Posted on 06/08/2015 2:17:41 PM PDT by StormPrepper
Documents recently discovered and Japanese scientist acknowledge that Japan had a nuclear weapons program in WW2. The Japanese had made big strides toward creating their own atomic bomb.
Very interesting documentary.
If you think about it, a Japanese nuke wouldn’t have had the same effect on us as ours had on them.
It would have angered us even more and likely led to us putting even more people into the fight.
It never got very far but they were considering building a dirty bomb.
Germany got a bit farther.
Japan did not surrender because we dropped a nuke. They surrendered because we dropped a second nuke AND they did not know that those were the only nukes that we had.
Making the Japanese believe that we would keep dropping nukes until they either surrendered or ceased to exist is what finally ended the war.
When the second bomb dropped, they discovered not only did we have the resources, but we had enough to build the bombs two ways, uranium and plutonium. It was shock and awe to the Japanese scientists and engineers who understood what we had done.
Making the Japanese believe that we would keep dropping nukes until they either surrendered or ceased to exist is what finally ended the war.
Yes. They had no idea that it would take many months to re-stock. But they knew that we would scale production to unimaginable levels, eventually.
So much for fighting to the death.
Plus these weapons proved that war, between large nations, is obsolete.
Death from war has basically disappeared and we are fortunate to be born (most of us) in this era.
China has the bomb and the means to deliver them.
Their military expands everyday and the US is broke.
Liberalism, pacifism, and the introspective blame-game runs our foreign policy.
History has a peculiar tendency to repeat itself.
Germany had a cast iron kettle with some nuclear product imersed in a three foot pit of heavy water. That was it. Japan's ruling council wouldn't let the atomic researchers have some electronic equipment need for the war effort. It took General Grove to turn the US into a giant bomb making factory that produced two weapons. One a fission bomb and the other a fusion bomb. Plus the one used at Trinity.
It's all in the well researched book and a great read.
Was part of my home schooling reading list.
Home viewing bookmark.
Given our B29’s destruction of so much of their infrastructure, I cannot imagine Japan getting close to having a nuke. Look what it took to make ours. You break that chain and you have setbacks.
You’re right about the second bomb. Hirohito doubted that one bomb had destroyed one city, but 3 days later he learned the horrible truth.
It will not be history repeating itself: the United States has never been ruled by a foreign power. I fear that happening.
Keep track of the voters who wanted this change.
Both Fat Man and Little Boy were fission bombs
Little Boy was a uranium gun device. Fat Man and the Trinity device were both plutonium implosion devices.
The first true fusion device (not a deployable bomb) was detonated in 1951.
We had a total of three nukes, all different designs. The first one we set off to test. Until we did, we had no idea whether or not any would work. The next two we dropped on Japan. We dropped the second nuke on Japan a week after the first because they refused to surrender after we dropped the first one.
Imagine how history would be different if any one of the three nukes had failed to go off.
“....If they do not now accept our terms, they can expect a rain of ruin from the air the likes never seen before on earth...” The best part of Harry Truman’s great speech just after the first nuke went ka-boom on their asses. The Japs STILL had not had enough tho, no uncle from ‘em so.......we fed ‘em number 2!
Excellent book. Highly recommended.
Little Boy was the last one we used, so it was an untested design until we dropped it on Nagasaki.
This information is covered in the books "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", and "Dark Sun, the Making of the Hydrogen bomb" both by Richard Rhodes.
The Japanese program wasn't going anywhere. If I recall correctly, they were trying to use a diffusion process for isotope separation and they were completely unaware of certain peculiar attributes of these particular compounds. (Uranium Hexafloride, I think.)
The enrichment device wasn't working at all, and the Japanese scientists were getting very worried about their lack of Progress. (One did not disappoint the Emperor in those days.)
Fortunately for them, a mysterious fire somehow occurred and burned the whole apparatus to the ground.
I used to have a Fire Marshall friend. He used to tell me "The only buildings that burn, are the ones that need to burn. "
In any case, the Japanese bomb was never a threat, and neither was the German effort. There is some evidence to indicate that Werner Heisenberg was either foot dragging or deliberately sabotaging the German effort.
We had that weapon all to ourselves except for the spies in our government shipping our research over to the Soviets.
Klaus Fuchs should have been shot.
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