The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.
Vannevar Bush, more than any single individual, scientist or non-scientist, stands at the center of the bureaucratic decision to feasibility-test the fission chain reaction.
(compsci & s/w engineers can love VB all they want for As We May Think, but the man had some serious and arguably unnecessary blood in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term, on his hands. The silence of his legacy has been far too effective at ducking popular criticism of his role in history)
If humanity ever chooses to avoid creating yet-to-be-developed doomsday devices in humanity's future, while _still_ harvesting benefits of new R&D (viz. nuclear power plant energy), it needs to 'debug' the social epistemology around the Advisory Committee on Uranium / Uranium Committee (leading to S-1 under the NDRC).
edit: added 'in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term'
What about a pure Soviet entry into the war? You have to look at what happened to Poland and Eastern Europe when the Soviet army invaded. Once again, by any metric, this was the best possible outcome at the time.
But it was unquestionably a local maximum - the best solution at the time, with horrific consequences afterward.
While the debate on the bomb is not and never will be settled, I'm not sure I'd call the bloodshed caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be unnecessary: it ended up a war that had caused so far millions of death.
And what social epistemology, actually?
Indeed it would have been better for me to focus on the decades of existential fear rather than the immediate bloodshed because, as demonstrated, the debate descended straight to the usual about the morality of dropping the bomb in WWII.
>And what social epistemology, actually?
Karl Compton and Leo Szilard whispering in Vannevar Bush's ear about the threat that the prospective threat that a German atomic bomb would pose. Vannevar would later make the case that the physicists would have done these feasibility tests anyways with or without his support, but this is a (somewhat biased) counterfactual and therefore incapable of being evaluated.
The whole episode demonstrates that it is by responding affirmatively to the 'choice to learn' - in this case whether a unique embodiment of already known physical properties is _really_ feasible - which finds us crossing the technological Rubicon of runaway doomsday device development.
Vannevar would go on to defend his actions in saying that it was good that such a horrific capacity was demonstrated in such a 'spectacular' way. His words in his autobiography, "Pieces of the Action" strive to cement the legacy of his gift to the world:
"The advent of the A-bomb is generally regarded as a catastrophe for civilization. I am not convinced that it was. With the pace of science in this present century it was inevitable that means of mass destruction should appear. Since the concept of one world under law is far in the future, it was also inevitable that great states should face one another thus armed. If there were no A-bombs the confrontation would still have occurred, and the means might well have been to spread among a a people a disease for a chemical that would kill or render impotent the whole population. History may well conclude, if history is written a century from now, that it was well that the inevitable confrontation came in a spectacular way that all could recognize, rather than in a subtle form which might tempt aggression through ignorance. At least we all know, we and the rest of the world, that there are A-bombs and what they can do."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU
There's also the argument that it saved more lives than the deaths it caused. The same can not be said for Japan's atrocities.
Picking anything other than the nuclear bomb to never happen again is moronic because the planet can survive the other things, but if nukes were to start flying again, it would most likely not end with just two. Other countries have those weapons now too and such a war has the potential to be last one ever fought.
The Japanese did things that were arguably even more horrific than the bomb; read up on unit 731 and the rape of Nanjing. I'm sure those who experienced those things would have far preferred dying in a flash.
The German did the holocaust, Babi Yar, etc.
The Allies did various fire-bombings.
The current singular taboo around nuclear weapons kind of misses how destructive and horrific the whole war was. This was total war on a scale that is hard to imagine today. To be fair modern nuclear weapons pack a punch that far exceed those atoms bombs.
Agree about the necessity of the never again stuff though, even though we've been failing at that continuously.
Lower than the Holodomor? Lower than Dresden or Tokyo fire bombings? Lower than the Holocaust? Lower than Unit 731?
The 9/10 March 1945 caused more death and damage as an individual event, even more than each of the atomic bombings:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...
By the way: that same argument is used by Netanyahu and Putin today!
Likewise, I guess technically Hamas didn't "make" Israel defend itself. They just fired thousands of rockets indiscriminately against Israeli civilians and launched the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, where 1200 Israelis were murdered, tortured, raped, and/or kidnapped for being Jewish, and brought Israel into a situation where it had to choose between continuing to allow for its population to be a victim of massacres threatened by a total war of annihilation, or defend itself by destroying Hamas.