[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEmJ-VWPDM4&feature=kp]
If climate scientists had of been in charge of developing the first nuclear bomb, they would have attempted to correct the behavior of each particle – and would be asking Emperor Hirohoto III every year for more money to purchase a larger supercomputer needed to get the problem solved.
This sums up the whole problem; we have a collection of book-minded academics as opposed to results-oriented engineers assigned to ‘work’ the issue …
The US had the war won with or without the fat man, little boy, and the thin man. Results would not have changed much.
Music from the infancy of music videos on tv. Brings back memories.
Probably 1,000,000 fewer American casualties and uncounted millions fewer Japanese deaths.
not really. I once thought so, but since I learned that US politicians simply didn’t want to accept terms of surrender they ended up doing anyway with the unconditional surrender.
Where did you “learn” this B … my recollection of WW2 history is consistent with James’ statement.
Does this somehow go hand-in-hand with Roosevelt ‘luring’ the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor too so the bulk of the US population would shift their opinion on going to war (both in EUR and against Japan)?
The Allied powers – primarily the USA, UK and Russia – had demanded unconditional surrender, which the Japanese military faction of the government refused point blank, continuing that refusal even after the bombing of Hiroshima. Even after the bomb on Nagasaki, when the Emperor Hirohito had approved the unconditional surrender, an extreme faction of the Japanese army invaded the Imperial Palace with the intention of destroying the document, preferring to fight to the last man, woman and child.
Had the Japanese not surrendered at that point – mostly as a result of the use of the nuclear bomb, the death toll would have been appalling, in particular because the Russians had recently entered the hostilities with the intent of doing in Japan what they had already done in Eastern Europe. As it was they had already captured Sakhalin Island, which they refused to relinquish even when the peace treaty was signed.
Curious how all the anti-American historical revisionists entirely fail to mention the influence that the Russian invasion had on the timing of the events in the latter stages of the War in the Pacific, isn’t it?
In fact, I have a personal axe to grind here, as both my father and my wife’s father had been stationed in the Far East, and were slated to take part in the invasion of Japan, which. as a result of their previous experience fighting the Japanese, neither expected to survive. So if it wasn’t for the use of the nuclear weapons, neither I nor my wife would in all probability have been born.
Further to that, had it not been for generally calming effect of the nuclear deterrent, it is entirely probable that I would have been conscripted – I only missed it by a short time – and dispatched to have my ass shot off in some Balkan sh!thole or similar, so all in all I am very grateful to the scientists, engineers and military men who are responsible for the construction and deployment of nuclear weapons.
_Jim you can choose to learn more or you can simply believe your grade school teachers told you the entire truth.
catweazle666, I am well aware of the attempted coup and all the rest. In fact I wrote a grade school paper on why Enola Gay and the Brock’s Car had to be sent out to do what they did. I defended that view for many years. I know that case backwards and forwards. The issue is I kept learning.
In May of 1945 Japan’s government and military (other than that faction that tried the _failed_ coup) were willing to surrender with the condition of preserving the emperor. This is historical fact. Allen Dulles wrote of it in his 1966 book, “The Secret Surrender”, which is one of the cites given in what I’ve read and probably the most acceptable for the audience here. Herbert Hoover also wrote of the demand for unesscary unconditional surrender in his book on WW2. There are further cites in Gar Alperovitz’s book, “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb”. ( http://bionicmosquito.blogspot.com/2012/02/decision-to-use-atomic-bomb.html )
Everything or at least practically everything of importance government tells us officially is either a lie or designed to manipulate us by leaving things out. Climate change is just one thing they lie about to retain and grow their power.
As to Pearl Harbor and FDR, well I’ll let you both research that on your own time for now.
You can keep believing that government incompetence keeps rewarding government office holders with what they want or perhaps maybe figure out that if were actual random incompetence, that roughly half the time it would be in the favor of the people…. but it’s somewhere under 1% best I can tell.
re: B July 3, 2014 at 2:17 pm
“_Jim you can choose to learn more or you can simply believe your grade school teachers ”
Bzzzzt!
Waaay beyond that “B”.
Somewhere along the line you’re scored a main bearing due to frequent over-revs …
B says: “The issue is I kept learning.”
Go and patronise someone else, you ignorant child.
That very much depends upon your definition of “results”.
My father was on a ship heading for the invasion of Japan when he got news of the first nuclear detonation. Although he never talked excessively about his experiences in the war, he did tell me in, quite simple terms, that everyone on his ship expected they would die in the invasion.
As I recall, our plans for the invasion of Japan included a force of 600,000 allied soldiers (much larger an invasion force that was used at Normandy) to land at a predetermined location and fight their way to Tokyo. We anticipated facing a force of 140,000 Japanese military defenders.
After the war, we found that the Japanese had surmised our landing location and had planned to offer up a force of 600,000 Japanese military to counter our offensive, as well as another 30 million Japanese civilians prepared to fight with farm instruments with the hope they could kill one allied soldier.
The Japanese military and civilians were extremely dedicated to their country and the vast majority of them were quite willing to die for their Emperor. These qualities were encountered time and time again as we island-hopped to Japan.
As horrible as it was, the decision to drop the nuclear bombs saved more Japanese military and civilians, and more allied troops than any decision in history.
And yes, the final result would have been the same. Japan would have lost the war, except they would have seen several million more casualties.
re: Ginger July 3, 2014 at 5:36 am
“…As I recall, our plans for the invasion of Japan included a force of 600,000 allied soldiers (much larger an invasion force that was used at Normandy) to land at a predetermined location and fight their way to Tokyo. We anticipated facing a force of 140,000 Japanese military defenders.”
These are facts and … are inconvenient when discussing woulda coulda shoulda’s since in the mind of the conspiratorially-minded ALL things work towards pre-conceived goals or outcomes,e.g. “but since I learned that US politicians simply didn’t want to accept terms of surrender they ended up doing anyway with the unconditional surrender.”
Did that make sense to you? Me neither …
Like I’ve said before, normally B fires consecutively on all cylinders but then floats a few ‘valves’ during over-rev conditions …
.
B,
You left out a couple of things–the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 1918, gave the Allies the willies that turn-coat Stalin would flip-flop if there was anything less than Unconditional Surrender (not to mention his own Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that permitted Nazi Germany to enter Poland on the west as Stalin entered on the east).
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk.html
http://www.fact-index.com/m/mo/molotov_ribbentrop_pact.html
And then there was the fact that the Japanese peace feelers were sent through “neutral” USSR–with “conditions” that were not afforded to Nazi Germany.
http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/correspondence/togo-sato/corr_togo-sato.htm
http://corntigaja.blogspot.com/2010/08/nagasaki-and-japan-condition-for-peace.html
This history does matter–as much as the temperature history does. Revising so that a current political agenda has some weight, some validity, is building a castle on shifting sands of lies. Absent atomic weapons, there is every indication that heavy use of chemical weapons on Japanese soil would have been inflicted by the United States. One project using Navy PB4Y2 Privateer patrol bombers (Navy B-24 Liberators) that carried modified German V-1 cruise missiles was being tested at Wendover while Paul Tibbets was standing up the 509th Composite Bomb Group. Some of those warheads would have contained mustard gas–if not Sarin (also liberated from Nazi Germany).
Steve Goddard’s blog has corrected the lies about climate history.
It’s a bit like a gambling program: it’s designed to wager a certain amount every month, and it works exactly as it was designed; that it is steadily losing is apparently of no concern.
“Works as designed” does not necessarily equal “desired outcome”. Competent people actually check the results, identify the issue(s) and correct them.
Politicians, however, ‘tune’ (as we are like to say in my field for dramatic effect) for either minimum or maximum (political) ‘smoke’; efficiency or quantified results are not as big an issue for a ‘pol’ …
According to “Top Secret Rosies” and “Rocket Girl” and other non-academic histories, the atomic bomb program used some of the early computers (the ballistics branch, not the code breaking branch) to solve the ballistic shape of the bomb casing and some of the implosion equations.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1587359/
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17247967-rocket-girl
Because prior to the development of the analog and digital electronic computers, all computers were human mathematicians. Starting in 1942 the man shortage led to recruiting female mathematicians to do these tedious calculations.
The Powers That Be are missing out on employing “wise Latino women” to foist climate policies on the world! They could simply rip a page from history, claim “limited computer resources” and form a pool of “wise Latino women” like Judge Sonia Sotomayor who have life experiences that cannot be disproven by peer review. Just think–instead of computers with the famous GIGO (garbage in/garbage out) issue and the Steve Goddard types who examine the data and the “anti-technology bent” of a large number of Americans who distrust what hasn’t been fully explained to them, you can have a bunch of “wise Latino women” handing down holy writ from on high!
That science stuff is dangerous because of the Scientific Method of Inquiry and the dangers of Peer Review. Eventually, “Aryan Science” gets disproved because reality fails to conform.
The tuition is expensive!
A song about… ah…nevermind.
The interesting thing is that the Japanese actually fully developed and detonated a nuclear bomb 2 weeks before the war ended.
Debatable. Imperial Japan had a robust nuclear weapon program that had to be moved to Korea (where hydroelectric power, pitchblende mines and lack of B-29 bomber raids facilitated development) and this set back their program an unknown amount. And the Japanese atomic bomb strategy was to mount their bomb on a submarine and detonate it beneath one of the many Allied amphibious task forces–exposing the chronic Imperial Japanese strategic blindness.
http://fas.org/nuke/guide/japan/nuke/
http://www.histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/air/gas/nuc/w2-nucj.html
As so often Richard Adams had it about right
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVkYaZXCl8U
The invasion of Japan would have resulted in a high body count for both sides. The island hopping battles fought to get to the mainland were horrific. The Japanese fought to the last man, less than 1% surrendered. The women and children jumped off of cliffs in Saipan and Okinawa because they would told the GI would rape them and eat their babies. Yokosuka Naval Base had suicide sub waiting for the US Fleet to arrive. I have been to both ground zero’s and it is humbling but I still believe it was the right thing to do.