[archy]

We even considered using atomic bombs as beach clearing weapons. If that operation would have gone forward, it would have been nothing short of hell on earth.

In 1945 only 17 B-29s had completed the *Silver Plate* modification program that enabled them to carry/arm/drop the atomic weapons; even as late as as the close of 1948 the Air Force had modified only 60 of the fleet of some 4000 B29s built to carry the atomic bomb.

Neither was there any overabundance of atomic weapons for immediate use; by the end of the war there were probably six devices in various stages of completion usable for support of an eventual invasion of Japan, and when the USAF was established as a seperate armed service in 1947 there were still only 13 in the entire arsenal; 56 in 1948; 298 not until mid-1950.

The idea of atomic weaponry reducing enemy strongholds prior to beachhead landings may have been a happy story intended to boost troop morale, but it's almost certain that the third U.S. atomic weapon would have been delivered to Tokyo... offering the possibility that there would have been no surviving national authority that could order a surrender.

Though the idea of a demonstration strike atop Mt. Fuji certainly offers a certain charm.... Whoops! There go all the cherry blossoms!

[Iris7]

Hi, Archy.

I read somewhere in one of the Manhattan Project histories that the production of nuclear weapons was to have been one a day by the first of the year. Teller was pushing hard for fusion weapons even in 1944. Oppenheimer and the other Reds would have been on board like crazy after the Red Army was committed. Japanese could indeed have become "a language spoken only in Hell."

The nuclear weapons program was stopped with VJ day. I suspect that our home grown Reds were not happy with the Worker's Paradise, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, being the intended target.