That’s how long it’s been since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, with a second one on Nagasaki three days later, ending the war and probably saving millions of lives. Gerard Vanderleun thinks that it’s been too long (three generations now), and perhaps the world needs another reminder. Nuke something for peace.
28 thoughts on “Sixty Five Years”
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Pakistan will provide the demo soon enough. Adults really don’t need a live demo. We’ve had them. Every time someone dies that lived in those cities during the attack, it’s still counted as a nuke death to this day. One guy made it to both, but my favorite story is the guy that got atom bombed out of jail. I don’t know if he’s still alive today.
MAD worked, but Russia is rational. China as well. For Iran, a demonstration would only spur them on so they can get their twelfth Iman.
I don’t see the point of such a demonstration, unless everyone in the world (or at least the world’s governments) could witness it in person. There are plenty of videos available already; Vanderleun links to one montage in his article. If those aren’t at least a little scary, how much more would video of a contemporary shot be?
Personally, I find a lot of the old videos to be very effective — especially the Crossroads Baker shot. This was a 21 kt underwater explosion, set off in the middle of a flotilla of test target ships. One of the videos shows the battleship Arkansas rising vertically next to the water column.
Eyewitness accounts I’ve read of above ground tests all describe the experience as more than just scary. So a live demo for political (and military) leaders might be useful. But I don’t see it ever happening.
Think of it as the World Cup of Doomsday. It always gets a bigger audience if you don’t know what the score will be at the end.
Now if you are suggesting all current world leaders get a demo at ground zero… it is something to consider.
Well, Ken…I was almost tempted to say something like “set up the viewing area for a W-82, but ‘inadvertently’ use a W-85 [yield difference ~ 2 orders of magnitude].” But I don’t wish that on anyone, and I think if the world leaders ever actually saw something like that, it might make a valuable impression.
If it ever did happen, I’d pay whatever I had to to get a front-row seat. I like things that go “boom.” Fortunately, as a rocket scientist, it’s socially acceptable for me…
A demo is pointless unless the beneficiaries of said viewing are also a, convinced that you’ll use it in earnest and b, unsure of where the tipping point is. Otherwise, like my younger grandkids they’ll just keep right on pushing, and pushing since they know deep down that baba isn’t likely to disassemble them. I doubt anyone’s likely to believe it if BO trots out da big stick. The Hillabeast, otoh…
…so they can get their twelfth Iman
I’d happily settle for a second Iman if I knew where to find her.
k, for a start, the war wasn’t ended by the nukes. It just stopped Russia from taking Japan (and most likely handing it over to China). Anyway, it would have been great if he actually explained the rationale of why nukes = peace, cause the vast majority of young people don’t get it. They happily point at Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever else there’s been a “war” in the last 65 years and say “it didn’t stop that war”.
Personally, I found the video that included the Empire State Nuke more interesting. A 150kt bomb at that altitude is insufficient to level Manhattan but it certainly takes a nice chunk out of it. So how realistic is this? Your regular suitcase-nuke boogeyman – more often called a backpack-nuke these days – is sub-kt, and could conceivably be improved to ~2kt, and by backpack they mean 45kg. In other words: it’s pure scare tactics, and that’s the fundamental basis of nuclear deterrence, unfortunately people still haven’t caught on that this wired generation has better bullshit detectors than their grandparents did.
Trent, I rarely say this, but you are simply wrong.
WWII ended with a Japanese surrender that was directly the result of the nuclear weapons dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This isn’t my opinion, but the statement of virtually every senior member of the Japanese govt that has spoken on the subject in the post-war years. Apparently your wired generation BS detectors need tuning….
Ken,
I agree that, at least for the ruling class of Iran, they’d be happy to bring on armageddon so they can see the 12th imam, but there are plenty of perfectly rational, modern, intelligent people in Iran who don’t feel that way. I think nuking one or two of the underground bunkers they are doing their processing in now would be instructive, and finally frighten enough people in Iran to revolt merely to avoid a full US attack.
Saying, REALLY? IS THIS WHAT YOU REALLY WANT? during the demonstration merely adds irony.
Mike, I know there are reasonable Iranians. I’ve met many of them over the years, but they aren’t in power (Thank you Jimmy) and we are doing less than nothing to help them regain power (ty Barry.) They don’t need a demo and the rulers don’t care.
Islam is a religion founded on deception. They need emancipation.
Scare tactics–that’s the radical Islamists’ specialty, and a demonstration blast would probably turn out to be a “now-you’ve-seen-what-we-are-planning-for-you-infidels” event for them to capitalize on.
Why dirty the nest with radiation as an exercise in show and tell? Nuclear weapons are truly scary, but have relatively local messy effects, unless they can be detonated high enough to produce an EMP to blanket a wide area. An EMP could bring our entire nation to its knees (more swiftly than certain people residing in Washington, DC). Shouldn’t we be hearing more about EMPs as a national security threat?
The thing that concerns me is whether or not our nuclear firecrackers still have viable “powder” after all these years, what with no live testing in a very long time. Computer simulations are great, but physical testing is still, IMHO, the best way to go.
What would the consequences be if, hypothetically, we set up a demo and the Nuclear Black Cat fizzled? End Times, folks?
Nuclear weapons aren’t scary enough.
“Pakistan will provide the demo soon enough”, opines ken anthony. True enough, although I suspect that India will take a hand in providing it. And, despite the carnage — which will, I’d opine, include the deaths of 100-200 million from nuclear war and its side effects, and the end of even nominal Pakistani existence — people will look around them and say, “Holy fecal matter, the world didn’t end!” (The Petulant Left taking a very Brooksian attitude towards such things.) And we’ll be back to the late-40s notion that nuclear weapons are just like other bombs, only bigger.
“Islam is a religion founded on deception. They need emancipation.”
How do you emancipate a willing and committed slave? How do you change the hearts and minds of a population committed to dominating others?
Give them the soul crushing sense of failure only possible by the overwhelming destruction of everything they stand for. Fatman and Littleboy did a good job of that.
Japan was a much harder nut to crack than Iran though. We could destroy Iran in 2 weeks with conventional weapons and little to no loss of American lives – if we ever chose to defend ourselves properly.
The rational people in Iran can pick up the pieces and build a peaceful persian country in the aftermath. They’ll have plenty of incentive to be nice.
Scott,
100% right.
It was the Nuclear Bombs that gave Japan the opportunity to surrender while saving face. Otherwise they would have fought on to the bitter end, with the carnage of Okinawa being a mere taste of what would have occurred when the invasion of Japan proper started.
War with Russia was not a major factor. In fact, the Japanese Army that was stranded on the Asian mainland by U.S. submarines was looking for a chance to die for the Emperor and Japan had long had a grudge with Russia to settle. So it was more of an attitude of bring it on.
BTW my father was always glad for the A-Bombs. He was at home on leave in Chicago when the U.S. dropped them. He had just returned from Europe where he had spent a nearly a year fighting with the 7th Armor in the European war.
He was supposed to go California for amphibious training. The 7th Armor was supposed to be part of the invasion of the main island in the Spring of 1946. Estimated U.S. causalities were in the range of one to two million in the campaign at a minimum.
After the second bomb was dropped my dad got a telegram extending his leave indefinitely and informing him to stay in the Chicago area pending further orders. Then a couple weeks later he got orders reassigning him to detached duty at Fort Sheridan (located in Chicago, he was just required report in by phone daily), then a month later he was simply discharged. He was very happy to not have to invade Japan, as were millions of other U.S. military personal.
As for a view of what might have happened here is an excellent book on it and a good counter to the historical revisionists who say dropping the bombs was unnecessary.
http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-Invasion/dp/1400119081/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281224841&sr=1-7
Don’t forget Rand’s Amazon link 🙂
“The thing that concerns me is whether or not our nuclear firecrackers still have viable “powder” after all these years, what with no live testing in a very long time. Computer simulations are great, but physical testing is still, IMHO, the best way to go.”
In almost any other field, I would agree with this wholeheartedly. In fact, I think the gutsiest event in the history of human warfare was dropping the “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. It was a design that had never been tested…ever. It used U-235 in a gun-assembly mode. The ONLY other atomic bomb test was a plutonium implosion device. If the Hiroshima bomb had not worked, the Japanese would have been tipped off to what we were doing (they figured it out pretty quickly, anyway).
But it turns out that the bombs can not only be simulated, they can be tested with no nuclear reactions involved (at least at the fission stage). All one has to do is get the mechanisms to work correctly and reliably, and substituting nuclear fission material (properly made) will do the trick.
In the 700+ tests the United States has conducted, there has been only one dud as far as I know. It was very early in the “H-bomb” era, and was just a speculative experiment.
It’s really remarkable how well these things work. However, I think the amount of effort required to make them work is gargantuan. It is well beyond the means of terrorists, and beyond the means of small nations.,
See Trent Telenko’s excellent post and comments on the likelihood of a Japanese surrender without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese plans for resisting invasion, and Japanese and American plans for chemical weapon use, including the actual uses of chemical weapons during WWII by Japanese forces:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/14488.html#comments
Lots of direct sources cited.
My point was that the US wasn’t the major threat to the Japanese before the bomb. They would have kept fighting against the Russians and the Chinese, not the US. Nuking Japan gave the US the win.
My point was that the US wasn’t the major threat to the Japanese before the bomb.
Yeah, those thousand-plane B-29 firebomb raids were just a trivial nuisance. And those pesky American submarines sinking everything that floated? Mosquito bites.
Seriously, dude, what Harry Turtledove fever dream do you currently imagine you live in?
They would have kept fighting against the Russians and the Chinese, not the US.
They’d already gone up against the Russkies when they got a little too high on hubris after gobbling up Mongolia. Got their asses handed to them. Decided discretion was the better part of valor; fuck with the Bear, pull back a bloody stump. They’d already decided not to fight the Russkies anymore years before they got around to adopting the same wisdom with respect to us. Where do you get this stuff?
Nuking Japan gave the US the win.
Duh. How this goes logically with the two sentences that precede it, though, is beyond me.
Trent,
So you think the fire bombing of Japan, which killed far more people then the atomic bombs, and naval blockade that had cut off all food and oil to Japan were not major threats? Nor the roving task force of battleships that was bombarding coastal areas at will? Nor the major amphibious invasions, larger then D-Day, planned by the U.S. in the Fall of 1945 and Spring of 1946? Hmmm….
Although the Russians may have drove the Japanese from the mainland of Asia, the ability of the Russians to mount an amphibious assault on the major Japanese islands without the U.S. or British Navy would have been very limited since their naval resources were limited. That is why Japan’s fear of Russia was limited. Without the U.S., Japan would have probably just cut a deal with Russia giving them Korea and Manchuria and still be left with major areas of China and Formosa.
Why would Russia have cut a deal with Japan? They owned them, and the US knew it. Japan was essentially Russian territory. Territory isn’t taken by air, it’s taken by boots on the ground and the US had none. Without the nuke the US would have pulled out of Japan and left it to the Russians. I don’t know how you can debate this.
Trent,
Japan is an island. To take Japan you need an extensive amphibious warfare capability. Russia had none. The U.S. had. That is how the U.S. Marines and U.S. Army got to the doorstep of Japan. And how the U.S. was planning to put boots on the ground if the atomic bombs had not work.
By contrast Russia would had been like Nazi Germany, looking over a small gap of ocean without any capability to cross it. Yes, Russia and Japan would have cut a deal if the U.S. had withdrawn. But its academic as the U.S. was not going to withdraw. World War II was a fight to the finish, and that meant taking Japan no matter the cost.
Yes, there is nothing to debate because you don’t have a clue about the military capabilities of the nations involved. You need to read some good histories of World War II.
Without the nuke the US would have pulled out of Japan and left it to the Russians.
I think a 4chan guy got a hold of Trent’s account and decided to troll? Or was it Russia that took the Japanese island of Okinawa…It wasn’t covered by American boots was it? Along with all the other islands of the Pacific the Japanese previously laid claim to?
“I don’t know how you can debate this.”
This I agree with. I think the best response is: LOL
It is well beyond the means of terrorists, and beyond the means of small nations.
This could have been said about private payloads to orbit. 3% of uranium is the stuff that goes boom. You can’t enrich isotopes chemically, but you can physically because of the difference in mass. What if some wizkid comes up with a new cheaper method?
I think the last time Obama bombed the Moon the explosion wasn’t big enough ; big let down in fact. Next time let’s nuke the Moon and we’s sure to see something blow up real good.
“This could have been said about private payloads to orbit. 3% of uranium is the stuff that goes boom. You can’t enrich isotopes chemically, but you can physically because of the difference in mass. What if some wizkid comes up with a new cheaper method?”
It’s actually 0.72% that goes boom, and if you’re talking about enrichment (which I wasn’t) then my statement about a bomb being beyond the means of a terrorist is ironclad. A lot of whizkids have been working on enrichment methods for decades, and the only “new” ones (first proposed in the 1970s) involve laser methods which one might think would be cheap. But some multiple of a billion dollars has gone into just getting pilot plants working for the two variations on that theme, and no one is producing anything.
What I was talking about assumed that one had a supply of weapons-grade (or weapons-usable) U-235. You’d have to have this to make a gun-assembly device. Plutonium won’t work in a gun-assembly device, and an implosion device requires the technical wherewithal of a good-size country. But even a gun-assembly device isn’t as simple as the sketches you find in the open literature. There is a lot of disinformation in those. It is not simple to assemble a critical mass, and keep it together while supplying enough neutrons to get it to explode.
India and North Korea have both exploded nuclear bombs. In each case, however, the first try was a dud.
India and North Korea have both exploded nuclear bombs. In each case, however, the first try was a dud.
Some of the things I’ve read recently suggest the Nork test wasn’t a bomb but a trigger and they have their sights on megaton fusion bombs. They are definitely nuts.