Posted on 08/06/2004 2:01:45 PM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets
It was the afternoon of August 5, 1945. To a group of six hundred army officers assigned to the Hiroshima garrison, Professor Yoshitaka Mimura of Hiroshima Bunri University, a theoretical physicist, was explaining the scientific possibilities of new weapons which might reverse the tide of war. Japan had little Navy or Air Force left. Within months a massive invasion of the home islands seemed likely. “Could you tell us, sir”, a young lieutenant colonel asked, “what an atomic bomb is? Is there any possibility that the bomb will be deployed by the end of this war?”
Mimura chalked a rough sketch on the blackboard to illustrate the [nuclear] reactions required. Scientists at Tokyo University, he explained, have “theoretically penetrated” the secrets of nuclear fission. If they could apply their theories practically, an atomic bomb “could be smaller than a piece of caramel candy, but, if exploded five hundred meters above a populated city, it could destroy 200,000 lives.”
“When can we have that bomb?” “Well, it is difficult to say”, Mimura answered, knowing nothing of any Japanese enterprise to apply fission theory to bomb-making. “But I can tell you this much: not before the end of this war.”
A good day to celebrate "gay pride". Enola Gay, that is.
That's just such nonsense. Plutonium would have done the Nazis no good at all. They weren't even *remotely* capable of funding the advances required for an implosion detonation.
No, their efforts were along the gun-type design uranium critical mass, and their own math precluded their success there even if they had somehow been able to devote enough resources to obtain enough refined U-235.
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Eisenhower, Dwight D.:
. . . I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.”
Similarly Admiral William Leahy: “[T]he use of this barbarous weapon . . . was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . I was not taught to make war . . . by destroying women and children. . . .” Harry Truman in August 1945: the bomb saved “thousands of American lives.” In December 1945: “a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities . . .” In 1946: “life for - maybe half a million - of America’s finest youth.” In 1959: “the dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives.” The only casualty estimate presented to Mr. Truman prior to Hiroshima, by General George Marshall: 31,000 casualties, or about 7,000 to 8,000 deaths.
Good L-rd! The atomic explosion tore most of those airmen's shirts off!
Not without asking PFrance for permission.
See
http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-53/iss-7/p34.html
for an account by Hans Bethe. Apparently much of the Germans' problem was too much deference to authority.
Physics Today, August 1995, had an article on Heisenberg including material from the "Farm Hall" tapes. The article includes copies of slides Heisenberg prepared for the top Nazi leadership (Goebbels, Goering, Speer, inter alia.) It is clear that Heisenberg understood the physical principles required to make a nuclear bomb. He had personally recommended against it in 1942, on the grounds that it would take too long and cost too much.
Edward Teller relates the story of trying to recruit Neils Bohr for the Manhattan Project. Bohr said that building the bomb would be impractical, you'd have to turn the whole country into a factory. Bohr returned to Denmark and was there when the Nazis invaded. Heisenberg met with him in Copenhagen, and apparently tried to convince him to accept some sort of position in Germany. Although much has been made of this meeting, there was absolutely no serious German "Manhattan District Engineering Project".
Bohr escaped to Sweden and then on to the U.S., where he joined the Manhattan Project. When Teller finally ran into him in Los Alamos, he was all set for one of those "I told you so moments". The cagey Bohr turned the tables on him and immediately confronted Teller with, "I told you, you'd have to turn the whole country into a factory!", a testimony to the enormous scope of the Manhattan Project.
Although the Germans did not seriously pursue a fusion bomb, the threat of a German atomic weapon was the impetus for the Manhattan Project. It is said that the U.S. spent more money looking for a German atom bomb than the Germans spent on nuclear research during the War. (Roosevelt lied! Intelligence was flawed!)
After the war, top German nuclear physicists were interred in relative comfort in an estate in the English countryside called Farm Hall. Their conversations were secretly being recorded to see if they revealed anything of value about a German weapons program. Heisenberg's reaction on seeing newspaper reports of Hiroshima are telling. His first reaction was that it could not be true, he asserted that somebody just made a bomb with a lot of uranium in it and made a mess and killed a lot of people. (Heisenberg, father of the "dirty bomb".) As it began to sink in over time that the Americans (and the British with a lot of help from scientists driven out of Europe by the Nazis) had done what the Germans had not done, there began to form in the minds of the German scientific community what has come to be known as the "explanation" (I forget the German word.) It was more a rationalization of their failure than a truthful explanation. According to the "explanation", the German scientist could have made a bomb, but they did not want to help the Nazis (why in this single endeavor alone is unclear) and besides they were morally superior to those Americans and their English toadies. (Sound familiar?)
I see that irony is not lost on you.
Only in a sensitive and nuanced way.
Read my tagline and perhaps you'll get the (admittedly weak) joke.
That sort of ridiculous propaganda doesn't even make for a good urban legend. In August of 1945 the Japanese Army had more than 1 million armed soldiers still in control of China and Formosa (now known as Taiwan). Far more than that were in the Japanese home islands, and vastly more than 40 million Japanese civilians had been armed for "home defense" in the event of an American invasion.
The U.S. lost some 25,000 soldiers and marines taking the tiny Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima, an island garrisoned by a mere 22,000 Japanese soldiers.
The concept that the U.S. Army could take Japan proper, in the face of millions of armed Japanese, with a mere 8,000 fatalities goes beyond ludicrous into the land of pure opium delusions.
...And there's more. An American President in 1945 would have been *impeached* for getting as few as 8,000 Americans killed if the public ever learned that he possessed a weapon capable of ending the war without such sacrifice on our part.
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Europe has *always* attempted to claim moral superiority to the U.S. to explain away Europe's second-rate performance.
In the Great War, both the French and the Germans claimed that American soldiers couldn't fight. Yet after the first contact between green American marines and crack German veterans, the Germans fled from their forest screaming "Run! It's the Americans. The Americans are killing *everyone*!" German snipers of that time had been artfully trained to kill men dead at 300 yards, and every German platoon had such men. In contrast, *every* American Marine had been trained in marksmanship out to 900 yards. It was an unheard of difference in training at the time.
Besides inventing the airplane and the combat submarine that gained fame in that war, the American mathematician Zimmerman made a contribution that is still used to this very day: he proved mathematically what makes a cypher unbreakable or not. This 1917 work was more advanced than what *any* European nation was using in cryptology through 1945.
The Germans and Japanese were completely outclassed in computers and atomic weapons in the next war, too. German and Japanese computers used either mechanical wheels or magnetic contact relays. American and British computers used light-speed vacuum tubes. Americans had self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions as early as 1942, as well...a feat that fewer than a dozen nations have managed to this very day. German rocketry stole whole-heartedly from the American scientist Robert Goddard, and it was the British who invented the Jet engine.
Yet to this day the America-haters will claim that the Germans and Japanese were more advanced. The Axis scientists "could have" invented the atomic bomb, they'll lie to each other. Uh huh. This sort of pretend-superiority continually gets the Europeans into trouble. It likely will again, too.
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