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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

#171

Post by DominikR »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #89
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…

>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…

> How many died because of the advance of Communism in Asia?

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.

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

#172

Post by lobster_johnson »

tedjdziuba wrote: post #82
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 Making of the Atomic Bomb" http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/dp... is a fantastic book for anybody in a technical field. It describes in precise detail how a team of scientists, materials engineers, and government came together to make possible something that started as theoretical physics. J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves were a fascinating team, Oppenheimer being a physicist and…

Its sequel, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb [1] is also great. It deals with Edward Teller's hydrogen bomb, the nuclear spies (Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, etc.), the beginning of the cold war, Oppenheimer's ambitious attempts at atomic regulation, and his subsequent trial. TMAB stands out, however; it is superb in its panoramic, often lyrical depiction of science and philosophy coming together in a broad cast of scientists. Much of Dark Sun is about spies, cops and military figures, and its subject matter is somewhat more prosaic.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb/dp/06848...

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

#173

Post by tfranks »

justatdotin wrote: post #170
tfranks wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I advise those that get misty eyed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to look into Unit 731: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

remind us again of the fundamentals of moral calculus: how many rongs make a right?

Point out a horror resulting from Hiroshima or Nagasaki that tops human infant vivisection.

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

#174

Post by walshemj »

theoh wrote: post #158
walshemj wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that the "peace" faction's strategy was to force an invasion and massive casualty's (98% wastage for the first 5 waves) to help a negotiated settlement I think Pres Eisenhower is as naive as Chamberlin was prior to ww2

You may be right, I don't know enough to say. Perhaps it was wishful thinking in retrospect. (He said it in the 1960s when the nuclear genie was definitely out of the bottle and causing major headaches for everyone.) 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 w…

d don't for get that American politicians saw what the butchers bill for Verdun and Somme did t France and England.

What if 4 or 5 years after the war it turns out that the president had a wonder weapon that could have ended the war in a week and saved 1/2 a million GI's - it would have been the end for the democratic party when that came out.

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

#175

Post by [deleted] »

theoh wrote: post #158
walshemj wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that the "peace" faction's strategy was to force an invasion and massive casualty's (98% wastage for the first 5 waves) to help a negotiated settlement I think Pres Eisenhower is as naive as Chamberlin was prior to ww2

You may be right, I don't know enough to say. Perhaps it was wishful thinking in retrospect. (He said it in the 1960s when the nuclear genie was definitely out of the bottle and causing major headaches for everyone.) 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 w…

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by DominikR »

aaronem wrote: post #127
mikeash wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Y…

Instead of going for the quick win, you'd rather we had risked an invasion with five- to seven-figure casualties to each side, followed by years of necessarily yet insufficiently brutal occupation, followed in its turn by another war against a nation we'd just finished giving every reason in the world to want to wipe us off the face of the earth?

I do not see why it was mandatory to invade Japan. Their army was wiped out, so were most Japanese cities and industry centers.

They were no threat to anyone at that time.

And if we look at it from the japanese perspective: They never intended to invade the US. Their goal was to end the US blockade of Japan.

Not every single war has to end with an all out invasion.

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

#177

Post by personalcompute »

demallien wrote: post #167
hollerith wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. (La Wik says the US Air Force is currently paying $27,000 per tail kit.)

Wow. There's an industry in massive need of disruption. I'm thinking a mid-range android phone + some servos + software would do the trick. Let's say one year's dev for a reasonable engineer, so $100k + $300 in parts. Make a 1-Iraq-war-day's worth, and you'd have the unit price down to hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands.

You'll need radiation hardening, a more precise inertial measurement unit (six axis gyro), and extreme reliability and lifetime that no consumer electronics device provides. The labor and materials cost, plus electronics mentioned above, is a lot more than $300. I also doubt you'll find a single engineer with the required aerospace and electrical engineering skills - you don't build an flight control surface control system with some 'ninjas' working on node.js in SF in a year.

I also haven't gotten into the business and logistics costs of pulling this off, but consider the fact that there is not even a RFP for such a device in existence.

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

#178

Post by mannykannot »

larrydag wrote: post #52
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…

I'm no nuclear physicist but I think there wasn't a danger of dropping the a-bomb accidentally. If I recall from reading about it the a-bomb needed a huge electronic catalyst to start the fission processes. In fact a lot of time was spent setting up the timer to determine when to start the reaction during the bomb descent. I'm just recollecting so i could be wrong.

The Goldsboro incident went 5/6ths of the way: http://www.ecu.edu/cs-admin/news/brokenarrow.cfm

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

#179

Post by mikeash »

DominikR wrote: post #176
aaronem wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of going for the quick win, you'd rather we had risked an invasion with five- to seven-figure casualties to each side, followed by years of necessarily yet insufficiently brutal occupation, followed in its turn by another war against a nation we'd just finished giving every reason in the world to want to wipe us off the face of the earth?

I do not see why it was mandatory to invade Japan. Their army was wiped out, so were most Japanese cities and industry centers. They were no threat to anyone at that time. And if we look at it from the japanese perspective: They never intended to invade the US. Their goal was to end the US blockade of Japan. Not every single war has to end with an all out invasion.

The alternative to invasion was a long-term blockade. Japan was already near the breaking point and there would have been millions dead due to starvation in fairly short order in that scenario.

There was probably no way to beat them without getting a lot of people killed. Leaving them alone was probably not a good option either.

I also feel a need to point out that Japan did invade the US in the Aleutians campaign, albeit a fairly insignificant and deeply out-of-the-way portion of the US. The Philippines could also be considered part of the US at the time the Japanese conquered it, although pretty loosely.

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

#180

Post by sgustard »

sophacles wrote: post #13
vixin wrote: post #9

Implosion Sphere for Fat Man nearly assembled and about to be placed inside it's casing. "Its casing". Why do people have such a problem with it's and its?

Because it's backwards of how apostrophes normally work. In all other cases, it is the right place to use an apostrophe: * ...about to be placed in Fat Man's casing. * ...about to be placed in the bomb's casing * ... about to be placed in its casing. One of those is not like the others.

All English pronouns are nonstandard, different from each other, and different from nouns. You can bother to learn it or not, you're choice. I mean your choice. Yer?
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