181–190 of 204 posts
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!"
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> (which was ignored and they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians). This is inaccurate. Much fewer than 200,000 people were killed immediately (totaled across both bombings), including both incinerated and not, civilian and not.
Wikipedia has casualties between 129,000–246,000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an... Casualties and losses: 20 U.S., Dutch, British prisoners of war killed 90,000–166,000 killed in Hiroshima 39,000–80,000 killed in Nagasaki Total: 129,000–246,000+ killed It doesn't say if these are all immediate casualties (does it even matter), but it does mention estimates for Nagasaki immediate casualt…
Wikipedia gives an immediate death toll of 70,000–80,000 people, of whom 20,000 were soldiers for Hiroshima and 22,000-75,000 people for Nagasaki. This is far from hundreds of thousands of incinerated civilians.
It's self-published, and he's a great fellow; he'll email you and offer to sign your copy, as well as answer any questions you've got.
http://www.amazon.com/Atom-Bombs-Secret-Inside-Little/dp/B00...
This next year is the 70th anniversary of the Trinity test, which is open to the public once a year: http://www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/default.aspx
Edit: He's also the guy who deduced the most probable internal configuration of Little Boy, and built an inert 1:1 scale model which was presented to and signed by the living members of the 509th Bomb Wing.
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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…
Imagine today you have that device in your table. Ok. What is your next step. Just show up at the Pentagon with it in your bag?
A lot of that costs money (unfairly probably) and that is one of the reasons soldiers sometimes end with crappy hardware that costs some astronomical amounts.
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>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 f…
Nowhere near as many that were systematically slaughtered by their own gov't.
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…
> "Immediately, all eight scientists in the room felt a wave of heat accompanied by a blue glow as the plutonium sphere vomited an invisible burst of gamma and neutron radiation into the room. As the lab's Geiger counter clicked hysterically, Louis used his bare hand to push the upper plutonium hemisphere off and onto the floor, which terminated the supercritical reaction moments after it began." Nit pick: What you h…
Had he not made this instinctive move, everyone present would have perished and the area would have remained deadly until some other poor soul came upon the tragedy to stop the reaction.
The first-hand accounts of those present are in the thorough official report, which just happens to be collected in John Coster-Mullen's Atom Bombs book.
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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.
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Wikipedia has casualties between 129,000–246,000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an... Casualties and losses: 20 U.S., Dutch, British prisoners of war killed 90,000–166,000 killed in Hiroshima 39,000–80,000 killed in Nagasaki Total: 129,000–246,000+ killed It doesn't say if these are all immediate casualties (does it even matter), but it does mention estimates for Nagasaki immediate casualt…
You wrote that "they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians", which implies that at least 200,000 Japanese civilians were incinerated in the bombings. The 129,000–246,000+ killed figure you cite covers 2-4 months after the bombings. I am confident that no one was incinerated 2 or more months after the bombing. Wikipedia gives an immediate death toll of 70,000–80,000 people, of who…
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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?
It seems like it was more a declaration of power than anything.
Things I've read indicate that there was an actual lack of trusted comms between the Imperial staff and the U.S. I believe things were going through the Soviets. Some credit that with leaving enough gap to make any offer of surrender much slower and harder to verify. And there was allegedly a power struggle within the Imperial chain of command.
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As far as we know, history can only be written the once. No rewrites.
We know a few other things too. For example, we know that anyone who confidently and bluntly asserts that "if X had been done Y would have happened" is not contributing to any useful discussion. People rarely know why they are doing what they are doing today, and certainly know almost nothing about why someone else did something half a century ago. We can point to things people said and did in the past and make infor…
Sure, if it hadn't worked, they may have tried again, and the next attempt may have led to all these things, but fact is, it DID work, and everyone in these photos contributed to it (knowingly or unknowingly).