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I haven’t seen the film yet so I don’t know if they get into this, but a large number of the scientists involved with the Manhattan Project were working because they were terrified that the Nazis would build a bomb before the Allies. When, for several reasons, that failed to happen, they were relieved that the bomb wouldn’t have to be used. They felt betrayed when it was used against Japan, who were not developing a bomb and who could have been defeated using conventional means.
the argument put forward was that continuing the war (with a possible drawn-out ground invasion of japan) would cost more lives than demonstrating 2 nukes.
Continued firebombing (which absolutely would not have stopped, and would’ve increased in intensity) alone would have killed far more than the bombs did.
Yes. that was the argument put forward. Similar arguments have been put forward for almost every military and major terrorist action ever taken. People can subscribe to the justifications, or not, as they see fit. The real thing to be cautious about is if you accept such justifications but only when your country is the one making them.
Yeah, but the argument put forward for everyone may not have been acceptable to some working on the project.
It is important to note that the physicists working on the gadget came from diverse backgrounds and had wildly different politics and moralities when coming to decide if they should work on what they saw as a doomsday weapon.
I always see it posed as “we either nuked Japan or we invaded”, but the nukes were absolutely used in preparation for a land invasion. Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit into the highly controversial US strategy of strategic bombing Japanese industry prior to a land invasion, and they were not even the most deadly of our strategic bombing campaigns against Japan (the fire bombing of Tokyo was worse). A proper invasion of Japan post introduction of nuclear bombs commanded by one of our most infamously nuke happy commanders, Douglas MacArthur, planned to have US troops marching through the radioactive wasteland formerly known as Japan slaughtering anything that resisted them. It wasn’t an either or, we weren’t nuking Japan as an alternative to a land invasion, we were nuking them in preparation for a land invasion
Why didn’t they send a movie of the bomb to Hirohito with demands?
Of course, they’d killed a lot of our people in really horrific ways, so patience was running thin.
Because Hirohito was completely shielded from outside communications, and only knew what his top military leaders told him. Specifically the same military leaders who though it would be poetic for the entirety of Japan to die in combat before a single individual surrendered. Nuking 2 cities was the only way for the US to get Hirohito to see the actual consequences of continuing the war
The usa looked at Nazis and went “wtf only we get to be like that” and thenattacked nuked Japanese civilians
They could have dropped the bombs on the coast or a non populated area as a warning, and act if they didn’t surrender though. That’s a demonstration, dropping it in a city/town was not, that was a masacre.
They dropped the first one on a city and that didn’t get the point across, what would bombing a beach do?
the plan was always to drop at least 2, to show it was not a one-off trick.
that would be very expensive (in terms of materiel) demonstration that, considering 1. japanese mindset at the time and 2. the fact that nobody has been nuked to date, would be probably not effective at all. Today, this works because everyone and their grandma knows that nukes exist and they do work
Correct plus we fire bombed a lot of Japanese cities including Tokyo and that barely phased the Japanese government and especially the military. Imagine if instead of burning dresden to the ground we burned Berlin and the Germans responded the same as Japan.
Dude they dropped a bomb on a city, and they completely ignored it. In fact, there was an attempted coup by several the generals to kill the other generals who wanted to sue for peace. These were really militant military men.
The Kyūjō incident (宮城事件, Kyūjō Jiken) was an attempted military coup d’état in the Empire of Japan at the end of the Second World War. It happened on the night of 14–15 August 1945, just before the announcement of Japan’s surrender to the Allies. The coup was attempted by the Staff Office of the Ministry of War of Japan and many from the Imperial Guard to stop the move to surrender.
They attempted to place Emperor Hirohito under house arrest, using the 2nd Brigade Imperial Guard Infantry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
So when people argue that the Japanese were willing to surrender without a bomb or a major military conflict, they are completely ignorant about the trajectory of what was actually happening. We’re lucky that we didn’t have to drop five nukes AND invade. And don’t forget, the Russians were going to invade as well.
This was a time before cell phones, the emperor wouldn’t even know that the blast happened.
Yes, the movie gets into all of this and much, much more. It’s like 80% about the political landscape, 10% personal relationships, 10% the technical aspects of building the bomb itself.
I really really want to see this one in iMax. Does it justify the extra effort, in your opinion?
I liked the movie, but I would honestly say no. I think the visuals were less important than the dialogue being said. I think this part of the internet tends to overrate the movie as a whole imho
Agreed. I saw it in non-imax and felt that I didn’t miss out on anything. As mentioned elsewhere, 80% of the movie involved the politics of building it, 10% on personal relationships, and 10% on the technical aspects of building it. You sure don’t need imax to enhance politics….
If the only other option is a non-premium format (and after this weekend, it will be) then absolutely yes.
That said, not gonna lie that I wish I had seen it in Dolby Cinema instead of 70mm IMAX. But I’m a huge Dolby nerd. This is the first time I’ve bothered with the hassle of 70mm IMAX, and while I do get it, I still think the immersive audio and high contrast video of Dolby will remain my preference.
Absolutely. It’s not a huge difference for most the movie, but the really big moments were something special.
The history behind Japan is far more complex. No one can tell what would have been the worst outcome but there were worse outcomes than the two bombs.
Though one interesting thing is that we only had 30 years between WW1 and WW2, both being horrible wars, and it has now been almost 80 years without WW3. What was the big change between the first two that made us so scared of a third?
I was in the business for a while, and I’m not going to offer an opinion about to what extent mutually assured destruction prevented a third world war and whether the risks of a catastrophic event were borne out except in the hindsight that it didn’t happen yet. My views on the questions have evolved over time.
I would point out that, had the US remained the sole nuclear power, the world would possibly not have seen a lack of a major war in Europe, and that the intention of the US developing strategic weapons wasn’t to prevent war. The US didn’t volunteer nuclear technology to the Soviets in order to create detente because we wanted to balance on a knife edge for the better part of a century. The US tried to prevent the USSR from developing such weapons, and has tried experiment hard to prevent other countries from developing them. The DPRK wants weapons so they won’t be invaded. The US doesn’t want them to have weapons because we think they’ll make the situation less stable. I’m not saying the DPRK should have weapons. I’m just saying that narratives are conveniently spun to justify the things countries want to do anyway.
MAD (mutually assured destruction) that nukes kill 70-90% of your population in 24-48 hours then kills most of the rest in a 4 year global nuclear dust driven winter. The UN has stopped 100% of the scenarios where Ww3 aka MAD happens.
The highest casualty rate I’ve ever seen published for nuclear war was somewhere around 40 to 50% of the population of the US. Interestingly, despite a nuclear strike of over 25,000 nuclear weapons, Russia was expected to win that one with less than 25% of their population killed.
And there is no proven scientific basis for a nuclear winter to be the results of nuclear war. Even less so today, considering that the United States and Russia have far far fewer nuclear weapons then they did in the past. Russia only has a few thousand functional nuclear weapons, most of which are not in a state that could actually be deployed in a war.
Russia likes to say they have a big and powerful military. The us likes to say “we have a weak military, please more congress money”. Based in Ukraine, I think the us would win (if you can call it that) in MAD.
Also you are right that the anti ICBM capabilities has increased in each nation. Also each nation is increasing the ICBM nuke speed to render the anti ICBM ineffective. I hope we never have to find out beyond “theory”
With the first 2 bombs, there was only 1 country that had nukes, and the rate of production was slow.
After Japan’s surrender, no democratic country is going to want to initiate a whole new war of a similar scale to wipe out other countries. Countries make bad decisions sometimes it’d still be insane to do that, if for no other reason than the public would disapprove.
Fast forward a few years, you had multiple countries building up nuclear stockpiles, hydrogen bombs that were orders of magnitude more powerful were invented, and you had development of ICBM’s that were difficult to intercept and could reach anywhere on Earth in 30 minutes
Had Japan not surrendered, we had another nuke en route (The demon core was around already, we just had to slap it into the mechanism), and could have had a fourth reasonably quickly. (We had processed a huge chunk of the fuel for the fourth pit before we dropped our first bomb) It was just after that where the US couldn’t just keep setting them off because the timescales to generate the plutonium was measured in several weeks.
Last Podcast on the Left did a decent, though immensely gory, series on the Manhattan Project recently.
I know your question at the end is rhetorical but for anyone who didn’t get it, the change that made us so afraid is nuclear/atomic weapons.
I have no doubt that had they not been dropped on Japan, they would have been used in Korea. All the theory in the world wouldn’t be enough to instill the rightful existential terror nukes cause.
The difference being that with Korea, it would have already had a fusion booster, which even in early designs increased the yield by a factor of 20-100 (Edit: depending on which pure-fission generation you compare to).
Edit: Also, I feel we need some tests again that get recorded with modern equipment - the old footage seems like from another world. People should be able to see it in 8K and VR to get properly scared of them.
There is no footage of modern tests because they have been conducted underground since the 60s in order to reduce contamination of the biosphere.
That as well.
Whether dropping the bomb was morally right is sort of irrelevant. It was almost certainly going to be used, and it’s better it was the early ones than later ones. Just not in human nature to understand the consequences until our noses are rubbed in it
