> 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.
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...