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And three days (Aug. 8, 1945, 78 years ago today) after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, another (and more powerful) one was dropped on Nagasaki.
The intended target was the city of Kokura. But when the B-29 "Bock's Car" arrived over Kokura carrying a plutonium implosion bomb, they found the city obscured by smoke and fog. So they turned and flew to the alternate target, Nagasaki, and dropped the Bomb there.
Shortly afterward, even the most warlike Japanese members of the government realized that they could not stop the Americans from methodically destroying every city in Japan. So they finally agreed to unconditional surrender, and WWII ended. It was a result that more than five years of "conventional" warfare failed to achieve. The Atomic Bomb (and a declaration of war upon Japan by Russia) achieved it in about a week.
Japan didn't know at the time, that those were the only two complete atomic bombs the Americans had been able to produce at that time (plus one more set off in July as a test in New Mexico). They could eventually produce more of the needed fissile material, but it would have taken a while, so the Americans kept quiet. The head of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Leslie Groves expected to have another "Fat Man" (plutonium, as was dropped on Nagasaki) atomic bomb ready for use on 19 August, with three more in September and a further three in October; a second Little Boy bomb (using U-235, the typed dropped on Hiroshima) would not be available until December 1945.
And three days (Aug. 8, 1945, 78 years ago today) after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, another (and more powerful) one was dropped on Nagasaki.
You really should stop using Pukipedia as source. It's unconscionable that you would use Puki on such a controversial issue when primary sources are readily available.
You do understand that Puki was written by some guy living in his mom's basement playing with his man-bun, right?
Because, um, the article is factually wrong.
A minimum of 12 weapons were produced exclusively for use on Japan (not counting the Trinity Test) which refutes the claim that "They could eventually produce more of the needed fissile material."
The fissile material already existed and as General Groves himself stated all would be "ready for use before the end of November." (actual quote of Groves) which refutes the false claims.
To produce U-235 you just take Uranium ore and separate the U-235 from the U-238.
To produce Plutonium, you have to load a reactor with U-238 and bombard it with neutrons for this reaction:
U-238 + n --> Np-239 - b --> Pu-239 (+ n --> Pu-240; + n --> Pu-241; + n Pu-242)
If you run the reactor sloppily you get Pu-241 and Pu-242 which will ruin your weapon.
Then you unload the reactor and separate the Pu-239/Pu-240 (Pu-240 is not a problem and costs way too much and takes way too long to separate).
General Groves planned on using 4 weapons because that's what he believed would induce Japan to surrender.
Contrary to the claim by the loser in his mum's basement playing with his man-bun, what General Groves actually said is a 3rd weapon would be available on the first target clear weather day after August 17 or August 18.
Contrary to the claim by the loser in his mum's basement playing with his man-bun, neither weapon was more powerful than the other.
Both weapons had an intended yield of 20 kt. Although the intended yield of Fat Man was 20 kt, the effective yield was estimated at 12-14 kt due to a minor design flaw which was corrected after it was used. The effective yield of Little Boy was estimated at 18 kt although some estimates do put it at 20 kt and I've seen estimates at 16 kt. We couldn't exactly set up testing equipment to see what it actually was.
Why a minimum of 12 weapons?
Gosh, I don't know. What did Oppenheimer say?
Oppenheimer said he could make more bombs out of the material he already had.
How's that possible? Well, see the difference between the loser playing with his man-bun and Oppenheimer and I is that Oppenheimer and I actually played with nukes.
Anyone who knows freaking anything knows that General Hull and Colonel Seeman discussed the possibility of using lower yield tactical nuclear weapons in support of the invasion of Japan. Specifically, they were discussing the use of low yield "tactical" nukes at or near landing sites to kill off the enemy then have US troops land and move through the area.
General Groves erroneously believed that troops could move into an area only hours after a nuclear detonation had occurred. In fact, Groves said that to everyone on the Pacific Command Staff. When reports of people keeling over and dying in the day or two after Hiroshima made their way to US officials, Groves contacted one of the Manhattan Project scientists at Oak Ridge who was not even remotely qualified to answer the question of radiation-induced injuries. He told Groves it was enemy propaganda. If I'm not mistaken, it was Colonel Rea who said it was propaganda.
If you have a chunk of U-235, what happens? Nothing happens very slowly. Oppenheimer can take the U-235 and divvy it up into smaller chunks with yields of 8-12 kt instead of 20 kt because very obviously 8-12 kt will do sufficient enough damage at that particular time in history.
U-235 has a spontaneous fission rate of 30 fissions per kilogram per second. That's why you can have a chunk of it. You take a chunk slightly less than critical mass and another smaller chunk that together would equal critical mass and you fire the U-235 "bullet" through a gun barrel into the other chunk and then run electricity through a cryoton (a gas-filled tube) and it sheds neutrons to initiate the cascading chain reaction and away you go.
You can slap that together in a couple of days.
The Plutonium is different. It has a spontaneous fission rate of 20,000 fissions per kilogram per second. No such thing as "a pound of Plutonium." It would self initiate. Wouldn't get a mushroom cloud but it would expand burning white hot and throwing off massive numbers of neutrons. I wouldn't wanna be within 5 miles of where that was happening.
Plutonium is kept as pellets with a volume less than one cubic centimeter. You have to put them in an autoclave and make strips about 4 mm thick and lay those over a spherical lattice structure and then put you PBX over that. That was the minor design flaw. The slow-burning PBX was too slow and so when the hollow sphere collapse it rebounded because of the inelastic collision thing and reduced the yield of the weapon. You have to suspend all that inside the weapon casing and put your cyrotons in. As you might guess (and the moron playing with his man-bun was too stupid to guess) it takes considerably longer to make one than it does the single-gun design used with U-235. A "back-pack" nuke was just 4.5 kg of Plutonium without cryotons that self-initiated and yielded 1 kt.
The Japanese people got what they deserved. It was their government. They own it. They let it run amok and they're guilty of conspiracy; complicity; facilitation; accessory before, during, and after the fact; and aiding and abetting.
That kinda stuff happens when people are ignorant and apathetic.
My father was in the Army in WWII. He said the estimate was it would kill about 1 million allied soldiers to invade and subdue Japan. He was also a historian.
Quote:
Originally Posted by michiganmoon
Some argued for a quarantine of the island, but Japan was still killing around 200,000 people in their occupation of foreign lands late in the war.
Tough choices as it seemed to lower us on some level by not minimizing civilian deaths, but on the other hand it surprised some of our leaders just how bad it was and we already had firebombed Tokyo and leveled other cities.
I wondered about a blockade/quarantine. Starve them out. It would have taken probably a year or more, that's just my guess. They could go a long time cannibalizing their own people. But eventually they'd have run out of ammo, petrol...all the needs for war.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bus man
The whole issue of estimated casualties is extensively discussed in Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank. Well worth reading for anyone with an interest in this subject.
It varies. The Pacific Command themselves estimated US/Allied 500,000 casualties.
I would accept that as accurate for a number of reasons.
What the non-starters and revisionists do is take an island like Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Saipan or any other and say the Japanese had this many troops and this many casualties and the US had this many troops and this many casualties and disgustingly apply that to the urban warfare in Japan.
Urban warfare is every commander's nightmare.
In non-urban areas, like those islands that were uninhabited or sparsely populated and devoid of development, the enemy is to your front and maybe on a flank.
In an urban area, the enemy is in front of you, to your left, to your right, behind you, and worse above you shooting down on you. It's door-to-door and often hand-to-hand. Armored vehicles are useless because their advantages are negated and the effectiveness of artillery fires is substantially reduced.
For those who don't believe that, I give you Iraq.
The US took far more casualties in urban areas like Fallujah than they did on the open plains of Basra.
It's ugly. No, not ugly. Fugly (some know what that means).
In Germany, nearly all bridges could support armor ('cause Hitler made them that way just like he made the autobahns defensive barriers).
In Japan, most bridges couldn't handle armored vehicles so you gotta stop and bring the engineers up and figure out how to bridge it and while you're sitting there playing around you make a really good target.
So, the infantry is one side of the bridge getting pounded while waiting for armor and towed artillery to get across the make-shift bridge (eventually). Not cool.
I saw a documentary on it and the military still wanted to fight even after the bombs. In fact there was concern they would not comply with the surrender.
There was a coup attempt August 14 that failed. Had it succeeded, a third bomb would have been dropped.
What Admiral Tagaki wrote in his diary was that military hard-liners were very much in charge and that Prime Minister Suzuki was talking tough against surrender by evoking last ditch moments in Japanese history and warning of the danger that subordinate commanders might not obey surrender orders.
The emperor himself was trying to organize one last major battle where Japan would win or stalemate the US as a negotiating tool.
One selfish man who thought he was god incarnate on Earth. He refused to accept any “demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler†(actual quote).
The emperor's terms of surrender were stop attacking us and leave us alone. The emperor stays in power. The government stays in power. Japan keeps its occupied territories. No occupation. No war reparations.
That is unconscionable.
The US terms were the emperor were the same as those to Germany and Italy: Emperor steps down, government steps down, Japan abandons all occupied territories and any future claims to those territories, submits to occupation, and pays war reparations.
There was nothing racist about it. Japanese culture was toxic. Period. Anyone who thinks some guy on a throne is the incarnation of a god is mental.
Hirohito knows all he has to do is outlast the American people. The euphoria over V-E Day is gone. Americans want the troops home. Now. Hirohito knows that because Japanese spies (you don't have to be Japanese to spy for Japan) are telling him that.
It's Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then New Year's and where are the troops? Not home. Americans will be in the streets protesting.
No invasion of the mainland would take place before March 1946 which would be 3 months after New Year's so you can see how torqued up Americans would be.
At that point, the US would do anything Hirohito told them to do just be done with it.
Ignorant people also don't understand that if the US invades mainland Japan, the Soviets will be invading, too which means when Japan finally surrenders, half of Japan will be occupied by the Soviets and the other half by the US and British.
Most of you couldn't deal with the world that evolved out of that.
I feel this way, japan was the aggressor. they did terrible things to chinese and other asians. Like horrific things. You have to do what you have to do to win a war. So I feel badly for dead innocents but innocents always die in war, thats the nature of war. I don't talk about this with my mom it's like a touchy subject with her, probably ww2 and Hiroshima is taught differently there,so I just avoid that topic. But I asked her what do you think of internment of Japanese Americans during ww2, she was like, you have to do what you have to do to protect your country. And we were talking about the Iraq war and afghanistan war she said, I was watching a documentary on US soldiers in afghanistan and due to specific rules of engagement you cannot shoot the terrorist if they use human shields and other rules of engagement, she was like if they could nuke a civilized country like Japan, then they should be able to kill those terrorist savages. I don't blame her for thinking like this. She was talking to my dad on the phone. But yeah, I think rules of engagement has changed, my dad was telling her well they set it up that way with the impossible rules of engagement to purposefully keep us mired in forever wars that the military industrial complex wants they want to make profit from war etc.
My mom was telling me in east Asia, it's actually complete normal to be against other east asians like Koreans will openly hate Japanese, Japanese hating Koreans and Chinese etc. She was telling me most Japanese have a very unfavorable opinion of china compared with korea though. She says she doesn't like china but she respects them because they do have a culture and Japanese script came from china. She also said korea and japan will never come together to fend off china, there's too much antagonism.
My mom was telling me in east Asia, it's actually complete normal to be against other east asians like Koreans will openly hate Japanese, Japanese hating Koreans and Chinese etc. She was telling me most Japanese have a very unfavorable opinion of china compared with korea though. She says she doesn't like china but she respects them because they do have a culture and Japanese script came from china. She also said korea and japan will never come together to fend off china, there's too much antagonism.
Yep, I worked for a Japanese company for 3 years. They thought the South Koreans were inferior, and thought of the Chinese as an eternal enemy. Many People in the US have no clue as they think of everything from a White/Black and other perspective.
My mom was telling me in east Asia, it's actually complete normal to be against other east asians like Koreans will openly hate Japanese, Japanese hating Koreans and Chinese etc. She was telling me most Japanese have a very unfavorable opinion of china compared with korea though. She says she doesn't like china but she respects them because they do have a culture and Japanese script came from china. She also said korea and japan will never come together to fend off china, there's too much antagonism.
Americans tend to think of East Asians as one big blob, indistinguishable from one another. But there are indeed major differences between the various East Asian peoples (and I don't mean just in what they look like), and the people there are very well aware of them. As for Japanese-Korean antagonism, a huge whole lot of it on the Korean side comes from leftover resentment from the horrible treatment that Japan inflicted upon them during World War II, coupled with their refusal to apologize for their mistreatment. They have very long memories there. To this day, elderly "comfort women" picket in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. Granted, there are other issues, like Dokdo Island, which the Koreans make a huge deal out of while the rest of the world says "huh?" But if Japan would render a sincere apology directly to Korea, a lot of the antagonism would diminish if not vanish.
Americans tend to think of East Asians as one big blob, indistinguishable from one another. But there are indeed major differences between the various East Asian peoples (and I don't mean just in what they look like), and the people there are very well aware of them. As for Japanese-Korean antagonism, a huge whole lot of it on the Korean side comes from leftover resentment from the horrible treatment that Japan inflicted upon them during World War II, coupled with their refusal to apologize for their mistreatment. They have very long memories there. To this day, elderly "comfort women" picket in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. Granted, there are other issues, like Dokdo Island, which the Koreans make a huge deal out of while the rest of the world says "huh?" But if Japan would render a sincere apology directly to Korea, a lot of the antagonism would diminish if not vanish.
I don't know what Americans you associate with, but in my experience that statement is patently untrue, as well as, insulting.
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