime.
