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Because US coup'ed the empire (as Orwell had predicted with "Airstrip One") in the mid 1950's[1]. The UK has certainly left many frozen conflicts still littered about the globe, but they get to tell the yanks "zabashcha" now.

[1] Head of State: John Dulles. Head of CIA: Allen Dulles. As for Eleanor Dulles, she pretty much focused on european affairs, but had previously served in a wartime capacity on the "Board of Economic Warfare." (If that sounds insufficiently euphemised, recall that DoD was, in those pre-Orwellian times, simply the "War Department.")

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From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_the_United... it appears that the US refused to share nukes with the UK after the war, pulled Suez as the UK was attempting to independently develop megatonnage, but then relaunched the "special relationship" after Sputnik gave everyone a new appreciation for boffins.

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Thanks for mentioning "Airstrip One" (1). It's indeed always worth to mentally compare the parts of his Oceania with Five Eyes (2). The "airstrip" is, I believe, a reference to the island's role in the bombing operations of WW II (3) which would have been a direct association to the reader reading the novel in 1948. Also thanks for mentioning Eleanor Dulles (4) I haven't read about her before.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Fou...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...

4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Lansing_Dulles

On strategic bombing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23572030

I've read R.V. Jones' book about it from the said "Airstrip One" location, and much more, I really recommend it. It's really interesting. Regarding

"someone must've been doing similar analyses to pick allied bombing targets"

there is somewhat about that, regarding Japan, in the book by Leslie Groves.

Edit: Spoiler: they simply bombed every city that they didn't explicitly decide to spare for the bomb, in Japan. The bombs weren't too precise anyway. Most destruction was intentionally causing the fires.

Edit 2: also absolutely required read: "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" also about how "precise" the bombing actually was.

Ta! Will be busy tracking these down for a while.

Jones gives an early intimation of Snowden during a CIA symposium (1993):

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

> "A point to be made at the outset is the enormous difference between the scale on which you operate today and our own efforts in World War II..."

(As Jones is fond of Kipling, I offer one of the latter's less jingoistic moments:

    Children of the yoke and goad,
    Pack and harness, pad and load.
    ...
    While the men that walk beside,
    Dusty, silent, heavy-eyed,
    Cannot tell why we or they
    March and suffer day by day.)

Things that make you go hmmmm: Groves could publish a memoir the Manhattan Project in 1962 (<20 years after the war), yet the JFK cancellation files have still not yet been fully released.

What I was able to glean from the preview: Groves wanted to bomb 京都, less because he knew exactly what military targets there were there, and more because it would have been "large enough in area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of an atomic bomb." I wonder how much this calibration wish factored into his rationalisation (p.266) for not demonstrating the bomb before dropping it on civilians?

Good guys: Stimson (p. 275) and Patterson (p. 265)

https://archive.org/details/nowitcanbetolds00grov/page/274/m...

> Groves could publish a memoir the Manhattan Project in 1962

He explicitly named it "Now It Can Be Told." Only 17 years after the bombs, the whole book. The rationales for the target selection -- yes, it's straight from the horse's mouth, and plausible because it is directly not something somebody would just write to in any way "improve" his own reputation, I'd like to believe. He also wrote there something like, if I remember correctly, that his biggest worry during the last months of the war has been that the war could had been over before he gets to drop the bomb on some city with civilians which would provide for good demonstration. It's also obvious that the existence of "military targets" was totally irrelevant, except as a good excuse to be provided to the current president. Something which sounded like that to me, at least. Maybe somebody will locate the specific words. Also Groves, before the Senate, November 1945, about the suffering of the victims of the bombs:

"As I understand it from the doctors, it is a very pleasant way to die." (1)

Also see the book from my Edit 2, before.

1) https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/survivors-hiroshima-a...

The story of the 1'000 cranes made an impression on me when I was young.

It's about storks, not cranes, but this is a hit soviet anti-war song (mid-80's, roughly contemporaneous with "Top Gun"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oCoVXcZ59Q

> The story of the 1'000 cranes

Do you mean, this documentary?

https://archive.org/details/motionpicture0072

Yes! (I remember a short story, thanks for the docco.)

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