Declassified photos from Tinian Island as the B-29 “Enola Gay” was being loaded

And unlike a conventional weapon, it's pretty hard for a nuke of this design to accidentally explode.

Imagine the alternate version of something like the Korean War in a world where WWII ended without the use of nuclear weapons. Are the Americans going to refrain from using nuclear weapons on their enemies when the going gets tough in that scenario? My money is on "no", and I'd also wager that the nuclear bombing campaign would last a lot longer, since it would be initiated against countries with a much greater capacity to fight. For example, Mao really didn't seem to care about the potential devastation of nuclear war: "Let us imagine how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world, and a third could be lost. If it is a little higher it could be half ... I say that if the worst came to the worst and one-half dies, there will still be one-half left, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. After a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again."

Your counterfactual about North Korea seems rather weak. You seem to assume that we'd drop The Bomb and then the war would be won and we'd all go home. But it probably wouldn't have won the war. The Chinese would have been happy to keep on fighting even with nuclear bombardment. All it would have done would be to greatly widen the scope of the war and turn a small proxy war into a general WWIII.

As for the rest, those brutal proxy conflicts were still way better than direct conflicts between great powers, especially a potential large-scale nuclear conflict.

Yeah, one large, irradiated South Korea, ruled by a pathetic murderous dictator who would have friends in Washington D.C. instead of Moscow, and who would have killed people throughout the peninsula for being Communists[1], instead of being against Communists.

Yay for progress?

Fuck freedom and democracy. All those talk of freedom didn't do shit when Rhee murdered Koreans, when Park murdered Koreans, and when Chun murdered Koreans.

I know I can't really expect American soldiers to wage wars and get killed just to support the freedom of some third-world country they've never heard of, instead of ensuring the continuing political dominion of the US in a large portion of the world, but people could at least be honest about it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre

How many died because the US fought the advance of Communism in Asia?

And why do you believe that it is even your damn business to interfere in countries that are thousands of miles away from the US?

By the way, the General that was responsible for the bombing Japan with nuclear weapons, Curtis LeMay (you can see his signature on one of the photos) was in favor of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and proposed dropping more than 140 nuclear bombs on Russia.

And yes, he was willing to lose US cities due to counter strikes. All that mattered to him was that the US had an advantage at the time, and could win a war.

He also insisted on invading Cuba during the Missile Crisis and almost convinced Kennedy. We are lucky that he failed, because there were already nuclear weapons on Cuba at that time (which he didn't know) and an invasion would have triggered an all out war.

A quick non-nuclear win was very much on the cards. The soviet union had just entered the war. The navy knew that it couldn't protect the homeland and didn't have any planes. There was, at the very least, a substantial faction in the cabinet that wanted to surrender, and had the support of the emperor in this. Can we be sure the war would have ended quickly? No. Can we be sure that the human cost would have been less than the ~200,000 civilian deaths caused by the bombs? Definitely not - conventional firebombing could have inflicted those kind of casualties if the war had continued for as little as another week or two. But a decade-long conflict or frozen ceasefire is really implausible; the balance of conventional forces was really overwhelming at that point.

> Arguably, if the US used nukes on Chinese soldiers during the Korean conflict, as some generals advised, there would be no North Korea. We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea. Instead we have one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen as a client state of China, who uses China's political influence and muscle to threaten the West with nuclear war every day. So, progress?

You could equally argue that if the US had given up and pulled out of Korea entirely, instead of North and South Korea we'd have a country like Vietnam, which is doing pretty well. Or that if the Soviet Union had used nukes to conquer the world we'd have peace everywhere. Everyone thinks they're the "good guy"; any moral principle that would allow the US to use nukes would seem to allow other countries to do so too.

It probably would have been more efficient to dilute the U-235 into reactor grade and use it to manufacture weapons grade Plutonium. However at the time the U.S. only had two bombs (the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and it was probably judged politically expedient to drop two instead of one.

Japan was beaten. They had already offered a complete surrender, conditional only on keeping the emperor, which was rejected by the U.S. Their utter defeat and the hopeless state of their armed forces was well-known by the allies, since their communication encryption had been cracked months earlier.

The real issue was likely that the Soviet Union, positioned to become a formidable power in the post-war theater, had promised to enter the war against Japan on August 6. The Americans needed to make sure that Japan had been defeated by that point and that the U.S. would occupy Japan, not Soviet Russia. Hence the rush to drop the bombs before that.

Also, there was no uncertainty about the lack of military significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the contemporary reports state this clearly, they even warn about the presence of American POWs in the area (which was ignored and they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians).

Pretty scary stuff considering that the main brunt was born by civilians.... oO;

There is a 1950s fictional film by Akira Kurosawa called "I Live in Fear" which tells the story of a man driven mad by fear of radiation from a nuclear war. For better or worse it is easy to forget now what a catastrophic thing the introduction of the bomb was for everyone.

The notion that the alternative to the bombings was an invasion is an utterly pernicious falsehood. It is a matter of record that Japan had offered to surrender prior to the bombings, conditional only upon retaining the emperor. Those terms were subsequently accepted, after the bombings. The "peace" faction's strategy was to accept the surrender before conducting the bombings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_84_bomb

It's fine to say that Japan would have surrendered without invasion, but such a strong assertion needs to be backed by equally strong evidence.

EDIT: An excerpt from your link:

This conclusion assumed conventional fire bombing would have continued, with ever-increasing numbers of B-29s, and a greater level of destruction to Japan's cities and population.

It seems hard to argue that literally firebombing an entire civilization into stoneage living conditions was more ethical than forcing a quick political decision to surrender and stop the madness. Can you imagine trying to live without basic necessities? Even if nobody was dropping bombs on you directly, you, your family, and everyone around you would be the definition of misery for the duration of the firebombing. The firebombing didn't simply destroy military targets. It also decimated infrastructure that we take for granted, such as the ability to deliver drinkable water, or to seek medical treatment at hospitals. How many were to die a miserable death due to the firebombing before Hiroshima and Nagasaki could objectively be called the more ethical decision?

Also, the above analysis assumes both sides had perfect information. But information during wartime is asymmetric. It's entirely possible that America had no knowledge of the Japanese political framework at the time the decision to drop the bombs was made. If the Japanese were broadcasting their intention to surrender before the bombs were dropped, that would be different, but it doesn't seem like that was the case.

Would you mind helping me understand why firebombing was more ethical than the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Note that even with the bombing and the Soviet intervention, there was a military coup aimed at preventing the surrender that very nearly succeeded. The contingent of the Japanese government that felt it was better to be obliterated than to surrender was large and powerful.

One could certainly argue that they would be overcome as the realities of the situation set in, but one could also argue that they wouldn't.

It is, as you say, debatable. Which makes it odd that you just dismiss the other side so readily.

They may well be right, but American Military officers making decisions couldn't possibly know any of that. All they can know is what the Japanese government has said and done, and anything that their intelligence sources can pick up, which may or may not be believable. Everything they would have seen up to that point says that Japan is ruthless and determined to not surrender, and they can only be convinced otherwise if it's clear that they face total destruction otherwise. I can't see how any information available to them points to any other conclusion than that the bomb should be dropped as soon as it's ready to bring an end to the war as quickly as possible.

You might have visions of the U.S. systematically destroying any Japanese war power that ventured out for conquest while leaving the home islands untouched, but that kind of shepherding requires a degree of total military superiority we did not posses at the time.

If that is the case, then that proves they were dead wrong about their justification for the necessity of dropping those bombs in the first place. Why tell everyone "we need to bomb" in order for Japan to surrender when you knew it wouldn't stop the war?

What they were ignorant of, I'm pretty sure, was the actual magnitude of the destruction caused by the devices. My father was about 10 yrs old at the time, he was deeply effected by news reels at the time. The tragedy was horrific.

Arguably, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was the best move they could have made, considering their position. They did succeed in limiting US naval power in the Pacific for the 6 months that Yamamoto estimated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto#Attack_on_Pear...

Sure, if it hadn't worked, they may have tried again, and the next attempt may have led to all these things, but fact is, it DID work, and everyone in these photos contributed to it (knowingly or unknowingly).

What is relevant is that there are two forms: it's and its. Its easy to mix them by non-natives like myself.

No-one ever writes She's or Us's, but "It's" is valid as is its. It's easy to deduce that one should not write us's but it's not that easy with it. :)

The regular form of possessive is 's. That is, when it's right to add an s to a noun indicate possession we add an apostrophe. This is more regular than a lot of english rules. So now there are pronouns. They are a bit weird, carrying some strange stuff from germanic languages about changing the word based on the case (sometimes). For the most part, it's pretty straightforward still.

Now we get to the word its. Yeah, it's a pronoun, but it follows the possessive pattern of adding an s. So 'it' follows the pronoun pattern of changing the word, but it also phonetically follows the regular noun pattern of adding an s.

In this one special case, there are two patterns being followed at the same time. Except not really, because unlike all the other cases where the s is appended for possession, we don't mark it different.

This is of course because there is a form of the phonetic 'its', which is spelled "it's" . This word is very similar to its, but it really is a contraction (a special word that actually means two words, but we're lazy and drop some of letters from the second word) in this case, "it's" is ("it's"'s :) ) short for it is. That phrase of course is not about possession, but it does describe a quality possessed by the thing referred to by "it".

Of course on top of all this, we have yet another use in english for the 's construct. It is related to the "it's", because it not only denotes possession, but also denotes a contraction with is, or with has (which itself is a completely different rant - have and is are arbitrarily used in all sorts of languages) like described above for it's , but more generally.

That means the the sentence:

Bob's going to Bob's house.

Is a correct way of using the 's in two different meanings...

Bob is going to the house Bob owns.

Yet, if was talking about a robot...

Robot is going home. Its house has its charger and it's going to plug in.

So yeah, English is super duper easy! I mean, how hard is it for our pattern matching machines to not realize that contracting with is means 's, that possession which is phonetically an s sound is spelled 's, and pronouns use different words for different cases, these are all pretty regular occurrances, EXCEPT when talking about spelling the pronoun its, which despite its appearance and phonetics of being a pronoun that follows noun rules, is actually a separate word arbitrarily. I mean, who would ever get confused by the 's pattern not applying in this one case? It's a special case of a special case and should be extremely obvious.

Amiright?

"placed in its casing" vs. "placed in ours casing"

English is more like Ruby than anything else.