Let's not presume high moral motives in everything our forefathers did, nor to all of our current generation either.
As for A119, the issues with the project were entirely political. The idea of bombing the moon is a good one; it's a legitimate way of collecting scientific data in lieu of being able to deploy a drilling team on the surface, and something that's been done with non-nuclear impactors. See [0], [1], [2], and probably a bunch of other cases I don't remember today.
It's easy to say that "nukes bad humans stupid", but there are aspects to this idea - and a bunch of other so-called "peaceful uses for nuclear weapons" - that illustrated human smarts, not stupidity.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS
Edit: thanks for the response btw
As for bombing Mars ice caps, that was a nice idea too, IMO (even though AFAIK it turned out to not be useful). The goal here was to densify the atmosphere with water vapor and CO₂. Assuming you consider terraforming Mars a good idea, doing it in reasonable timescales will require some preparations involving direct applications of lots of energy - whether it's melting the ice caps, or redirecting comets to hit the planet. At some point we might be able to accelerate the process by deploying bacteria and plants (read: self-replicating chemical processing nanobots), but the conditions are not right for this yet - hence the ideas like using nukes or comets to bootstrap those conditions.
Also half the stuff that shows up on HN.
March 1, 1954 was 3 years after this ship was scuttled, so mentioning it is irrelevant.
Also, dumping waste in sea may be stupid, but it was the norm for decades. And yes, that includes dumping nuclear waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...: ”From 1946 through 1993, thirteen countries (fourteen, if the USSR and Russia are considered separately) used ocean disposal or ocean dumping as a method to dispose of nuclear/radioactive waste“
I still think these tests and towing the Independence back to SF were stupid. But I'll grant that I got the timelines wrong.
Or that animals have a cognitive ability similar to humans "I don't know why the dog wants the cookie, he knows chocolate is bad for him"
I don't know what to make of it. I hope it's just the age, but since it seems to be a wide-spread problem....maybe it's something in the water.
I don't remember having those kind of gaps in understanding at that age.
The world was a different place then yet people are passing judgement on decisions made then but colored with the 20/20 vision that hindsight provides and a life lived in the mostly stable world we have today.
Feel free to rewind to nearly any known history period and the entire world would be barbaric compared to today's standards, but that doesn't make the people that lived and fought during that time wrong.
The reasons those bombs were dropped were to scare the fuck out of Stalin and keep his armies away from Japan. Perhaps unstated, but pretty obviously so. There are so many ways the world could have been very much worse after WWII, all in all it went very well (despite what many people think).
As for the testing there were people actively protesting it's beginning and continuation, but the effects and persistence of effects were not fully understood for some time. That is what you're getting at it seems. It wasn't so much about the world being a different place but that the consequences of radiation being unknown.
Looking at the world today I think most people would prefer that a device that can cause such massive destruction simply not exist. I can only imagine what will happen once the ones that have been 'lost' start showing up in the wrong hands. The destruction was bad enough when in the 'right hands' (scare quotes, because I don't feel so great about what we(USA) did either.)
We can play what-if all day but we will never know what would have happened if things didn't happen as they did. I just hope that the actual version of what happened doesn't get 'corrected' in history books so that our future descendants can learn from our mistakes.
Increasing power is a consequence of expanding knowledge.
All these leaders:
- Adm. William Leahy (President Truman’s Chief of Staff)
- Henry Arnold (US Army Air Forces commanding general)
- Adm. Chester Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet)
- Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, (head Bomber Command)
- Gen. Dwight Eisenhower
are all on record as acknowledging that "Japan was already defeated". [1]
[2] Japan knew they could not win and were concentrating on obtaining the best possible terms of surrender, hoping that Stalin might be convinced to mediate a settlement between the United States and Japan. This hope was dashed by the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island, which happened at 1 minute past midnight on August 9, 1945 [3].
Another important factor is that Japan had good reason to be wary of USSR military might [4]. It's arguable that Japan's fear of fighting the USSR is the reason Japan went east (to Pearl Harbour) instead of west (to eurasia) in Dec. 1941 [5].
[2] and [5] are thoroughly researched and make compelling arguments.
[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-us-really-bombed-h...
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War
[4] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/effects-nomonh...
[5] https://www.amazon.com/Nomonhan-1939-Armys-Victory-Shaped/dp...
When it comes to the poor judgement of teenagers, most of the brain literally isn't completely assembled yet until age 21.
Eisenhower himself advocated for the Pacific Proving Grounds site when he was Army Chief of Staff [1]. It had 105 tests, atmospheric and underwater. It really was a military decision; you are just supposing it to be political. American Exceptionalism doesn't make stupidity smart.
[1] https://www.raabcollection.com/presidential-autographs/eisen...
He may have called it that, but it certainly wasn't. There were numerous nuclear accidents at Los Alamos predating that test. There were also numerous civilian incidents, particularly the famous 'Radium Girls'.
I realize this is what people were told during the war, but it's kind of hard to accept that that was the real reason for WWII when Eastern Europe ended up controlled by the Soviet Union, which was, by any reasonable historical standard, a worse totalitarian government than Nazi Germany. Not to mention that by the time the tests referenced in the article took place, China had also been taken over by a worse totalitarian government than Nazi Germany.
Fascism and WWII were created by humans. If you were an alien species and observing the earth from afar it's pretty insane how foolish we look.
We've built the worlds greatest nuclear arsenal, then pointed them at each other.
The Fermi paradox plays into this. If life is possible throughout the galaxy where is everyone?
It's possible that life just destroys itself.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...
(I can't confidently assert that one way or the other, though I'm sure opinions differed even then)
I really hate this 'aliens would be disgusted at out foolishness' meme.
There's no reason to think that. That's how you, with your particular disposition that some proportion of humans share, would react if you were teleported to a flying saucer in orbit- shake your head and cluck your tongue. You're projecting on to aliens to make your own view look more sophisticated by comparison.
Now, I don't know how aliens would think. But when we look at bacteria, or ants, we don't point moral judgements on their actions and get annoyed when the microbes acy a certain way- and to do so has a term associated with it, anthropomorphisation, that's generally seen as a foolish mistake.
You don't get emotionally charged at the actions of microbes when you observe them because, in part, you can kind of understand what they're doing. You have a bird's eye view. You don't get angry at them for not banding together and solving their toxic waste problems. You don't shake your head and cluck your tongue at their foolishness. If we're going to anthopomorphise aliens, we should at least get the situation to something of comparable scale.
There's no reason to actually believe that those very aliens aren't just as foolish and survived, competed and advanced in part through a process of killing their fellow tribes of aliens to reach supremacy.
This is emphatically not true, and a common lie used by the US to justify atomizing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By that time in the war, Germany had already been defeated, the Imperial Japanese Armed forces were already signalling a willingness to end the war, with the one condition that the Japanese emperor (who most Japanese view as divine) would not be harmed.
The US (and specifically Truman and Leslie Groves) wanted to demonstrate the power of this amazing weapon that they had developed to the entire world.
The Japanese were in the war, and a land borne invasion would have bore heavy casualties. There was no clear and obvious certainty of Japans will to surrender, and there was political infighting, an attempted coup against the surrender.
I'm tired of this inaccurate, revisionist, fringe crap coming up every time the atomic weapons program comes up. This is not mainstream history, but historical-fiction entertainers like the irresponsible Oliver Stone keep promoting it and people lap it up.
Generally, my takeaway is:
There was a moral argument to be made in favor of atomic bombing for political effect. However, that argument was not very influential on military decision making at the time - generally, the military philosophy was "we have a weapon, why would we not use it to the greatest extent possible?" This disconnect was so strong that when the civilians who were making these sophisticated moral calculations saw the manner and (more importantly) the rate at which the bombs were used, they put on the brakes.
Those civilians names were not auto-penned at the bottom of letters that started with "The United States Army regrets to inform you...". Those civilians had not seen what kind of end conventional warfare had lead to on inner islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They did not understand how committed to their cause the people we were fighting were. The disconnect goes both ways.
At the time of their invention, nuclear weapons were seen as more effective munitions and not necessarily the civilization ending tools that they are now considered to be.
The existence of the atomic program is not the question. It is their _use_ against a nation that was on the brink of surrender.
I'm sorry that the truth does not fit your neat model of the US. It stands to reason, that the only nation in the world to use atomic weapons against dense human populations needs to be scrutinized appropriately, and not hailed as the "hero", the decision to do so being "inevitable". Nothing about the use of nuclear weapons was inevitable, and their use simply egged on similar development in other nations and a general increase in the probability of nuclear holocaust.
> By that time in the war, Germany had already been defeated, the Imperial Japanese Armed forces were already signalling a willingness to end the war, with the one condition that the Japanese emperor (who most Japanese view as divine) would not be harmed."
Assuming that "by that time in the war" means prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, this is false. Even after the bombing of Nagasaki 3 of the 4 military members of the Supreme War Council wanted additional terms that would never have been acceptable to the Allied Powers (among them, no occupation of the home islands). It took the intervention of the Emperor himself to break the deadlock.
The idea that the armed forces were amenable to a surrender with the sole condition that the emperor remain in power before Hiroshima is simply not true.
Japanese surrender was not prompted by bombings of 6th and 9th August -- they had endured already much worse bombings of their cities during that summer, and were not particularly scared of atomic weapons.
However, Japan was very scared of USSR, who up until then was neutral against them. All that changed rapidly and hugely, when USSR declared war on Japan, and attacked Manchuria on 12:01am 9/August.
Check the timelines -- the argument is solid and much more compelling than "Japan surrended because nuclear bombs".
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...
"Japan was ready to surrender before the atomic bombs" and "Japan surrendered because of the USSR's declaration of war, not the atomic bombs" are two completely different arguments.
To spell it out for you: Japan was ready to surrender before atomic bombs, but held back because the allies terms were unacceptable, and Japan were hoping to get better terms, using USSR to mediate them. Only when that hope was removed (by USSR declaring war on Japan) did Japan realise they had no other choice. And then they actually surrended.
"[Before the atomic bombs were dropped], the Imperial Japanese Armed forces were already signalling a willingness to end the war, with the one condition that the Japanese emperor ... would not be harmed."
I don't know why you're trying so hard to read things that are not there.
Not "just to see what would happen" but to know how vulnerable our Navy would be to the very real threat of atomic attack from the Russians, and thus to responsibly inform strategy and tactics should that nightmare ever come to pass.
Testing decontamination also necessary to inform e.g. necessary fleet sizes in case of nuclear war -- could ships ever be reused or not? An existing shipyard is the logical place to do that, and unfortunately widespread environmental consciousness just didn't happen until the landmark publication of Silent Spring in 1962, more than a decade later.
Storing the contaminated sand on the ship and sinking it was a pretty reasonable thing to do at the time, not "just to use it as target practice" but to kill two birds with one stone.
Nobody's perfect, but you seem to really be judging people from several generations ago according to current societal standards, and completely misportraying their motives.