Nit pick: What you have described is the incorrect version in the movie "Fat Man and Little Boy". It was a knee-jerk reaction that stopped the supercritical reaction, and it was the beryllium outer sphere which was dropped, not the plutonium core.
Slotin was holding the top half of the beryllium sphere with his thumb which he immediately lifted up due to the intense heat.
Had he not made this instinctive move, everyone present would have perished and the area would have remained deadly until some other poor soul came upon the tragedy to stop the reaction.
The first-hand accounts of those present are in the thorough official report, which just happens to be collected in John Coster-Mullen's Atom Bombs book.
Very well written and interesting book.
http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Eric-Schlosser-ebook/d...
And if cold-war nuclear lore is your thing, check out the photo gallery at http://atomic-annhilation.blogspot.com
A very well-researched book that challenges, adequately in my opinion, some of the fundamental assumptions about nuclear weapons. First and foremost, that "the atomic bombs ended the war with Japan".
It probably would have been more efficient to dilute the U-235 into reactor grade and use it to manufacture weapons grade Plutonium. However at the time the U.S. only had two bombs (the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and it was probably judged politically expedient to drop two instead of one.
All of these processes were brand new at the time and mostly untested. Plutonium enrichment at the Hanford site used a reactor design that was validated well into the construction of the site. The Manhattan project already had a lot of risks, and they weren't going to attempt chaining projects for something unproven. Real experiments came after the war.
Also note that the design tested at Trinity was not the design used on Hiroshima. The Little Boy design used on Hiroshima was a gun-type design that was so obvious it would work that it wasn't felt that any testing was required. The Fat Man design used on Nagasaki was vastly more complex (but much more efficient and scalable) that it was felt best to validate it before using it in war.
I occasionally wonder about the atomic bombings and the timing of everything. If the project had been delayed by a year or so, the war would have ended without them. But the development would continue, and the Cold War would no doubt kick off something like it did in reality. But without two examples of the horrors of nuclear war, would the superpowers have been as restrained as they were in reality? Rather than the first (and so far, only) use of nuclear weapons in war being two primitive bombs, it could have been hundreds or thousands, in a war run by people thinking that they were just doing a scaled up version of the city bombing of WWII. It seems like the timing ended up being extremely lucky.
How do we really know this? The Japanese were ready for a long drawn out decades conflict. The US forces were war-weary and war was draining the economy. This could have gone on with quite some time, or ended in a frozen conflict that would reignite periodically. Who knows, but a quick non-nuclear win was certainly not in the cards.
>would the superpowers have been as restrained as they were in reality?
Arguably, if the US used nukes on Chinese soldiers during the Korean conflict, as some generals advised, there would be no North Korea. We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea. Instead we have one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen as a client state of China, who uses China's political influence and muscle to threaten the West with nuclear war every day. So, progress?
Conflicts need to happen. The more we put them off or try to find conditional surrenders or half-assed peace, the more we're asking for more trouble down the line.
imho, the cold war thinkers had no love for humanity and weren't influenced by the bombings in Japan. From a game theory perspective they had no incentive to fight a full scale war because it would annihilate both sides quickly. Its a losing outcome for all. Instead, it led to dozens of brutal proxy conflicts in non-nuclear states paid for by the lives of young men of those states. How many died because of the advance of Communism in Asia? How many states failed because of it? How many did Stalin send to their deaths?
These are not trivial numbers. You still had conflict by the USSR's expansionist agenda, and a serious amount of it, just with conventional arms while nuclear arms largely protected the West from a Soviet surprise nuke attack. Countries without nukes were gristle for the Soviet oppression machine.
Yeah, one large, irradiated South Korea, ruled by a pathetic murderous dictator who would have friends in Washington D.C. instead of Moscow, and who would have killed people throughout the peninsula for being Communists[1], instead of being against Communists.
Yay for progress?
Fuck freedom and democracy. All those talk of freedom didn't do shit when Rhee murdered Koreans, when Park murdered Koreans, and when Chun murdered Koreans.
I know I can't really expect American soldiers to wage wars and get killed just to support the freedom of some third-world country they've never heard of, instead of ensuring the continuing political dominion of the US in a large portion of the world, but people could at least be honest about it.
How many died because the US fought the advance of Communism in Asia?
And why do you believe that it is even your damn business to interfere in countries that are thousands of miles away from the US?
By the way, the General that was responsible for the bombing Japan with nuclear weapons, Curtis LeMay (you can see his signature on one of the photos) was in favor of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and proposed dropping more than 140 nuclear bombs on Russia.
And yes, he was willing to lose US cities due to counter strikes. All that mattered to him was that the US had an advantage at the time, and could win a war.
He also insisted on invading Cuba during the Missile Crisis and almost convinced Kennedy. We are lucky that he failed, because there were already nuclear weapons on Cuba at that time (which he didn't know) and an invasion would have triggered an all out war.
Nowhere near as many that were systematically slaughtered by their own gov't.
A quick non-nuclear win was very much on the cards. The soviet union had just entered the war. The navy knew that it couldn't protect the homeland and didn't have any planes. There was, at the very least, a substantial faction in the cabinet that wanted to surrender, and had the support of the emperor in this. Can we be sure the war would have ended quickly? No. Can we be sure that the human cost would have been less than the ~200,000 civilian deaths caused by the bombs? Definitely not - conventional firebombing could have inflicted those kind of casualties if the war had continued for as little as another week or two. But a decade-long conflict or frozen ceasefire is really implausible; the balance of conventional forces was really overwhelming at that point.
> Arguably, if the US used nukes on Chinese soldiers during the Korean conflict, as some generals advised, there would be no North Korea. We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea. Instead we have one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen as a client state of China, who uses China's political influence and muscle to threaten the West with nuclear war every day. So, progress?
You could equally argue that if the US had given up and pulled out of Korea entirely, instead of North and South Korea we'd have a country like Vietnam, which is doing pretty well. Or that if the Soviet Union had used nukes to conquer the world we'd have peace everywhere. Everyone thinks they're the "good guy"; any moral principle that would allow the US to use nukes would seem to allow other countries to do so too.
Your counterfactual about North Korea seems rather weak. You seem to assume that we'd drop The Bomb and then the war would be won and we'd all go home. But it probably wouldn't have won the war. The Chinese would have been happy to keep on fighting even with nuclear bombardment. All it would have done would be to greatly widen the scope of the war and turn a small proxy war into a general WWIII.
As for the rest, those brutal proxy conflicts were still way better than direct conflicts between great powers, especially a potential large-scale nuclear conflict.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:
- Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
- Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
- Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
- Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
- Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
- Surrender of designated war criminals.
Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):
The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.
And as we can all agree, the emperor played at least as central a role to the Japanese leadership's legitimacy as the Fuhrer did to his.
What the atomic bombs did was made the emperor himself call on his people to surrender. This removed the ability for more hawkish parts of the Japanese leadership to continue a resistance effort, which some surely would have pursued.
Given the sprawling nature of Japanese positions, its deep cultural divides even between army/navy, its hard to know exactly who could authorize a peace treaty and if all other factions would listen to him.
They were no threat to anyone at that time.
And if we look at it from the japanese perspective: They never intended to invade the US. Their goal was to end the US blockade of Japan.
Not every single war has to end with an all out invasion.
There was probably no way to beat them without getting a lot of people killed. Leaving them alone was probably not a good option either.
I also feel a need to point out that Japan did invade the US in the Aleutians campaign, albeit a fairly insignificant and deeply out-of-the-way portion of the US. The Philippines could also be considered part of the US at the time the Japanese conquered it, although pretty loosely.
Imagine the alternate version of something like the Korean War in a world where WWII ended without the use of nuclear weapons. Are the Americans going to refrain from using nuclear weapons on their enemies when the going gets tough in that scenario? My money is on "no", and I'd also wager that the nuclear bombing campaign would last a lot longer, since it would be initiated against countries with a much greater capacity to fight. For example, Mao really didn't seem to care about the potential devastation of nuclear war: "Let us imagine how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world, and a third could be lost. If it is a little higher it could be half ... I say that if the worst came to the worst and one-half dies, there will still be one-half left, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. After a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again."
Eisenhower said "it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
At the time Truman said Japan had been "repaid many fold" for Pearl Harbor. In these new images there is a bit of graffiti on the bomb allegedly written by a Rear Admiral: "a second kiss for Hirohito". It seems to me like the mood in the US camp was "let's hit them hard, teach them a lesson." rather than a more considered or balanced calculation.
Edit: in the documentary "The Fog of War" on McNamara, there is discussion of Curtis LeMay's decision to firebomb Tokyo. In that case there was apparently a degree of cool-headed calculation. http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html
Some discussion of the nuclear bomb decision here: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/it-wasnt-necessary-to-hit-... (I have no idea what the politics of that paper are, caveat lector)
"Stimson left the meeting thinking Truman completely understood the matter, and the final target order — with Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki (the latter added only then) — was sent out.
But what did Truman take away from this meeting? We can look at Truman’s own diary entry from July 25th:
" This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.
He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful. "
This passage reflects an incredible misconception. Truman appears, here, to believe that Hiroshima was 'a purely military' target, and that 'soldiers and sailors' would be killed, 'not women and children.' But of course every city on that list was inhabited primarily by civilians. And by the calculus of war being waged, every city on that list had a military connection — they produced weapons for the military."
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/08/08/kyoto-misconceptio...
Japan was beaten. They had already offered a complete surrender, conditional only on keeping the emperor, which was rejected by the U.S. Their utter defeat and the hopeless state of their armed forces was well-known by the allies, since their communication encryption had been cracked months earlier.
The real issue was likely that the Soviet Union, positioned to become a formidable power in the post-war theater, had promised to enter the war against Japan on August 6. The Americans needed to make sure that Japan had been defeated by that point and that the U.S. would occupy Japan, not Soviet Russia. Hence the rush to drop the bombs before that.
Also, there was no uncertainty about the lack of military significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the contemporary reports state this clearly, they even warn about the presence of American POWs in the area (which was ignored and they were incinerated along with the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians).
Hiroshima was the city that supported the Kure Naval Base and associated anchorage. Nagasaki was a major port that was an adjunct of the Sasebo Naval Base. Those were two of the IJN's four main bases. The impotence of the IJn at this point notwithstanding, I think it is unreasonable to claim they had little military significance.
Whether or not that justified levelling them in what you can argue were just live-fire nuclear tests is a different question.
Are you saying the Japanese offered to surrender, with the only condition being maintaining the emperor, prior to the bombing of Hiroshima? My understanding is that was the terms accepted after the atomic bombings and the declaration of war by the USSR.
This is inaccurate. Much fewer than 200,000 people were killed immediately (totaled across both bombings), including both incinerated and not, civilian and not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an...
Casualties and losses: 20 U.S., Dutch, British prisoners of war killed 90,000–166,000 killed in Hiroshima 39,000–80,000 killed in Nagasaki Total: 129,000–246,000+ killed
It doesn't say if these are all immediate casualties (does it even matter), but it does mention estimates for Nagasaki immediate casualties is between 22,000-75,000.
Wikipedia gives an immediate death toll of 70,000–80,000 people, of whom 20,000 were soldiers for Hiroshima and 22,000-75,000 people for Nagasaki. This is far from hundreds of thousands of incinerated civilians.
I don't think 120,000 lives qualifies as splitting hairs. I thought I was delivering good news, but judging by my karma, it has not been well received.
They already knew that they could take Japan, it would be nasty, but they could do it. So from that point of view, the bomb was unnecessary. But from a post-war perspective, the West was facing the prospect of a strong aggressive Soviet front. The A-bomb put an instant chill on all post-war aggression and helped encourage the worlds armies to stand down just a little bit.
I think in hindsight it's also worth pointing out that people in general are pretty terrible at judging the consequences of things of that scale. ie. You can describe just how big an explosion a nuclear bomb is going to make, but until one is actually dropped and the casualties start coming in, you don't really comprehend it fully. If those bombs hadn't been dropped, the aversion to destruction might not have been fully ingrained in the minds of every commander and it could well have meant that the Cold War would have turned "Hot".
Pretty scary stuff considering that the main brunt was born by civilians.... oO;
The ultimate aim of an attack on a town area is to break the
morale of the population which occupies it. To ensure this,
we must achieve two things: first, we must make the town
physically uninhabitable and, secondly, we must make the people
conscious of constant personal danger. The immediate aim, is
therefore, twofold, namely, to produce (i) destruction and
(ii) fear of death.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_...
(But keep in mind, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and others all regulate revenge instead. Revenge is certainly justified under those moral systems, and the revenge is usually bigger than the event that "justified" the revenge. Judaism, but especially Islam is especially famous for having revenge punishments so extreme (I should say so extremely stupid) that they have triggered civil wars on occasion (of course these come from the Roman Empire's late-empire laws, which had a justice system that can reasonably be called "based on terror"). Which moral system is right ?)
The moral issue here is the duty to stop or at least contain moral wrongs in progress, e.g. this Unit 731, the Soviet Union, ... The key difference being that revenge is after the fact and is unnecessary. The key thing about revenge is that it makes society worse off in the short term, both the person taking revenge and the person being punished (e.g. kids destroying a toy rather than giving it back).
To fight moral wrongs in progress the moral position is that it is justified to use any amount of force, but comparable force should be tried first. Collateral damage should be avoided, but if you can't stop a criminal without causing collateral damage, then it is acceptable to, for example, destroy property (if the police destroys your front door chasing a robber, you will not receive compensation, nor if they burn down your house, though insurance usually covers this). If someone fights, beat him a bit and lock him up. If someone has a knife or a gun and is (trying to) kill people, shoot him. If a country is raping and killing half a continent, ...
This differentiation can be found in the bible, and in any sane moral text. Hell, it can be found in the UNCHR (united nations convention on human rights).
US POWs ended up picking up the tab for My Lai.
The notion that the alternative to the bombings was an invasion is an utterly pernicious falsehood. It is a matter of record that Japan had offered to surrender prior to the bombings, conditional only upon retaining the emperor. Those terms were subsequently accepted, after the bombings. The "peace" faction's strategy was to accept the surrender before conducting the bombings.
There is a 1950s fictional film by Akira Kurosawa called "I Live in Fear" which tells the story of a man driven mad by fear of radiation from a nuclear war. For better or worse it is easy to forget now what a catastrophic thing the introduction of the bomb was for everyone.
What if 4 or 5 years after the war it turns out that the president had a wonder weapon that could have ended the war in a week and saved 1/2 a million GI's - it would have been the end for the democratic party when that came out.
Hence, I imagine that many servicemen and women didn't see themselves as having a long life span. Maybe not consciously, but certainly subconsciously.
The plutonium bomb was an implosion bomb, and had to be set off with the simultaneous (< 1us difference) firing of all the explosive lenses to get a symmetrical compression. This was done by charging up a big capacitor bank and discharging it through a krytron switch (like a thyatron or SCR; there's a turn-on gate, but no turn-off) into resistance wires used as detonators. There were no intermediate explosive detonators; they weren't consistent enough on timing. Any inconsistency on timing would cause the explosion to blow out on one side rather than achieving full compression. That still might produce a "fizzle yield", tons rather than kilotons of TNT.
"Single point detonation safe" bombs came years later.
And unlike a conventional weapon, it's pretty hard for a nuke of this design to accidentally explode.
Its pretty amazing that the test procedure for determining the critical mass was essentially "stack these blocks of plutonium/uranium (by hand) until the neutron detector starts going off, and then take one away"
IIRC, that incident happened with the same sphere of plutonium, causing it to be called the "Demon Core".
I have had a lot of oh shit moments in my days, but none gets close to dropping the plutonium onto the uranium and nearly detonating a nuclear payload.
Not possible for a plutonium device, and this is why the implosion method was so technically challenging. The plutonium must be transitioned from subcritical to supercritical very, very fast to achieve any significant nuclear energy release. In the final design, shaped plastic explosives, chosen for their very high velocities, were used to compress the plutonium from all directions simultaneously, very fast. Then, after the compression phase is complete, a carefully timed burst of neutrons triggers the nuclear fission event.
Consider this: even if that "youngster" wasn't filtered out from his contemporaries due to his skills or character, he still came from a generation that was engaged in a war that had taken the lives of friends, family and neighbors. It was also probably also obvious by then that you don't mess around with bombs, regardless of how they worked.
I'd wager that the average "youngster" during WW2 was a great deal more responsible than their modern-day counterparts of similar age.
J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves were a fascinating team, Oppenheimer being a physicist and Groves an Army general.
A must for anyone in technical management.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb/dp/06848...
This sort of appeal to superficial appearances generally doesn't hunt on HackerNews.
It reminds me of the Slotin Incident (http://www.damninteresting.com/bitten-by-the-nuclear-dragon/) where dr. Louis Slotin accidently slipped the screwdriver he used to separate two plutonium/uranium hemispheres:
"Immediately, all eight scientists in the room felt a wave of heat accompanied by a blue glow as the plutonium sphere vomited an invisible burst of gamma and neutron radiation into the room. As the lab's Geiger counter clicked hysterically, Louis used his bare hand to push the upper plutonium hemisphere off and onto the floor, which terminated the supercritical reaction moments after it began."
Big oopsie.
However gruesome the goal of these bombs, the rate of advancement in such a short timespan is nothing short of amazing. From the very first successful test (Trinity) to bombing Hiroshima: just 21 days. They were great days for science, but a shame to mankind that it had to come this far.