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

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

#71

Post by scrollaway »

crusso wrote: post #57
kyberias wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this doesn't help. 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. :)

Its easy to mix them by non-natives like myself You're being far too generous to us natives by implying that this is only a problem for non-natives.

FYI: I'm not a native English speaker. I just love languages.

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

#72

Post by mikeash »

dirktheman wrote: post #68
mikeash wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the interval from test to drop is all that meaningful. If you can build one, you can build two. Also note that the design tested at Trinity was not the design used on Hiroshima. The Little Boy design used on Hiroshima was a gun-type design that was so obvious it would work that it wasn't felt that any testing was required. The Fat Man design used on Nagasaki was vastly more complex (but much more efficie…

I'm not sure if I agree on the superpowers being as restrained as they were. The US and the USSR had over 70,000 nuclear warheads in the 80's... If they showed any restraint, it was more in not using them.

That's what I mean by restraint. They built up a vast arsenal, but never used it.

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."

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

#73

Post by scrollaway »

kyberias wrote: post #53
scrollaway wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's" is a contraction of "it is", it doesn't exist in and of itself. Maybe that helps more?

Argh... now I really got it backwards. What I meant to say was that one does not write "shes", one writes "her", and not "wes" but "our". And that does not apply to "it". To summarize, comparison to other personal pronouns is irrelevant since "it" has a special combination of rules.

I'm not sure how "it" is special". Because its possessive ends in an s? So do "theirs", "hers", and "ours" (which I think are the ones you meant).

I think you're having a hard time because you're overcomplicating the matter. "its" is the possessive of "it". "it's" is a contraction of "it is". Possessives adjectives: My, Your, His, Her, Their, Its. Possessive pronouns: Mine, Yours, His, Her, Theirs, Its. You have four less to remember than with most languages :)

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

#74

Post by scrollaway »

Moru wrote: post #49
ryandvm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because English is like Javascript - it's weird and is riddled with vestigial design errors, but since it's everywhere, we're all forced to use it.

I think people coming from other languages have another view of English. As a "swede" I find it surprisingly logical and easy to learn. I bet someone from Finland would agree :-)

You're at an advantage. Swedish is essentially just an antiquated english (I mean that in a good way). The difference in learning Swedish between before and after I learned English was night on pluto and day on venus.

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

#75

Post by pavel_lishin »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #50
dirktheman wrote: post #31

It always amazes me how seemingly careless they were with these nuclear devices back then. To know that such a devestating bomb was handled by a sultry, shirtless youngster, in a shed on a small island in the Pacific... It reminds me of the Slotin Incident ( http://www.damninteresting.com/bitten-by-the-nuclear-dragon/ ) where dr. Louis Slotin accidently slipped the screwdriver he used to separate two plutonium/uraniu…

You should read Command and Control which is about the history of nuclear accidents and management in the US. Carelessness didn't go away for a long time, especially in the upper management. Very well written and interesting book. http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Eric-Schlosser-ebook/d...

Weird, says not currently available for purchase - I don't even have the option to add it to the wish list.

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

#76

Post by pavel_lishin »

dirktheman wrote: post #56
qwerta wrote: post #24

There were amazing (and deadly) alternatives to a-bomb. Most interesting was Bat bomb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

That's hilarious! Imagine sitting in the mess hall, overhearing two men discussing their day: "I'm working on a cunning plan. It involves bombs, strapped to bats. What are you working on?" "Oh, just a nuclear fission device. When it goes supercritical it's.. oh well, never mind. Tell me more about the bats!"

... and then reporting them for flagrant breaches of security, as well as being quarantined yourself for knowing too much.

Whee, wartime is fun!

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

dirktheman wrote: post #31

It always amazes me how seemingly careless they were with these nuclear devices back then. To know that such a devestating bomb was handled by a sultry, shirtless youngster, in a shed on a small island in the Pacific... It reminds me of the Slotin Incident ( http://www.damninteresting.com/bitten-by-the-nuclear-dragon/ ) where dr. Louis Slotin accidently slipped the screwdriver he used to separate two plutonium/uraniu…

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by hamiltonkibbe »

dirktheman wrote: post #31

It always amazes me how seemingly careless they were with these nuclear devices back then. To know that such a devestating bomb was handled by a sultry, shirtless youngster, in a shed on a small island in the Pacific... It reminds me of the Slotin Incident ( http://www.damninteresting.com/bitten-by-the-nuclear-dragon/ ) where dr. Louis Slotin accidently slipped the screwdriver he used to separate two plutonium/uraniu…

There were a few nearly identical incidents. Another involved someone working alone after hours dropping the last block of plutonium/uranium onto a stack during criticality testing after realizing that it was going to go critical, and removing it by hand.

Its pretty amazing that the test procedure for determining the critical mass was essentially "stack these blocks of plutonium/uranium (by hand) until the neutron detector starts going off, and then take one away"

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

#79

Post by lutusp »

There are a number of errors in the photo captions, so for the record:

1. The "Little Boy" device, cylindrical in shape, was a U-235 gun-type device that was so simple in its design that it was dropped -- on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 -- without having been tested first. The U-235 was extraordinarily expensive to produce, taking up a large percentage of the Manhattan Project budget and several years. Two independent programs using different methods were designed to produce sufficient U-235, which needs to be separated from the much more abundant and non-fissioning U-238 isotope. The expense of extracting U-235 is the reason that only one such bomb was used, and only a few were ever built.

2. The "Fat Man" bomb design used an isotope of plutonium (Pu-239) that was bred in fission reactors in Hanford, WA and Oak Ridge, TN over a relatively short time and at much lower cost. This bomb was tested at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945, in advance of its use on Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) because its implosion design was much more complex than the uranium bomb.

3. All modern fission weapons, and the trigger devices in fusion weapons, are design descendants of the Pu-239 "Fat Man" device that was dropped on nagasaki.

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

#80

Post by Involute »

dirktheman wrote: post #31

It always amazes me how seemingly careless they were with these nuclear devices back then. To know that such a devestating bomb was handled by a sultry, shirtless youngster, in a shed on a small island in the Pacific... It reminds me of the Slotin Incident ( http://www.damninteresting.com/bitten-by-the-nuclear-dragon/ ) where dr. Louis Slotin accidently slipped the screwdriver he used to separate two plutonium/uraniu…

The bomb that was tested during Trinity was a plutonium, implosion device, completely different from the uranium, gun-type device dropped on Hiroshima. The designers were so confident of the latter that it was never tested before being deployed.
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