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Watch the video again, They showed a third bomb ready to go if they did not surrender. That one was going to be dropped on Tokyo which had a big population. The first two was dropped on their industrial areas that were turning out their airplanes, etc.
There's a difference between analyzing and armchair quarterbacking.
Obviously, some people fail to understand that difference.
Its amusing when people throw out statements like this. If its clear I don't understand the difference, by all means, please educate me. There is this crazy thing that happens when people look at the same set of facts and possible conclusions. They come up with different ideas of what to do. Not everyone was on board with this attack when it happened either.
Yah. Except we had to work up the physics, find & mine & extract the U, enrich the U, (same for Plutonium, except enrichment), calculate critical masses, design the devices, work up explosive lenses & the math involved there. Build & test the implosion design. Then design & build B-29s, & refine the design, & put out the fires, & refine the design, & install all the updates, & put out the fires (the engines were @ the very bleeding edge of technology - & they caught fire/blew up a lot - any shot you see of them refueling, there's @ least one guy there with a big fire extinguisher, ready to go.) Then we had to get close enough - Tinian - to be in the B-29's enormous range. Train the crews, reduce the bomb to an actual deliverable.
We barely got everything done in time to go operational. May God have mercy on us all.
It has always made me wonder how it was the Nazis didn't develop atomic weapons first. They had the technology, the minds and the personnel. Had they actually gotten working weapons into action before they were over run, things would be quite different today. I keep imagining nuke tipped V2s shooting off the pad. Japan could have conceivably made atomic weapons themselves, but I'v never seen anything on a Japanese atomic weapons effort during WW2. That Germany would have provided them such weapons had they made any, well, that's a foregone conclusion.
The decision to use our atomic weapons, I can't find fault in that. The war needed to end. Both theaters. We could have gone on to world domination after Fat Man and Little Boy, but we didn't. Instead we rebuilt both Germany and Japan and let the Russians get their own atomic weapons. That worked out well.
If I remember the date correctly, In early December of 1941, Erich Schumann of the German Army Ordnance Office informed the leading scientists in the nuclear fission research group that the continued support of the nuclear fission project could only be justified if military applications of nuclear fission could be expected in the foreseeable future.
I remember I read it somewhere that there has never been a race for the bomb. German scientists simply did not do serious research to get an A-bomb. They did everything to build a “reactor-bomb†tons heavy! A reactor-bomb was a bomb working with slow neutrons.
This has been covered thoroughly many times in the past especially in the History forum.
A lot of people have no idea of the actual history surrounding the events of the bombings and don't even know about Russia declaring war on Japan and decimating their forces on mainland Asia at about the same time the bombs were being dropped.
Heck, we killed more people firebombing Tokyo.
Japanese leadership was angling for a better negotiating position, the US wasn't having any of that so they kept getting bombed. It is what it is.
It has always made me wonder how it was the Nazis didn't develop atomic weapons first. They had the technology, the minds and the personnel. Had they actually gotten working weapons into action before they were over run, things would be quite different today. I keep imagining nuke tipped V2s shooting off the pad. Japan could have conceivably made atomic weapons themselves, but I'v never seen anything on a Japanese atomic weapons effort during WW2. That Germany would have provided them such weapons had they made any, well, that's a foregone conclusion.
The decision to use our atomic weapons, I can't find fault in that. The war needed to end. Both theaters. We could have gone on to world domination after Fat Man and Little Boy, but we didn't. Instead we rebuilt both Germany and Japan and let the Russians get their own atomic weapons. That worked out well.
The Nazis had their chance @ nukes - but they derided Jewish physics, & threw out the best Jewish minds within their reach - who typically went to the West - physicists, engineers, chemists, metallurgists, etc. The Manhattan Project recruited a lot of those people (& other dissidents, Socialists, etc. who also fled Germany & Italy), who helped move the US forward enormously. The remaining scientific elites in Germany had a bad model of critical mass, & made a wrong choice on the material for moderating controls in a nuclear pile. Even with the correct models & physics, I don't think a V-2 could have lofted an early nuke - the V-2s could lift just over one ton. We (the US) had to develop B-29s to lift & deliver our nukes. Fat Man weighed 5+ tons, Little Boy just under 5 tons. (Payload & weights from Wikipedia.)
Also, Germany & Japan were both @ the end of their economic rope - Japan's nuke effort never got beyond position papers, & there just wasn't the infrastructure (economic, tech, mining, engineering) to spare to do the massive theoretical work necessary to get to a weapon). Also, the IJA & IJN competed against each other - they developed separate air wings & didn't coordinate well @ all. The Nazis got a little further - but not much. They had a couple of institutes @ colleges looking into the possibilities, but no central office coordinating efforts. If the Nazis had developed nukes, they likely would have used them (although the fallout patterns - the prevailing winds - typically came east from UK to the mainland). Radiation wasn't well understood, though, & if Hitler was willing to burn down Germany for their lack of faith, he might well have been willing to scorch all the earth on his way out.
Yah, the US didn't allow the Soviets to steal most of the nuclear secrets. The security net around US/Allied nuclear tech leaked like a sieve (most US security did, in the 1920s & 1930s & into the 1940s - although we got better @ it as the war progressed. Too late, though.) The USSR had blueprints, reports, diagrams, analyses, photos, lists of parts, materials, techniques - it's how the USSR was able to short-circuit the development process & get to a workable weapon so quickly.
Last edited by southwest88; 12-09-2016 at 09:54 AM..
Reason: fix
Watch the video again, They showed a third bomb ready to go if they did not surrender. That one was going to be dropped on Tokyo which had a big population. The first two was dropped on their industrial areas that were turning out their airplanes, etc.
Japan surrendered on September 2, 1944. The third bomb wasn't ready until August 1945.
It has always made me wonder how it was the Nazis didn't develop atomic weapons first. They had the technology, the minds and the personnel.
I would question whether they really had the minds. Nuclear science was a weird and obscure field in the interbellum years, and the Nazi insistence on refusing "Jewish Science" made it hard to make headway in afield dominated by people like Einstein and Bohr.
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Had they actually gotten working weapons into action before they were over run, things would be quite different today. I keep imagining nuke tipped V2s shooting off the pad.
In all fairness, I don't think even the United States could have built a missile warhead in 1945. The WWII bombs weighed in at about 5 tons.
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We could have gone on to world domination after Fat Man and Little Boy, but we didn't. Instead we rebuilt both Germany and Japan and let the Russians get their own atomic weapons. That worked out well.
The nuclear genie was out of the bottle and there was no subduing the Soviet Union in 1945. The Cold War sucked, but of the available options, it was probably the preferable one.
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Japan could have conceivably made atomic weapons themselves, but I'v never seen anything on a Japanese atomic weapons effort during WW2. That Germany would have provided them such weapons had they made any, well, that's a foregone conclusion. 
Some nuclear history
