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Re:Hiroshima (1946) by manfredo on Sunday August 09, 2020 @05:44PM (#24103185)
Remember, it took not one, but two atomic bombs dropped on cities for Japan to surrender. And even after that, there was an attempted coup to continue fighting the war: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident

There only existed two bombs at the time. Had the bombs been dropped as a show of force, it is very likely the US and Japan would have to suffer through a costly invasion anyway.

Re:Hiroshima (1946) by dboreham on Sunday August 09, 2020 @06:19PM (#24103442)
Hmm. I think the US had at least one more core for a fat man type weapon.
Re:Hiroshima (1946) by hpcjoe on Sunday August 09, 2020 @06:36PM (#24103532)
Specifically, the demon core[1]. It was the core-in-waiting for a third bomb if needed, and I believe that the uranium and plutonium production lines were ramping up by that time[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

[2] https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/timeline search for 1945 July 23 entry.

Re:Hiroshima (1946) by Gibbon1 on Sunday August 09, 2020 @06:48PM (#24103615)
40 years ago I wrote a paper on nuclear weapons. My memory isn't perfect and the sources are 40-50 years out of date. But here goes.

The US built a massive manufacturing pipeline to make nuclear weapons. Little boy was a once off. Fat man was basically a functional prototype. And the manufacturing pipeline was running and kept running after the war. How much weapons grade plutonium they had left over after they bombed Nagasaki is kind of a quibble.

Re:Hiroshima (1946) by garmaine on Sunday August 09, 2020 @09:44PM (#24104667)
The production line was already delivering about 1 bomb per 10 days at that point. The military wanted to keep bombing until surrender was achieved.