Posted on 08/08/2020 9:47:50 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Science has no moral code—unlike religion. In truth we shouldn’t have used it on a city-—the first one should have been on a military site after telling Japan what we had and offering a chance for surrender. Blow up a military target—wait a week—THEN start to blow up cities. The fire raids were almost as bad in terms of loss of life. No invasion, just starve them out and keep offering a peace deal. BUT, hindsight is 20-20. Ask yourself this—if they had the bomb—would they have dropped it on San Francisco? You bet.
Science has no moral code—unlike religion. In truth we shouldn’t have used it on a city-—the first one should have been on a military site after telling Japan what we had and offering a chance for surrender. Blow up a military target—wait a week—THEN start to blow up cities. The fire raids were almost as bad in terms of loss of life. No invasion, just starve them out and keep offering a peace deal. BUT, hindsight is 20-20. Ask yourself this—if they had the bomb—would they have dropped it on San Francisco? You bet.
Science has no moral code—unlike religion. In truth we shouldn’t have used it on a city-—the first one should have been on a military site after telling Japan what we had and offering a chance for surrender. Blow up a military target—wait a week—THEN start to blow up cities. The fire raids were almost as bad in terms of loss of life. No invasion, just starve them out and keep offering a peace deal. BUT, hindsight is 20-20. Ask yourself this—if they had the bomb—would they have dropped it on San Francisco? You bet.
The core plutonium accidentally went critical.... glowed blue and cooked this brilliant physicist. Massive doses of radiation, when, in order to stop the criticality of the core plutonium, Daghlian could not knock a tungsten carbide brick away— and had to dismantle the bricks by hand. Cannot imagine how horrifying that was.He certainly suffered a horrible end, including in the last stages— pericardial fluid around his heart making him unable to circulate blood well (without a doctor stabbing with a large hypodermic needle to draw off the fluid built up).
God Bless this brave man’s memory.
Daghlian’s father was a survivor/escapee of the Armenian Genocide by the Turks. To have his son die in the defense of freedom.
No, Hiroshima was a major military base, and the headquarters of the Japanese armies that would fight the Americans if they landed in Japan. Many of Japan’s military leaders and officers were killed in the Hiroshima attack, thus decapitating its military.
Both my mom and my father-in-law went through the Pearl Harbor attack.
See my #105—Hiroshima was a major military base and the headquarters of the home armies that would defend Japan. We killed many of Japan’s military officers that day and decapitated their military.
Remind me again how many Super Bowls Monday morning quarterbacks have won? Never mind.
Claire Chennault, heading the Flying Tigers before the United States (officially) entered the war, was pushing for long-range bombers for the purpose of bombing Japanese cities months before the United States even entered the war.
"A small number of long-range bombers carrying incendiary bombs could quickly reduce Japan's paper-and-matchwood cities to heaps of smoking ashes." - Claire Chennault TheJournalofHistoricalReview
Roosevelt approved this in July of 1941. (Look up "JB-355", which authorized the use of American bombers to be flown against Japan.)
(Everyone knows of the attack on Pearl Harbor on 12/07/1941; how many know of the Japanese attack on Clark Airfield in the Philippines on 12/08, where American B-17s were destroyed?) (Does anyone even wonder what American B-17s were doing in the Philippines in December of 1941 before the war began?)
James Doolittle and his "raiders" dropped incendiaries on Tokyo during their early 1942 raid.
The campaign against Japanese cities wasn't accidental or forced; there was a well-known weakness in Japan's defenses, and the US was simply going to exploit it
My father survived two amphibious landings on Japanese held islands in the Pacific. When the war ended, he was recovering from malaria and knew he would have been part of an amphibious landing on mainland Japan had the war not ended.
From what he saw first hand of the fighting in the Pacific, there was absolutely no doubt in his mind that dropping of the atomic bombs was the right thing to do.
I would also point out that those who question the morality of the atomic bomb, need to look at what alternatives would have been used. The Army Air Corp had already been firebombing major cities leading to huge civilian casualties. Further, the naval blockade of Japan had produced a food crisis in the County.
At the time of year that the atomic bombs were dropped, the weather in Japan was still reasonable. If the war had gone on the homeless exposed to the elements from homes destroyed by fire bombing and the starvation would have also produced mass civilian casualties.
Using any means to end the war as quickly as possible, was the moral thing to do.
Actually, that is only partially true. There were no US Bombers, available to drop the extremely heavy and large bombs in the European theater. There was a British bomber that could have if the bombs had been developed sooner.
As it was, the bombing of Japan required two very specially modified Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers that were modified and tested at the last minute.
The first bomb did not cause them to surrender.
How many months or years of traditional warfare would it have taken to end their imperialist war?
We detonated the first atomic bomb on our own soil during WWII as a test.
Why no annual essays debating whether it was wrong of Japan to use prisoner of war slave labor or to kill their POWs?
He may have been aware of some of the effects but he acted to prevent an explosion from happening
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian
Criticality accident
The sphere of plutonium surrounded by neutron-reflecting tungsten carbide blocks in a re-enactment of Daghlian’s 1945 experiment[5]
During an experiment on August 21, 1945, Daghlian was attempting to build a neutron reflector manually by stacking a set of 4.4-kilogram (9.7 lb) tungsten carbide bricks in an incremental fashion around a plutonium core. The purpose of the neutron reflector was to reduce the mass required for the plutonium core to attain criticality. He was moving the final brick over the assembly, but neutron counters alerted Daghlian to the fact that the addition of that brick would render the system supercritical. As he withdrew his hand, he inadvertently dropped the brick onto the center of the assembly. Since the assembly was nearly in the critical state, the accidental addition of that brick caused the reaction to go immediately into the prompt critical region of neutronic behavior. This resulted in a criticality accident.[5]
Daghlian reacted immediately after dropping the brick and attempted to knock the brick off the assembly without success. He was forced to disassemble part of the tungsten-carbide pile in order to halt the reaction.[6]
Daghlian was estimated to have received a dose of 510 rem (5.1 Sv) of neutron radiation, from a yield of 1016 fissions.[5] Despite intensive medical care, he developed symptoms of severe radiation poisoning and his mother and sister were flown out to care for him (his father had died in 1943).[2] He fell into a coma, and died 25 days after the accident.[6] He was the first known fatality caused by a criticality accident. His body was returned to New London, where he was buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery.[7]
“Yet in 8th grade they were showing them films of the Holocaust.”
I 8th grade Mr. DeBolt made us look at pictures from one of the camps. I remember him yelling at us “LOOK AT ‘EM. AND DON’T FORGET!”. I don’t remember anything being said about Japanese war crimes.
The Germans dropped incendiary bombs on English cities in WWI. The Japanese deployed incendiary bombs (ineffectively) on the American west coast in 1944. Oh, and by the way, the war HAD started by 1940. The Japanese started it in 1931. We just hadn’t officially joined the party.
“Criticality accident”
They had to have at least 2 of these accidents before they decided to stop fooling around willy-nilly with this stuff. They were smart people, but I guess you can’t be smart about everything.
Two that we know about. Other nations may not have been so public.
Yes, demonivitch korski probably got a few of them, too. Not to mention the fooling around that went on at Chernobyl.
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