Luckily no one was hurt or nearby when it went off.
Most of the damage to Japan's cities was actually done by napalm-filled bomblets combined into cluster-bombs[1], partly because weather made precision bombing difficult.
There was also the incredible plan to fill a bomb with bats strapped with tiny incendiary charges on timers so they would be dropped, go roost somewhere, and hopefully start even wider spread fires. They spent about 2 million dollars on it before it was cancelled because the atomic bomb was showing much better progress. They also accidentally proved it's effectiveness and burned down part of the testing facility.
(Let's rephrase the success part. The campaign was destructive and deadly for the civilian population but did nothing to end the war earlier. Bomber Harris and the Lord Lindemann got a career boost, though.)
Really? To assert this, you need to show not that Axis production didn't decline, but that the damage done didn't prevent production from increasing even more. How does one show that?
Axis production continued increasing, according to this, it tripled after the bombing campaign started.
Actually, it's even worse than that, since one must also subtract from this production the resources Germany was putting into air defense. This effort was massive.
The Germans ended up devoting 1/4 of their war production and a million men to antiaircraft defense.
There is a lot of speculation why emperor and generals surrendered, even atomic bombs may not have been the triggering point as much as soviet declaration of war to Japan at 8 August 1945. Most probably it all compounded.
To assert that the bombing campaign did nothing for the war in the Pacific flies in the face of recorded history. We literally have the imperial Japanese equivalent of meeting minutes where they talk about this stuff and toward the end the sheer destruction of the bombing campaign did affect the credibility of the militarists "yeah we can still pull this off" claims in the eyes of many of the others.
BS
Bomb findings during construction is nothing especially rare in these countries.
It's just part of doing business, really. Same story with archaeological remains, chemical contamination, or threatened animal species.
> If the war had lasted any longer than it did, the scale and ferocity of the conventional bombing campaign would have risen to inconceivable new heights. [...] At the height of the bombing campaign, between May and August 1945, a monthly average of 34,402 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Japan. According to USAAF chief Hap Arnold, the monthly total would have reached 100,000 tons in September 1945, and then risen steadily month by month. By early 1946, if the Japanese were still fighting, eighty USAAF combat groups would be operating against Japan, a total of about 4,000 bombers. In January 1946, they would drop 170,000 tons of bombs on Japan, surpassing in one month the cumulative tonnage actually dropped on the country during the entire Pacific War. By March 1946, the anticipated date of the CORONET landings on the Tokyo plain, the monthly bombing figure would surpass 200,000 tons.
Allegedly.
It's possible it's true, but claims like this have the incentive of selling the "atom bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and justified" narrative behind them, so that should be taken into account as a factor.
It doesn't even have to be consciously disingenous - the more one can convince oneself (and thus eventually others) of how destructive and costly conventional warfare would have been, the more digestible the nuclear option becomes, so there's a lot of motivation to fuel some motivated reasoning.
Not if you go by the kiloton rating of those two bombs: they were each in the kiloton range (around 10-15 kT IIRC), so if you add a generous 30,000 tons to the 160,800 you mentioned before, that's 190,800 tons, still far short of the 623,000 tons dropped on Germany.
Real WWII historians could probably determine the date on which the bomb was dropped, its intended target, etc., etc.
But with the condition that most of Japan was in, later in WWII - I'm thinking that "gone off where & when intended" would probably have had little effect. Most of the country was burned-out rubble.
If it's not, I can't tell because it's hard to get a sense of scale from the video and image. The crater only appears maybe 2 or 3 meters wide judging by the grass, the painted stripes, and the overall taxiway width.
A larger probability of a small crater(s) requiring repair would seem better for this purpose than a smaller probability of a large crater.
the reference: https://time.com/5772944/large-small-boulder/