Posted on 08/06/2024 8:47:24 AM PDT by NorthMountain
Today is August 6, 2024.
December 7, 1941:
August 6, 1945
Lest we forget.
“We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history — and won.” - President Harry Truman (The New York Times, Tuesday, August 7, 1945, p. 1)
“The atom bomb was no ‘great decision’… It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.” – Harry S. Truman, at a Columbia University Seminar, April 28, 1959, New York City (from The Buck Stops Here: The 28 Toughest Presidential Decisions and How They Changed History, Thomas J. Craughwell, Edwin Kiester Jr., Quarry Books, 2010, p. 178).
“During a meeting at the White House in October 1945, [Robert] Oppenheimer tried to convey his deep moral crisis. ‘Mr. President, I have blood on my hands,’ he remarked. ‘Never mind,’ Truman replied, ‘it’ll all come out in the wash.’ (According to some accounts he offered Oppenheimer a hankerchief.) ‘Don’t you bring that crybaby in here again,’ Truman later told an aide. ‘After all, all he did was make the bomb. I’m the guy who fired it off.'” Excerpted from The Bomb: A Life (Gerard J. DeGroot, Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 111)
“Don’t bother me with your conscientious scruples. After all the thing’s superb physics.” - Enrico Fermi, taken from Brighter than a Thousand Suns, Robert Jungk, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970, p. 202.
“There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream, a childish bug-a-boo. Nature has introduced a few foolproof devices into the great majority of elements that constitute the bulk of the world, and they have no energy to give up in the process of disintegration.” - Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan (1863-1953), 1923 Nobel Laureate, in 1928 at the Chemists’ Club (New York) (from “It’ll Never Work!“).
“The energy produce by the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” - Lord Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), Cambridge University Professor of Experimental Physics, 1908 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, known as the ‘father of nuclear physics’, as quoted in The New York Herald Tribune, September 12, 1933. Excerpted from Science Says: A Collection of Quotations on the History, Meaning and Practice of Science, Rob Kaplan, E-reads/E-rights, 2009, p. 61.
The ‘calculators’ will jump in with their calculations.. X lives here means Y lives there.. F all that. It’s a sobering day for humanity.
Armchair calculators.
The Japs fooled around, and they found out. We didn't bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a moral or social vacuum. They started a war (in China long before they bombed Pearl) and prosecuted it most brutally. The atomic bombings were an appropriate response.
LOL. The lurking idiot democrats might believe you.
After Dad got through killing nazis in Germany he received orders to return to the US and prepare for the invasion of Japan
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86th Infantry division? One of two I believe that were authorized both the European Theatre and Asia Pacific campaign medals. The 86th was shipped from Germany and arrived in the Philippines shortly before the Japs signed their Surrender.
You. 21-24 Kt, just a baby compared to Shrimp, Ivy-Mike, etc.
Democrat economic policy = worse than an atomic bomb. Commie-la would be worse than a cobalt salted copy of the Tsar Bomba to the economy.
The Uranium gun device was simplicity itself, and the physics was well understood and quite tractable. The problem with plutonium is that the reaction is so fast that the bomb would tear itself apart before much of the plutonium can fission in such a device. The implosion device depends on an array of explosive charges surrounding a plutonium sphere need to be triggered to all explode at once, within less than a microsecond of one-another, and impart a near-perfectly symmetrical shockwave to compress the sphere enough that it goes critical, but only for about one microsecond. Only about two-percent of plutonium actually fissions, but, man does it do a job. The energy released by a fissioning nuclide is about one-million times greater than the same mass of TNT.
Nagasaki did the job. Hiroshima prompted them to ask, "Ah so. You show again prease?"
The Japanese today do not teach their kids about what really happened in WW2. They depict themselves as the victims of evil oil embargos if they teach anything.
My dad was B25 crew chief in training in the US and had gotten his orders for the Pacific. The training units were being shut down and everyone was slated for Japan. They all cheered when they learned about the in bomb drops. You won’t find many hand writing sob sisters in that generation.
When the Atom Bomb Fell--Karl & Harty (1945)
Atomic Power--Fred Kirby (1946)
Atomic Cocktail--Slim Gaillard Quartet (1946)
Funiyama Mama--Annisteen Allen (1955)
Long but very good read
https://davidlabaree.com/2021/08/09/paul-fussell-thank-god-for-the-atom-bomb/
Paul Tibbets did. He used to visit the Enola Gay in the Udvar-Hazy wing of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum and was allowed to sit in the cockpit to reminisce.
Before the Hiroshima mission they stripped out everything that wasn't essential to save weight, even the padding in the crew seats, so the pilots on that mission sat on their parachutes. When Tibbets had got old a bony he brought a seat cushion with him to make the PIC's seat more comfortable, and they let him keep it there. It (allegedly) was the only thing on the whole airplane that wasn't period-authentic.
The Smithsonian had a 3-d virtual tour of the cockpit and you could see the Tibbet's cushion. I checked it a couple of days after he died in 2007 and the cushion was gone.
If it wasn’t for the bomb, my dad most likely would have died on the beaches of Japan and I would not exist.
Harry Truman (D) saved an estimated 1 million G.I.s with that.
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