scrubbedexpat099

I am not aware of that being a factor in WW2.

andyrebell

A valid point but I think it also enforced to the Japanese government the possibility that tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops could have been killed in a single strike with a single warhead.

civilservant

They were never intended to be used again 'soft' targets during WW2, there simply were not enough of them and the idea of tactical rather than strategic goals had not yet come into play.

They would have continued to be used as city busters, being dropped as frequently as they could be built. That was the stated goal.

Pulaski

I don't think so, the strikes at the heart of the Japanese mainland, was a deliberate strategy to disabuse the Japanese leaders that the war would continue to be fought at the fringes of territories occupied by Japan, that they (the Japanese) could fight a prolonged war of attritiion, that even with successive Japanese defeats, would wear down the Allies.

Take a look at Walt Disney's "Victory Through Air Power" if you want to see a bizarrely fascinating education/ propaganda animation pushing the strategy of bombing the heart of the Japanese empire, rather than trying to defeat Japan one island at a time. The animated short was produced at Walt Disney's expense and personal direction, and was shown to the Churchill, Roosevelte, and Mackenzie King at the Quebec conference in 1943.

Rete

IMHO, Europe would not have been a candidate for the Atom simply because the fallout from an attack on Germany would mean that the radiation cloud would do serious damage to Allied countries.

Japan would not surrender even though virtually beaten and needed serious incentive to do so. As a woman whose father was in a POW camp of the Japanese in the South Pacific, I'm glad they surrendered before he was a fatality.

Pulaski

That would be a concern today, and quite rightly so, but back then probably not so much. The US military was still conducting air-burst experimental nuclear detonations at Bikini Atoll as recently as 1958, and it was well documented that at least some of those tests were witnessed by US forces wearing shorts and T-shirts and no protective gear at all!

In researching my comment above ^ I was surprised to learn that air-burst nuclear weapons create relatively little fallout and that is why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were soon rebuilt and are thriving cities still today. It is detonation-on-impact and shallow sub-surface bombs that kick up fall-out that can cause catastrophic radioactive fallout.

robin1234

Racism, not a factor? Really??

andyrebell

The bomb dropped on Berlin may very well have killed Hitler, Himmler and god knows who else in the Nazi leadership.

My history teacher in secondary school made the argument that the bombs should have been dropped on Moscow and St Petersburg instead as they didn't have it at that time and we did. Arguing that those detonations might have meant the cold war never happened and Russia never become the nuclear superpower it was and is.

civilservant

The idea of attacking an ally, unprovoked, when already in a war - oh and by the way picking a fight with the largest standing army In the world at the time - is rather ‘out there’

Pulaski

Even at the time it was accepted by Britain and America that Russia was an ally in WWII because they weren't quite as bad as Germany. ..... I agree though, nuking Russia was still probably a really bad idea.

civilservant

Indeed, it was a marriage of convenience more than anything else - their political system after all didn't exactly jive with the other 2.

To think that destroying their capital city and gutting their political leadership would be a good idea though is lunacy. It would just have led to a mushroom cloud over London or Washington at some point a few years later. Indeed, the idea of MAD would never have come into being, because the US would already have shown that it couldn't be trusted.

That single act would have rewritten the entire latter half of the 20th century.

Pulaski

I don't know - it wouldn't be the first time that Britain had marched into town and burned the capital of an ally (past and future, though not exactly at that moment).

robin1234

In that particular case, it was just a tit-for-tat - the United States had burned and looted York.

civilservant

I had no idea that the Lanc was potentially a vehicle for Little Boy, thanks for the post!

OldJuddian

Visiting the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima is a very moving experience. I recommend everyone going to Japan to visit.