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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps to understand how it actually works. The s in its does not point towards possession, it is simply part of the word "its". My, His, Hers, Ours, Yours, Theirs, Its. Not Me's, He's, She's, Us's, Your's, Their's, It's. English is an easy language. Most languages use a lot more words than all that to convey all that. English speakers don't have to deal with the singular second person, with a separate objective no…

The brain is an incredible pattern recognition machine. 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…

I know you're being snarky, but do you actually speak any other languages? Because I don't think you realize how easy you have it.

He. She. It. That's all you have to deal with. You have to know whether the subject is male, female, or indeterminate in some way. There's maybe a couple of exception (like boats being refered to as She and such) but other than that, you literally go by genitalia.

In most other languages you have to take into account whether the subject is male or female and whether the subject should be referred to as plural as a form of politeness; if their sex is unknown or indeterminate you have to know whether the word itself is masculine or feminine (or neutral!). Shall I go on?

Oh and that's not even mentioning languages with different grammar rules for the various different kind of persons. You have singular and plural. That's it. Some languages have singular, plural-few, plural-many, some, none, all, and they all have their different grammatical rules.

Boo-hoo, you gotta remember whether to put an s or not. Some languages have to remember dozens of different suffixes to put at the end of the word depending on the forementioned rules and a bunch more, including how the word itself is written.

Come on.

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

#93
post #29
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They cost between 13k and 26k a piece in 2014 USD. That is truly amazing. EDIT: Even more amazing when you consider that they weighed about 10k pounds.

It's amazing/depressing how cheap bombs are when they don't have to be smart.

Why "depressing" that a device with little complexity costs less than one with much (smart implies much) complexity?

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

#95

It strikes fear into me that these folks are loading a device that is design to kill thousands of lives, the madness in this thing call war.

Actually, the purpose of the bomb was to save many thousands more lives than it ended. An invasion of Japan would've cost an enormous number of lives. It would've also had a catastrophic effect on the civilian population, because they were being told that the American troops were there to enslave them. It has even been said that the propaganda being told to the Japanese civilians included the idea that the troops wou…

How many children was it worth killing to make sure Japan lost? What if the alternative to bombing Japan wasn't an invasion of Japan?

How about using those bombs on or over invading fleets of Japanese - if Japan ever actually planned to invade the US?

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

#96
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…

>the war would have ended without them. How do we really know this? The Japanese were ready for a long drawn out decades conflict. The US forces were war-weary and war was draining the economy. This could have gone on with quite some time, or ended in a frozen conflict that would reignite periodically. Who knows, but a quick non-nuclear win was certainly not in the cards. >would the superpowers have been as restraine…

I don't think there's any chance of the war lasting more than a year or so longer than it did absent nuclear bombing. The US was preparing for a full-scale invasion. That invasion would have succeeded, albeit at great cost. No matter how stubborn the Japanese were about not surrendering, there was simply no way they could mount an effective long-term defense.

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.

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

#98
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing/depressing how cheap bombs are when they don't have to be smart.

Actually, it's amazing how much they charge for bombs that are smart.

Actually, most smart bombs (JDAMs) are just old, dumb bombs with a new "tail kit" containing a GPS and guidance electronics.

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

#99

Looks like HN has blown the sites quota out of the water... though as it redirects to http://www.alternatewars.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi you've gotta wonder what the cgi is written in.

People are probably already scanning it ;)

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I underestand, it was not purely confidence, it was also that there was a major war going on and the expected production rate was low, so the risk of failure in the field was judged a lesser cost than the using up another bomb in testing.

It took basically the entire Manhattan project to create enough U-235 for that single bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was no more U-235 coming, at least not any on a scale or timeline for the war.

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.

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