I know this is just a meme, but I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about something I think is super interesting. Physicists didn’t build the bomb (edit: nor were they particularly responsible for its design).
David Kaiser, an MIT professor who is both a physicist and a historian (aka the coolest guy possible) has done extensive research on this, and his work is particularly interesting because he has the expertise in all the relevant fields do dig through the archives.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read him, but he concludes that the physics was widely known outside of secret government operations, and the fundamental challenges to building an atomic bomb are engineering challenges – things like refining uranium or whatever. In other words, knowing that atoms have energy inside them which will be released if it is split was widely known, and it’s a very, very, very long path engineering project from there to a bomb.
This cultural understanding that physicists working for the Manhattan project built the bomb is actually precisely because the engineering effort was so big and so difficult, but the physics was already so widely known internationally, that the government didn’t redact the physics part of the story. In other words, because people only read about physicists’ contributions to the bomb, and the government kept secret everything about the much larger engineering and manufacturing effort, we are left with this impression that a handful of basic scientists were the main, driving force in its creation.
That’s how it is in almost every field, isn’t it? The ones who designed the space shuttle were not the same ones turning wrenches and welding on the actual vehicle.
Yeah, I thought it was well known that Scientists discover new things, engineers do things with what’s discovered
Well, I should’ve said “build or design,” maybe.
But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it’s just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.
It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.
The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he’s ever written.
Put another way, everyone in science and technololgy stands on the backs of giants.
Sort of but ,its also reasonably well promoted that 130,000 people worked on the project. I suppose people think they are all physicists?
I’ve read somewhere that he never regretted building the bomb, because he believed it prevented more wars/deaths from happening. Maybe I can find the article
Edit: Found it. https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.derstandard.de%2Fstory%2F3000000180215%2Fzehn-fakten-ueber-j-robert-oppenheimer It’s german though. He even sued an author who wrote a play where oppenheimer was struggling with his doings
I think he was right in that belief. Invasion of Japan by US forces would be far more deadly and devastating to both nations in terms of lost lives.
Apparently the purple hearts manufactured in anticipation of such an invasion during WWII are still awarded today with about 120k still in stock.
Japan was unwilling to surrender for a long time even though Japanese cities got bombed on a near daily basis near the end of the war. The US gambled on, for a lack of a better word, the wow-factor of the atomic bomb. They guessed correctly that Japan’s leaders would assume that there’s no way in hell the US could produce another one of these “special” bombs. They dropped the second one to basically say: “Hey, we got a huge stockpile of these things so we can do this as long as you like”. Or to put it simply: It was a show of force. When Nagasaki got hit Japanese leaders were in a council meeting about the Hiroshima bombing and the Soviet’s declaration of war on Japan and even after the news arrived in Tokyo half the cabinet was still insistent on their own terms of surrender. They didn’t know how many more bombs America had and that fear played a huge part in Hirohito’s decision to end the war after more than 14 hours of debate that day.
The first one to prove that it exists, the second to prove that America had the resources, manufacturing, and still had the balls to do it again even after seeing what it did. America dropped one to get the world’s attention and respect, and again to establish horrifying dominance. “I can do this all day” energy.
The conventional ordinance dropped on Tokyo killed many more people than Little Boy killed in Hiroshima. The Japanese barely surrendered after the nuclear attacks. I would suggest listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History miniseries Countdown to Armageddon if you want to know more.
In my mind, Oppenheimer figured out this when he said that:
We never nuked the Nazis…But even if we did, are you saying that the Nazis being Nazis would’ve justified vaporizing every civilian man, woman, and child in a city or two?
Whether or not you’d say it was justified is a different beast altogether than having to be the one that made it possible in terms of responsibility.
Tangentially, many firing squads will have only one person have a real bullet(s) while the rest have blanks so that they don’t all have to feel responsible for ending a life. Even that is setting justification aside.
the Nazis being Nazis would’ve justified vaporizing every civilian man, woman, and child in a city or two
- The bomb didn’t “vaporize every man woman and child”.
- 175 000 Volksturm (civilians pressed into service by their government, including women and children) died fighting the Allied advance into Germany. Dropping the bomb to end the war early would have prevented these deaths.
- This isn’t to mention the number of civilians who died as a result of being too close to the fighting. 125 000 civilians died in the Battle of Berlin alone.
- Also consider the number of soldiers who died on both sides which wouldn’t have happened had the war been ended early. The US produced so many Purple Heart medals (given to those who are killed or wounded while serving) in preparation for their invasion of Japan that they’re still using them today.
So yes dropping the bomb to end the war in Europe early would have been justified. Now please stop being a literal nazi apologist.
The belief was that the bombs would save lives compared to an invasion on both sides. There’s been a lot of retrospective analysis, but most of it agrees with that assessment. An invasion of Japan would have been absolutely ruinous for Japan’s civilian population. But it’s still a question of whether the ends justify the means in a lesser of two evils situation.
