News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:History vs. Hollywood: Oppenheimer by dmurray on Monday July 24, 2023 @07:36AM (#36846210)
> 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.

Re:History vs. Hollywood: Oppenheimer by defrost on Monday July 24, 2023 @08:20AM (#36846759)
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.