> what struck me most was how little was devoted to the context of the pacific war

In almost every way that matters (save at the end) the pacific war had little to do with the Manhattan Project and building of the bomb.

President Roosevelt approved the atomic program On 9 October 1941 and agreed to coordinate the effort with the British and maintained correspondance on that with Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

This was after a long sustained effort by commonwealth (UK, Canadian, Australia, New Zealand) and european nuclear scientists to convince the US nuclear scientist and DoD that a nuclear weapon was actually possible and feasible and likely being worked upon by the Germans.

Once started the project was a behemoth, a monster rolling downwards under it's own weight, with mining, processing, seperation, fabrication, testing, security and some 150,000 (IIRC) employed across multiple sites.

The only thing that prevented atomic weapons being used in the carpet bombing destruction of German cities was the surrender of Germany just a few months prior to the first protype being ready for testing.

The reasons for a new US President to sanction further testing of the new weapon he had only just barely first learnt about on two pristine Japanese targets remain somewhat hotly debated to this day.

Much has been written about this after the bombs fell.

I'd point out that anybody that has been exposed to massive projects understands one of the prime unspoken reasons, you cannot spend a massive proportion of GDP on a military project and not expect to see it used.

Further discussion on the breadth of the nuke or not debate: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-us...

> I'd point out that anybody that has been exposed to massive projects understands one of the prime unspoken reasons, you cannot spend a massive proportion of GDP on a military project and not expect to see it used.

The Soviet Union - and 8 other countries, to a lesser extent - also poured great resources into their atomic project, and then found the restraint not to use it in anger.

The case can be made that the US did not bomb H & N out of any particular sense of additional anger, that they bombed H & N to test two orthogonal designs and that they barely squeezed those tests in ahead of the already scheduled destructtion of H&N following the complete destruction of 72 Japanese cities prior to the H&N bombings.

The other countries that joined the nuclear club all made prominent demonstrations of their ability to build and detonate atomic weapons .. there were > 2,000 detonations following H&N.

Many of those tests, including tests by the British, the French, and the Soviets, killed innocent civilians.

The only demonstrated restraint that I can see was the pivot to full blown MAD strategy .. and that came close to unravelling on multiple occasions.

> despite that Germany was (or almost) defeated.

You forget that Germany started the war together with Russia. In 1939 Russia has also invaded several countries and unleashed terror. There were plans to drop nuclear bomb on Moscow after Hitler was defeated, but instead the US and the UK thrown Eastern European countries under the bus and the war was frozen.

I wonder if Russia had received the same treatment as Japan, that we would have this ongoing threat for decades and now the invasion of Ukraine.

Soviet Union was an ally, and it is widely accepted that Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a necessity to delay a looming war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, because Soviet Union was weaker but developing faster.

No Soviet Union wasn't an ally, comrade. You are spreading Russian propaganda.

Equating the Soviet Union's role to that of Germany during the second world war is certainly uhhh.. one of the takes. It's not as if the US sent tons of food, aircraft, and hundreds of thousands of vehicles to the SU as part of lend-lease.

The priority was to defeat Hitler and sending Western troops to the East wasn't feasible, so helping Soviet Union with lend-lease was seen as a lesser evil. The idea was then to defeat Soviet Union afterwards. However, the West was too tired fighting and since Stalin didn't look to move westwards, the war de facto got frozen.

> and since Stalin didn't look to move westwards,

Pardon my French, but WTF are you talking about? Stalin took half of Europe.

It confounds me how people think WW2 ended with a success when millions were killed or enslaved as a result of the "victory".

The point is the west didn't care about Poland, the Baltics and other states that fell under Russia.

In their mind it was the "price" to pay for relative stability in the west.

The status quo was sealed once Soviet Union has developed their own nuclear weapons using stolen IP. Had this not happened, most likely Stalin would have been pushed back.

You're right, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

Russia did not exist at the time of the WWII.

They are usually considered allies in the context of WW2. The Von Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was evil, though, and it doesn't look like the USSR would have attacked Nazi-Germany if they hadn't invaded. So in that sense, it was an ally only out of necessity.

IMO the discussion often boils down to definition of words and emotional attachment to those words. I don't think people here disagree on the (most prominent) facts.

It was indeed an ally. In fact, after the war surveys showed French people overwhelmingly credited it with winning WW2. It was decades of american propaganda that reversed that.

The western front was already lost. The game was over. Germany won. Britain was pinned back and had no chance of invading France. If the soviets hadn't won at Stalingrad, turned the whole war and then slowly pushed back Germany... it was over. The US would've done absolutely nothing about it.

More Russians died at Stalingrad alone than Americans in the entire war. WW2 was, for most of it, just Germany v Russia. That's where all the losses were. Thats where all the fighting was. D-day was only in 1944... what was happening from the french surrender in 1940 until 1944? Who was fighting?

Honestly, Americans drinking their own kool-aid is mad to me. This is all basic history and a few hollywood films won't change that.

From France 24: "Just after the European fighting ended in May 1945, a poll by the French survey group Ifop found that 57 percent of the French thought Moscow had contributed the most to the war effort, compared with just 20 percent who named the United States.

But by the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings by Allied forces in 2004 -- when Russia was represented for the first time, by Putin -- the figures were reversed, with just 20 percent putting the Soviet Union first.

Instead, 58 percent lauded the US, even though its total losses of 400,000 in both the European and Pacific theatres were just a small fraction of the dead in the Soviet Union.

"In 1945, the great ally was Stalin and the USSR -- their role was absolutely clear for the French," said Stephane Grimaldi, director of the Caen Memorial Museum for World War II in Normandy.

"But 50 years later, it's the US that won, for the very simple reason that in the meantime we had the Cold War," he said.

Hollywood also helped change perceptions with a string of hit films starting in the 1960s showing brave Americans fighting far from home.

"If you look at way it has been portrayed in popular culture, it's all about the battle in France and the Battle of Britain, but World War II was overwhelmingly Germans and Russians killing each other," said Jeremy Shapiro from the European Council on Foreign Relations."

You're overlooking the war in the Pacific. Hitler hoped that Japan would keep the US busy, and wanted a free hand to attack lend lease shipping. US Atlantic supply was key to keeping the UK and USSR alive and fighting. The UK shipped Churcill tanks via the Arctic convoy. The US sent Shermans, Jeeps and much infra. All key to the eventual victory at Stalingrad.

> In fact, after the war surveys showed French people overwhelmingly credited it with winning WW2. It was decades of american propaganda that reversed that.

Contributions aren't judged by polling random people.

Russia would have lost if it wasn't for American supplies. In fact the biggest US mistake was feeding 10 million reds a day during the 1921 famine[1].

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

> and it is widely accepted that Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a necessity to delay a looming war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union

Citation needed. Stalin did things for his own reasons, and he didn't bother explaining them, so where are you getting this from? And if that were the case, why did the Soviet Union export so many crucial things (oil, tungsten, etc.) to Germany up to the very morning of Operation Barbarossa if they knew there will be used against them in the near future? And also, why was the Soviet Union caught off guard with the attack if they were expecting it and had mountains of intelligence showing it was imminent?

Also, invading Poland, Finland and the Baltics was certainly a choice by the Soviet Union. Yes, they're responsible for the start of WW2 because not only did they collaborate with Nazi Germany, they also gave Hitler and Germany a stable Eastern Front allowing them to focus on Poland and then Benelux and France.

> Soviet Union was an ally

Ally of convenience purely and entirely. They needed the other United Nations for the stuff and the other fronts, and the other United Nations needed them against the Germans (let's not forget, Germany lost the war on the Eastern Front). It shows in Soviet intentions and actions against Eastern European nations, like when then set up a puppet Polish government even though in theory they were allied to the actual Polish government in exile.

> it is widely accepted that Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a necessity

What horrible russian propaganda! The pact was about splitting Europe. That's why Russia invaded Poland[1], the Baltic countries[2], Finland[3], and Romania[4] after signing it.

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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_state...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_occupation_of_Bessarabi...

It wasn't a necessity. If Russia/Soviet Union was trying to delay the German invasion then they shouldn't have trained German troops and sent natural resources for it's war machine.

> how little was devoted to the context of the pacific war and why it was desperate to build that bomb, despite that Germany was (or almost) defeated

Because then it would have been an apologetic propaganda piece. It is, in my opinion, precisely much more interesting to look into the political and organizational factors for dropping the bombs, than to whitewash the USA into the world's benevolent savior once more. Enough such movies have been made.

The nuclear bombs were not as deadly as the firebombing of Tokyo. Or the siege of Leningrad.

At that time, nukes were simply a difference of degree, not of kind, from the ongoing use of strategic bombing with incendiaries and explosives against population centres by all sides in the conflict. Perhaps the real crossing of the line into mass murder was at Guernica, in 1937, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica

The problem with trying to pick apart the morality of individual actions in WW2 is that wherever you look for context you find more atrocities.