I am a bit skeptical of this. Not even the Germans were close to building an atom bomb and it was their scientists that figured out the physics. If Japan did have any real plans on the board it probably had more to do with stolen intelligence garnered from the States.
Also, it is unlikely anyone would have realistically expected uranium to be delivered to Japan by U-boat in 1945.
This is well documented in detail in "Making of the Atomic Bomb". They had the will, but not the means. They had much of the knowledge, but not all of it. It's unlikely in any outcome of the war that they would have been able to refine enough uranium to make a useful bomb and then deliver it.
it was [ German ] scientists that figured out the physics.
Not exactly, although they contributed a lot to the early work. If we start from "splitting the [heavy] atom", the first practical method, a German radiochemist was the first to recognize what happened, and the German physicist he first forwarded this information and her nephew figured out how it worked. But those two were Jews in exile, and most of the following more practical stuff was figured out, correctly at least, by scientists outside of Germany. Inside, they suffered a couple of disasters, a silly failure to get an higher priority for the project, and an incorrect evaluation of using graphite as a moderator, limiting them to heavy water. Which we made sure through sabotage that they couldn't get more/enough of.
But if you put on your alternate history cap, note Heisenberg and Himmer's relationship from when they were school kids, direct all the V-2 resources into the bomb, who knows? Many on both sides were legitimately worried the Germans would get the bomb in time.
As for the Japanese, no way. Besides what you read in the article, thermal diffusion was all but a failure in the US, among other things required fantastically too much steam, and was only revived to provide somewhat enriched feed stock into the caltrons (modified cyclotrons), and later into the gaseous diffusion plant before it fed the caltrons. ADDED (forgotten while drafting): centrifuges were of course obvious, and about the first thing we tried, but were beyond the state of the art then.
1,200 pounds of uranium at the normal 0.72% U-235 would not come close to yielding one critical mass, and for gun assembly apparently you need more like 3 times the normal pressure critical mass, although it doesn't all have to be of the highest grade.
I read somewhere that after being captured by the allies some german physicists were recorded speaking in disbelief about the bomb. They were under the impression that any bomb would have needed many many times as much enriched uranium (think tons) resulting in weapons too big for aircraft. That was an indication they hadn't done much criticality research with enriched material.
Those guys at least weren't up on the state of the art. Early rough calculations indicated a huge mass might be required, which is why the Einstein–Szilárd letter to FDR said "A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air."
They pretty much laid out the correct physics mechanism (fast neutrons) and were only off by a factor of 15 on the amount required; pity for Adolph that they were Austrian and German Jews self-exiled in England by then.
Google "Farm Hall transcripts", that's what you're thinking of.
But you're quite right. Heisenberg used an incredibly faulty method of calculating critical mass. And everyone around him simply deferred to his expertise. His method involved considering a branching tree of neutron chain reactions inside a sphere of fissile material, and if this tree can grow to include about 1 mole of material then that should be about enough to release enough energy for a "bomb". The reality is that it's completely unnecessary for an entire neutron chain-reaction tree to be encompassed within fissile material. All that matters is that on average from generation to generation there is a multiplication of neutrons, which will then grow geometrically incredibly rapidly. And that can happen even with many "branches" of the tree leaving the sphere and not contributing to future reactions.
He also "proved" (incorrectly) that graphite was not an appropriate moderator. Which ruled out bombs pretty much entirely.
In hindsight, he was actually blatantly incorrect. Dude knew it was possible and convinced the rest of the German scientists it wasn't, for long enough to make a difference. If you read between the lines, he's almost gloating in that transcript.
"On the other hand the whole heavy-water business, which I did everything
I could to further, cannot produce an explosive."
"We wouldn't have had *the moral courage* to recommend to the government
in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for
building the thing up."
"The point is that the whole structure of the relationship between
the scientist and the state in Germany was such that although we
were not *100% anxious* to do it, on the other hand we were so
little trusted by the state that *even if we had wanted to do it*,
it would not have been easy to get it through."
"Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely
convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine,
*but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of
my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a
bomb. I must admit that*."
That's a Bill Gates level of finely-parsed deposition right there.
> But if you put on your alternate history cap, note Heisenberg and Himmer's relationship from when they were school kids, direct all the V-2 resources into the bomb, who knows? Many on both sides were legitimately worried the Germans would get the bomb in time.
Reading "The Man Called Intrepid", I saw something I had never noticed before: Germany occupied Denmark and conquered Norway before the main thrust into France. If you think of that as acquiring Niels Bohr (Denmark) and a heavy water supply (Norway), it becomes much more frightening. (Was that what Germany was thinking? I have no idea. But it's what at least a few people in England were afraid Germany was thinking.)
"What if Germany was never taken over by crazy people" is a hell of a counterfactual. In combination with "and they also retain all their focus and war-like drive", I'm pretty sure that's where the idea for Khan Noonian Singh came from. The eugenics wars of the 1990s...
"The candle that burns at both ends burns twice as brightly" is kind of a recurrent theme. Really the only way you wouldn't get that boiling-over that resulted in the Nazi takeover and the Holocaust would have been for the Treaty of Versailles to go way easier on them, or at least once the depression started happening. Once you fuck over a country with massive debt repayments within the context of a global depression, nationalistic backlash is inevitable. See: the current situation with Greece and the increasing rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party, who have been hovering disconcertingly close to double-digit territory lately.
And by that point in the alternate-universe hypothetical we're pretty much talking Kumbayah territory. By 1960 we've formed the one-earth government, we're on the moon and have eradicated polio. Nowadays we're probably vacationing on the moon, 10% of the world population lives on spaceships, and we've got an asteroid in orbit being strip-mined and outfitted into an Aldrin cycler for our Mars settlement.
Wait, why can't I live in that universe again? Not the one with Khan, the one with the asteroid mining...
Germany was severely hampered both by Hitler's poor leadership as well as several key mistakes by top nuclear scientists, which resulted in the perception of a bomb not being feasible.
Even if Japan had made a bomb in time, by 1945, they had barely any navy or air force left to deploy it. By then, the fantastically inept IJN leadership had squandered all their best assets in strategic blunders. The only way they could have used the thing would be to drop it on themselves.
I wouldn’t use the phase "attempt to build the bomb". I wouldn't even call this an effort.
I would label this as discussion or thought experiments. Drawing up a few blueprints for a centrifuge is no more an attempt to build a bomb than Project Daeidalus was an "attempt" to travel to another star. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus. The amount of effort necessary to build bombs during the 40s was ridiculous. Japan didn't have the industrial power. And I mean literal power as the manhatten project's Oak Ridge facility used something like 1/8th of US electricity at the time.
"Electric energy consumption, courtesy of the TVA, was 20 percent higher than that of New York City. Oak Ridge used one-seventh of all the electricity produced in the United States" http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1652.html (not the best source, but reasonable given the context.)
I'm all for discussion of ALL history but to bring forward claims that Japan was trying to build a bomb so close to the anniversary of its use against Japan smacks of guilt-motivated justification. Japan's "bomb" program was of absolutely no threat to allied forces and therefore should not be part of any debate over the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. If anything, a Japanese bomb program would have sucked up resources from other war efforts.
Not only did the V-2 program divert resources from more useful efforts, but the United States got the knowledge (and some unused V-2s) to give their space and missile development a big boost. The first big rockets the US fired were unused V-2 rockets followed by US-built V-2 clones.
That program ended up benefiting the United States much more than it did Germany.
The nuclear programs of Japan and Germany, however, never got close to producing an atomic bomb, and the research done was mostly useless at the end of the war.
One of Stalin's priorities in invading Germany was capturing intact the German nuclear research facilities. I wonder if that wound up helping the Soviet bomb program significantly.
The US got the better rocket scientists/engineers, the USSR got the better nuclear engineers. In particular, they got better centrifuge experts. The better centrifuges are the reason why the USSR could build their bombs so quickly and so much cheaper than the first US bombs.
PS: would you consider releasing the source code of one of your very early compilers at some point?
I recently found some code that was 25 years old. It was actually pretty decent, though of course not quite as clean as what I would write today. It basically did bit-banging across a COM-port using TxD/RxD + several control lines in order to talk to an external memory card (across a level-converter). It contained two control loops two autoregulate the speed across many different PCs, work nice with Windows, etc. It autodetected first the COM-ports and then whether there was a card reader connected to it, while talking care to work well with serial mice. All this before I knew what control theory was (or even just the name!). Still, it wasn't bad code at all.
Your code solved much harder problems so I would assume you were a better programmer then than I was, having only written small toy compilers. I can't imagine the objective quality of your old code to be bad in any reasonable way, even if you know you can do better now.
> but the United States got the knowledge (and some unused V-2s) to give their space and missile development a big boost. The first big rockets the US fired were unused V-2 rockets followed by US-built V-2 clones.
So did the USSR -- but they were already (much) further along with rocket engine development than the US.
First, it was certainly an effort. They had centrifuges, attempts to gather enough uranium, and so forth. That is more than "discussion" and "thought experiments" as you call it.
Also, I see no point to your ad hominem attack that the article "smacks of guilt-motivated justification". The article presents interesting historical facts, and I don't see it suggesting that dropping the bomb on Japan was justified.
Finally, was the Japanese effort to produce a bomb likely to succeed? In retrospect, we know it was definitely not. But you seem, in addition, to be very confident that they knew that fact at the time. Do you have a source for that?
(1) Research centrifuges for separating isotopes and a plant capable of creating enough for a bomb are different beasts. The former gives you the knowledge to understand the scope of the later.
(2) I don't attack only the article itself, but also its timing in relation to the anniversary. Americans are questioning the actions of their fathers and grandfathers re Japan and WWII. Any opinionated or politicized articles appearing now must be judged in that context.
(3) The article ends with the quote "If we'd built the bomb first, of course we would have used it. I'm glad, in some ways, that our facilities were destroyed." That quote is meant to leave the reader with the concept that Japan would have done the same as the US had the situation been reversed. Even more so, it suggests that at least one person in Japan welcomed the bombings. Those are justification arguments that, given the enormity of the context and timing, should be strictly scrutinized.
1. Even research centrifuges are a lot more than "discussion" or a "thought experiment", the terms that you proposed. Perhaps "research" is a good word for the stage they were in?
2. You're attacking the timing, but the timing makes sense. People are much more interested in the topic now, so it makes sense to publish it now.
3. You seem very eager to guess at the political motivations of the article's author, but not everything is about politics. The quote definitely gets the readers thinking, but (assuming it is accurate, of course) it seems very appropriate for the end of the article. Articles often end on an open question, and it is fascinating to think of what could have happened had history gone differently.
"That quote is meant to leave the reader with the concept that Japan would have done the same as the US had the situation been reversed."
Do you think they would _not_ have used atomic bombs, if they had them and believed it was militarily necessary? After all, Japan was not exactly known for merciful treatment of civilian populations or opposing enemy forces during World War II.
"Those are justification arguments that, given the enormity of the context and timing, should be strictly scrutinized."
Strictly scrutinized by whom, and to what end?
Furthermore, should an article which raises arguments against dropping the bomb be scrutinized just as strictly? If not, why not?
Yes. Any new articles at this time, particularly ones brining forward new or rarely-seen evidence should be put under a magnifying glass. The use of nukes by the US against japan is a backdrop against which all US military decisions are made today.
What you're saying is terrifying. You want history and historical debate to be completely politicized, with all authors investigated for having the correct ideological underpinnings.
History and science would all grind to a halt if the first thing people would do to every article and paper is to check for political leanings.
Not all, only where authors so openly insert modern political views into historical situations. If this were a more detached examination of the Japanese bomb program then I probably would welcome the new information.
>History and science would all grind to a halt if the first thing people would do to every article and paper is to check for political leanings.
Yes. Given the scope of what's available today re WWII, everything beyond primary sources should be investigated. Nothing should be taken as fact simply because it is written down. If you start accepting facts simply because they are in some online article, you are down the road to the belief that lizard people run the world. Every author's background and political goals are relevant where they inject opinion atop original research.
> Not all, only where authors so openly insert modern political views into historical situations.
And who decides if they "so openly" do that? Apparently you think it is happening here, while to me, your perspective seems very puzzling. You appear to be looking for something so hard, you find it even when it isn't there.
Where did this article inject opinion? The part you so take issue with, the closing, is a literal quote.
In what way is it terrifying to analyze the hugely controversial deployment of a terrible weapon against a civilian population, and the post-hoc justifications for this act?
This is not science. This is war and recent history, which are political beasts by nature. This was the deployment of a terrifying strategic weapon, which has doubly political implications. Any piece of journalism or recent news related to this -- either justifying or decrying this horrific historical event -- must be closely scrutinized by everyone interested in the subject matter.
If tomorrow a piece of news reads "secret documents have been uncovered which prove conclusively and decisively that the dropping of the atom bomb was done only to scare the Soviets and had no relation to the actual threat posed by the Japanese army, and the government and high command was aware of this, and here is a secret recording that proves it once and for all" this would also merit close scrutiny: why are they saying this now? Why near this date? Who benefits from this interpretation? Who doesn't? Is there any way this alleged recording could have been taken out of context or faked? Will the current military be similarly willing to deploy nuclear weapons against cities to impress other world powers, or have modern attitudes changed?
Of course I agree we should debate that very important topic. No objection to that.
What I find worrying is that sandworm takes a quite objective piece of reporting - a news article, not an opinion piece - and begins immediately to make assumptions about the author's politics, and to find grievous fault in those politics. He or she jumps straight to attacking the author and their motives, instead of considering what they are saying.
sandworm doesn't even find anything not objective in the article. His or her complaints amounts to "the author presents evidence that, while true, is clearly meant to argue such-and-such specific political point of view, and they are terrible people for promoting that agenda."
The article is just an interesting piece on new evidence. Sure, it could in theory be used to argue for some political side (more than one in fact), but no one actually did that, except in sandworm's head.
If we lose the ability to have objective discussions about history, facts, and science, we lose as a society.
For the U.K. and the Soviets, perhaps, but for the US it was anything but a sideshow. Not our main effort, but very much a major effort, we didn't e.g. build the Fast Carrier Task Force to invade Festung Europa.
Japan was not exactly known for merciful treatment of civilian populations
One of the many reasons to end the war ASAP was that by the end, the Greater East Asian Co-"Prosperity" Sphere was killing off its enslaved populations at an estimated rate of 250K per month.
or opposing enemy forces during World War II
General knowledge of this, e.g. the formal release of information to the American public about the Bataan Death March on January 1944, plus their widespread killing of POWs before capture was another factor in our dropping the bombs. I don't think the issue of their brutality towards non-Japanese is open to question. Heck, one of the heroes of the Rape of Nanking was a Nazi party member....
Of course, it should be noted that not all Nazi party members committed atrocities; many were simply opportunists who joined a political party of power.
Well, a bomb still needs a delivery system, and "strap it to a balloon and set it adrift in the general direction of the continent you want to hit" might have some (miniscule) utility for something you can make a lot of, but with a nuclear weapon you probably want targeting that's a bit more specific.
That's not to say that Japan wouldn't have used nukes if it could have gotten them, just that the balloon bombing of the US mainland [0] really illustrates little about their willingness, capability, or likely approach to do so.
[0] Well, okay, "North America" might be more accurate.
The Japanese could certainly have delivered the bomb to US targets. They had aircraft carrying submarines. Near the end of the war an operation to attack on the Panama Canal was in the works before the subs were recalled to the home islands in order to make kamikaze attacks on American warships.
> The Japanese could certainly have delivered the bomb to US targets. They had aircraft carrying submarines.
Which carried small planes; the largest of which had a loaded weight smaller than any of the early nuclear weapons.
The only way those were going to deliver nuclear bombs anywhere was to use the submarine itself as a suicide delivery system, rather than carrying them on the planes.
> How long do you think it would have taken them to develop an sub-born aircraft powerful enough for a one-way trip with a bomb?
The time consuming and expensive part of that would be developing and building the sub that could carry an aircraft capable of delivering a nuclear weapon, not developing the aircraft.
(OTOH, its all kind of a silly discussion; Japan certainly would have used the bomb if it had it, but in its late-war strategic position, it would have likely used it, at least first, on military targets closer to the immediate theater of war. The US dropped the bomb on Japan because at that point in the war, bombing Japan was the key focus of US military efforts anyway, and the US was in a position from which it could regularly and effectively bomb Japan.)
Much more. A first-generation bomb would have been huge. The B-29 was barely adequate for the American bombs, and it was a gigantic plane for its time. Building something capable of both carrying an early atomic bomb and fitting in a submarine was probably entirely beyond the technology of the day.
Eh, the reason we spent so much effort at Oak Ridge is that we tried all vaguely practical methods of getting weapons grade fissionables, and that was the location for uranium enrichment, thermal, caltron, and gaseous diffusion.
But the most practical method turned out to be breeding plutonium and separating it, and that was done at Hanford on a vast scale, the largest single WWII construction project. But not inherently super electricity intensive, the piles had to be kept cool, and ... I'm not sure anything was all that power expensive.
Ignoring the minor detail that they had 1/166th of the uranium needed for a Hanford style pile, assuming that 1,200 pounds was the first large quantity the might have gotten their hands on ... well, industrially there was no way they could have pulled this method off, we could just barely do it. They couldn't build reliable airplane engines with > ~1,000 hp of output.
Niels Bohr dismissed the concept of A-bombs for WWII early on, he thought "you would have to turn the county into a factory". When "Nicholas Baker" showed up in the US, he observed we'd indeed done just that.
I would argue that plutonium breeding is only obvious after you have performed some criticality experiments with an appreciable-sized block of enriched uranium. This was new physics at the time, without computer simulations. Bomb theory, critical mass, could only be understood after you get your hands on some enriched uranium.
Indeed, but there's a chick and egg problem there. We put the plutonium process fully in gear before we even knew the average number of neutrons a Pu-239 fast fission would produce, when we had no more than micrograms or so of cyclotron produced stuff. Which was enough to work out the separation chemistry, ultra-microchemisty is amazing.
I guess my point here is that the Germans realized uranium separation was a no-go for them, were trying reactor based approaches, and they might have rolled the dice that way and tried the plutonium path. I'm saying the pieces were in play to possible success, not that it was at all likely without 20/20 hindsight.
This is very much not the case. Bomb theory and critical mass come from a fundamental understanding of neutron chain reactions. You need to have good data on fission properties and neutron mean-free-path distances, but that requires only extremely tiny amounts of Plutonium or natural Uranium, it does not require enriched Uranium.
Other than that the other critical factor is coming up with the correct model/theory for nuclear weapons. Something that the Japanese got right, the Americans and British got right, and the Germans (specifically Heisenberg) ended up getting extremely wrong.
Fine tuning critical mass calculations was important in optimizing the bomb later on but it wasn't necessary to developing the basic underlying theory of how bombs work or of pointing the way toward implosion assembly and Plutonium breeding.
Note that the reason why we tried all vaguely practical methods at the same time was that we had no idea which one would turn out to be the best, and we wanted to get the bomb ready ASAP. And of course that we had the resources to do that.
It's true that Japan, or some other country, could have built a bomb much cheaper and faster if they used that method alone, but there was no way for anybody to know that. They'd have to be incredibly lucky to happen to guess right the first time, instead of wasting their time going down the wrong rabbit-holes.
Also you have to remember that by 1944-45 the Japanese economy was a smoking ruin. They'd lost all their overseas territories, we were island-hopping up to their doorstep, and firebombing the shit out of their industrial centers in Honshu. They were incapable of manufacturing sufficient quantities of basic war materiel like rifles, and they could only turn out a very limited quantity of high-end manufacturing like the J2M Raiden and the N1K Shiden interceptor aircraft (which were an known quantity, let alone developing new heavy-bomber type engines like that). Most of that critical production had actually been moved into caves to keep it safe from the firebombing. That's how fucked they were.
The idea of them pulling off a Manhattan Project-scale effort - even if they knew exactly what to do - is utterly preposterous. You'd be talking about a very large-scale effort that utilized a great deal of rare resources, energy, and scientific+high-end engineering capacity and it's utterly implausible even if they abandoned everything else. Let alone being able to effectively deliver it in anything except a tactical attack. No heavy bombers, no carrier fleet, no overseas bases? Not gonna happen. Best case is you sneak it into a west-coast harbor with a long-range sub on a one-way trip (if there's one thing that could have made us angrier than Pearl Harbor...). Most likely case you blow it retaking some random island. Worst case, well, they did kinda have the suicide cult thing going on.
Now that said they were clearly doing basic research/groundwork on the topic, even if they didn't have the capability to execute mass production or an effective attack. The general concepts of fission were pretty well known even pre-war - it was more of an industrial problem than a conceptual one, in the sense that they would have had to figure out the exact rates/constants involved in fission and the exact technologies/designs needed to cause effective fission, figure out the purification/refining processes and scale them up. The specifics weren't known, but pre-war physicists pretty much understood how to build an atom bomb in principle, looooong before they got their hands on workable quantities of material. Otherwise the US never would have devoted that quantity of expertise and resources.
There is also a key insight required for the Plutonium path, which is that Plutonium does not work in a gun-style device - you need to come up with the idea of implosion.
> Niels Bohr dismissed the concept of A-bombs for WWII early on, he thought "you would have to turn the county into a factory".
Same thing with breaking enigma and purple. There are some funny contemporaneous enemy quotations floating around about how it would be impossible to break the codes without huge buildings full of computers, which is what was in fact done.
"The amount of effort necessary to build bombs during the 40s was ridiculous."
Apparently, the act of enriching Uranium is too expensive (in more ways than just money) for any organization other than an entire nation, and a rich nation to boot...and that is why we don't have terrorist attacks involving nuclear weapons. Let's hope it stays that way.
This article is about the warhead B61-12; the whole program is estimated to cost about $11 billion.
This is scary, as the higher-precision guidance and adjustable lower yields make it more likely to be used; and sad, that President Obama and the various contractors and New Mexico politicians are pushing this.
Nuclear weapons have a definite "shelf life" because of the exotic materials used. But if you think about things like the screws & bolts used on them - every time a technician applies a tool to them, there's a little bit of wear and tear. Over time, these and other parts need replacing because of ongoing handling & routine maintenance.
The socio-political aspects are a much broader topic. Personally I don't like them, but I realize that once Pandora's Box Of Technology has been opened, there's no going back.
Some decades ago, during discussion about test bans, the people who had experience from blowing up 1,000+ nuclear bombs were asked if it was possible to design a nuclear bomb that could be used by future generations that would be sure to work without additional testing, and bearing in mind changes in technology. Their answer was "yes".
(I think my knowledge comes from one of Freeman Dyson's accounts.)
I have not heard a clear explanation of why those earlier weapons designers were wrong, only concerns about how they might have been wrong. That more nebulous caution sounds identical to the sorts of statements someone might make as a justification for designing new weapons - for some people designing nuclear weapons and watching them go BOOM is a lot of fun.
In my very limited understanding of the topic, the largest unknown is the changes to the plutonium-gallium alloy of the core. Some worry that it has degraded. Others say "most plutonium pits have a credible lifetime of at least 100 years". Even if it's a problem, one solution is to re-smelt the cores, though currently we do not have the facilities for that. However, we could make those facilities without testing new weapons.
"This is scary, as the higher-precision guidance and adjustable lower yields make it more likely to be used"
Nuclear weapons with much, much smaller yields have been in the US arsenal for a long time (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54 for an example of one with a yield of 10 tons of TNT, as compared to the 300 ton minimum claimed in the article for the B61-12) and we haven't used them in war, so I don't see how this one is any different in that respect.
Furthermore, the "high-precision" argument is also not convincing. You can make an argument -- dubious, but it can be made -- that existing precision conventional weapons are more likely to be used because it's possible to destroy an enemy target even if it's located right next door to noncombatants. But even at its lowest setting, the B61-12 would completely destroy dozens of square blocks and cause additional damage dozens farther out; there's no way that wouldn't lead to massive civilian casualties if it was used in a city.
"The uranium seized from the German submarine ended up in the American atom bombs"
That's what I call cruel irony. I wonder how much of a role those 1200 pounds of ready-made u235 made for the timetable/viability of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima/Nagasaki? A few more days/weeks and Japan would most likely have capitalulated from the terrorcampaign of firebombings among other factors.
Countries don't capitulate in the face of strategic bombing. They certainly would have been willing to negotiate a peace (as most losing combatants are), but sans nuclear weapons there would be no unconditional surrender.
Looks like we're both right: nuclear bombs are essentially strategic bombing -- and I misremembered the reason Japan was in the process of capitulating prior to the nuclear attacks -- but there have been a lot of discussion indicating that Japan was indeed in the process of surrendering prior to the attacks, see eg:
The bombs probably had no affect. The Japanese leadership surrendered because of the USSR invasion. The Soviets were clearly going to sweep down the islands and there was no hope to hold out.
There's no way that it was 1200 pounds of enriched uranium. The US didn't make that much over the whole war, and the Germans had no industrial-scale enrichment.
A lot of people are talking about Germany's and Japan's nuke programs being failed wastes of resources. In retrospect this is certainly true, but the massive benefit of a working bomb outweighed the slight chance of success. By late 1944 it was fairly clear that both countries were going to lose the war. Had they devoted the same resources to conventional weapons as they did the bomb, they would have lost anyway. But they didn't know how hard it was to build a bomb, and if it had worked, either country probably could have negotiated a ceasefire immediately. Furthermore, Japan could have theoretically held out a lot longer than August 1945 due to its extremely defensible position. The only reason the Pacific War ended when it did and not after a protracted siege or invasion of Japanese home islands was, of course, that the US built a bomb first.
"of course" is a bit too pat. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has used Japanese sources to argue that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the threat of Soviet occupation was at least as influential in the surrender decision.
74 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 75.4 ms ] threadAlso, it is unlikely anyone would have realistically expected uranium to be delivered to Japan by U-boat in 1945.
Not exactly, although they contributed a lot to the early work. If we start from "splitting the [heavy] atom", the first practical method, a German radiochemist was the first to recognize what happened, and the German physicist he first forwarded this information and her nephew figured out how it worked. But those two were Jews in exile, and most of the following more practical stuff was figured out, correctly at least, by scientists outside of Germany. Inside, they suffered a couple of disasters, a silly failure to get an higher priority for the project, and an incorrect evaluation of using graphite as a moderator, limiting them to heavy water. Which we made sure through sabotage that they couldn't get more/enough of.
But if you put on your alternate history cap, note Heisenberg and Himmer's relationship from when they were school kids, direct all the V-2 resources into the bomb, who knows? Many on both sides were legitimately worried the Germans would get the bomb in time.
As for the Japanese, no way. Besides what you read in the article, thermal diffusion was all but a failure in the US, among other things required fantastically too much steam, and was only revived to provide somewhat enriched feed stock into the caltrons (modified cyclotrons), and later into the gaseous diffusion plant before it fed the caltrons. ADDED (forgotten while drafting): centrifuges were of course obvious, and about the first thing we tried, but were beyond the state of the art then.
1,200 pounds of uranium at the normal 0.72% U-235 would not come close to yielding one critical mass, and for gun assembly apparently you need more like 3 times the normal pressure critical mass, although it doesn't all have to be of the highest grade.
On the other hand, with as far as I know no more info than the Germans had, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls estimated in early 1940 that a kilogram of U-235 might do it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memoran...
They pretty much laid out the correct physics mechanism (fast neutrons) and were only off by a factor of 15 on the amount required; pity for Adolph that they were Austrian and German Jews self-exiled in England by then.
But you're quite right. Heisenberg used an incredibly faulty method of calculating critical mass. And everyone around him simply deferred to his expertise. His method involved considering a branching tree of neutron chain reactions inside a sphere of fissile material, and if this tree can grow to include about 1 mole of material then that should be about enough to release enough energy for a "bomb". The reality is that it's completely unnecessary for an entire neutron chain-reaction tree to be encompassed within fissile material. All that matters is that on average from generation to generation there is a multiplication of neutrons, which will then grow geometrically incredibly rapidly. And that can happen even with many "branches" of the tree leaving the sphere and not contributing to future reactions.
In hindsight, he was actually blatantly incorrect. Dude knew it was possible and convinced the rest of the German scientists it wasn't, for long enough to make a difference. If you read between the lines, he's almost gloating in that transcript.
That's a Bill Gates level of finely-parsed deposition right there.Reading "The Man Called Intrepid", I saw something I had never noticed before: Germany occupied Denmark and conquered Norway before the main thrust into France. If you think of that as acquiring Niels Bohr (Denmark) and a heavy water supply (Norway), it becomes much more frightening. (Was that what Germany was thinking? I have no idea. But it's what at least a few people in England were afraid Germany was thinking.)
"The candle that burns at both ends burns twice as brightly" is kind of a recurrent theme. Really the only way you wouldn't get that boiling-over that resulted in the Nazi takeover and the Holocaust would have been for the Treaty of Versailles to go way easier on them, or at least once the depression started happening. Once you fuck over a country with massive debt repayments within the context of a global depression, nationalistic backlash is inevitable. See: the current situation with Greece and the increasing rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party, who have been hovering disconcertingly close to double-digit territory lately.
And by that point in the alternate-universe hypothetical we're pretty much talking Kumbayah territory. By 1960 we've formed the one-earth government, we're on the moon and have eradicated polio. Nowadays we're probably vacationing on the moon, 10% of the world population lives on spaceships, and we've got an asteroid in orbit being strip-mined and outfitted into an Aldrin cycler for our Mars settlement.
Wait, why can't I live in that universe again? Not the one with Khan, the one with the asteroid mining...
I would label this as discussion or thought experiments. Drawing up a few blueprints for a centrifuge is no more an attempt to build a bomb than Project Daeidalus was an "attempt" to travel to another star. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus. The amount of effort necessary to build bombs during the 40s was ridiculous. Japan didn't have the industrial power. And I mean literal power as the manhatten project's Oak Ridge facility used something like 1/8th of US electricity at the time.
"Electric energy consumption, courtesy of the TVA, was 20 percent higher than that of New York City. Oak Ridge used one-seventh of all the electricity produced in the United States" http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1652.html (not the best source, but reasonable given the context.)
I'm all for discussion of ALL history but to bring forward claims that Japan was trying to build a bomb so close to the anniversary of its use against Japan smacks of guilt-motivated justification. Japan's "bomb" program was of absolutely no threat to allied forces and therefore should not be part of any debate over the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. If anything, a Japanese bomb program would have sucked up resources from other war efforts.
Yep. That's also why we should be thankful for the V-2.
That program ended up benefiting the United States much more than it did Germany.
The nuclear programs of Japan and Germany, however, never got close to producing an atomic bomb, and the research done was mostly useless at the end of the war.
PS: would you consider releasing the source code of one of your very early compilers at some point?
I recently found some code that was 25 years old. It was actually pretty decent, though of course not quite as clean as what I would write today. It basically did bit-banging across a COM-port using TxD/RxD + several control lines in order to talk to an external memory card (across a level-converter). It contained two control loops two autoregulate the speed across many different PCs, work nice with Windows, etc. It autodetected first the COM-ports and then whether there was a card reader connected to it, while talking care to work well with serial mice. All this before I knew what control theory was (or even just the name!). Still, it wasn't bad code at all.
Your code solved much harder problems so I would assume you were a better programmer then than I was, having only written small toy compilers. I can't imagine the objective quality of your old code to be bad in any reasonable way, even if you know you can do better now.
So did the USSR -- but they were already (much) further along with rocket engine development than the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-1_(missile)
At first the USSR even had V-2's produced in Germany -- Mittelbau-Dora was in their occupation zone.
Also, I see no point to your ad hominem attack that the article "smacks of guilt-motivated justification". The article presents interesting historical facts, and I don't see it suggesting that dropping the bomb on Japan was justified.
Finally, was the Japanese effort to produce a bomb likely to succeed? In retrospect, we know it was definitely not. But you seem, in addition, to be very confident that they knew that fact at the time. Do you have a source for that?
(2) I don't attack only the article itself, but also its timing in relation to the anniversary. Americans are questioning the actions of their fathers and grandfathers re Japan and WWII. Any opinionated or politicized articles appearing now must be judged in that context.
(3) The article ends with the quote "If we'd built the bomb first, of course we would have used it. I'm glad, in some ways, that our facilities were destroyed." That quote is meant to leave the reader with the concept that Japan would have done the same as the US had the situation been reversed. Even more so, it suggests that at least one person in Japan welcomed the bombings. Those are justification arguments that, given the enormity of the context and timing, should be strictly scrutinized.
2. You're attacking the timing, but the timing makes sense. People are much more interested in the topic now, so it makes sense to publish it now.
3. You seem very eager to guess at the political motivations of the article's author, but not everything is about politics. The quote definitely gets the readers thinking, but (assuming it is accurate, of course) it seems very appropriate for the end of the article. Articles often end on an open question, and it is fascinating to think of what could have happened had history gone differently.
Do you think they would _not_ have used atomic bombs, if they had them and believed it was militarily necessary? After all, Japan was not exactly known for merciful treatment of civilian populations or opposing enemy forces during World War II.
"Those are justification arguments that, given the enormity of the context and timing, should be strictly scrutinized."
Strictly scrutinized by whom, and to what end?
Furthermore, should an article which raises arguments against dropping the bomb be scrutinized just as strictly? If not, why not?
History and science would all grind to a halt if the first thing people would do to every article and paper is to check for political leanings.
>History and science would all grind to a halt if the first thing people would do to every article and paper is to check for political leanings.
Yes. Given the scope of what's available today re WWII, everything beyond primary sources should be investigated. Nothing should be taken as fact simply because it is written down. If you start accepting facts simply because they are in some online article, you are down the road to the belief that lizard people run the world. Every author's background and political goals are relevant where they inject opinion atop original research.
And who decides if they "so openly" do that? Apparently you think it is happening here, while to me, your perspective seems very puzzling. You appear to be looking for something so hard, you find it even when it isn't there.
Where did this article inject opinion? The part you so take issue with, the closing, is a literal quote.
This is not science. This is war and recent history, which are political beasts by nature. This was the deployment of a terrifying strategic weapon, which has doubly political implications. Any piece of journalism or recent news related to this -- either justifying or decrying this horrific historical event -- must be closely scrutinized by everyone interested in the subject matter.
If tomorrow a piece of news reads "secret documents have been uncovered which prove conclusively and decisively that the dropping of the atom bomb was done only to scare the Soviets and had no relation to the actual threat posed by the Japanese army, and the government and high command was aware of this, and here is a secret recording that proves it once and for all" this would also merit close scrutiny: why are they saying this now? Why near this date? Who benefits from this interpretation? Who doesn't? Is there any way this alleged recording could have been taken out of context or faked? Will the current military be similarly willing to deploy nuclear weapons against cities to impress other world powers, or have modern attitudes changed?
If this doesn't merit close scrutiny, what does?
What I find worrying is that sandworm takes a quite objective piece of reporting - a news article, not an opinion piece - and begins immediately to make assumptions about the author's politics, and to find grievous fault in those politics. He or she jumps straight to attacking the author and their motives, instead of considering what they are saying.
sandworm doesn't even find anything not objective in the article. His or her complaints amounts to "the author presents evidence that, while true, is clearly meant to argue such-and-such specific political point of view, and they are terrible people for promoting that agenda."
The article is just an interesting piece on new evidence. Sure, it could in theory be used to argue for some political side (more than one in fact), but no one actually did that, except in sandworm's head.
If we lose the ability to have objective discussions about history, facts, and science, we lose as a society.
One of the many reasons to end the war ASAP was that by the end, the Greater East Asian Co-"Prosperity" Sphere was killing off its enslaved populations at an estimated rate of 250K per month.
or opposing enemy forces during World War II
General knowledge of this, e.g. the formal release of information to the American public about the Bataan Death March on January 1944, plus their widespread killing of POWs before capture was another factor in our dropping the bombs. I don't think the issue of their brutality towards non-Japanese is open to question. Heck, one of the heroes of the Rape of Nanking was a Nazi party member....
Now that you mention it, the story of John Rabe is fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
Of course, it should be noted that not all Nazi party members committed atrocities; many were simply opportunists who joined a political party of power.
Given the Japanese did bomb the USA during WWII[1], I cannot see someone justifying an argument where they got the bomb and didn't try.
1) http://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/01/20/3758...
That's not to say that Japan wouldn't have used nukes if it could have gotten them, just that the balloon bombing of the US mainland [0] really illustrates little about their willingness, capability, or likely approach to do so.
[0] Well, okay, "North America" might be more accurate.
Which carried small planes; the largest of which had a loaded weight smaller than any of the early nuclear weapons.
The only way those were going to deliver nuclear bombs anywhere was to use the submarine itself as a suicide delivery system, rather than carrying them on the planes.
The time consuming and expensive part of that would be developing and building the sub that could carry an aircraft capable of delivering a nuclear weapon, not developing the aircraft.
(OTOH, its all kind of a silly discussion; Japan certainly would have used the bomb if it had it, but in its late-war strategic position, it would have likely used it, at least first, on military targets closer to the immediate theater of war. The US dropped the bomb on Japan because at that point in the war, bombing Japan was the key focus of US military efforts anyway, and the US was in a position from which it could regularly and effectively bomb Japan.)
But the most practical method turned out to be breeding plutonium and separating it, and that was done at Hanford on a vast scale, the largest single WWII construction project. But not inherently super electricity intensive, the piles had to be kept cool, and ... I'm not sure anything was all that power expensive.
Ignoring the minor detail that they had 1/166th of the uranium needed for a Hanford style pile, assuming that 1,200 pounds was the first large quantity the might have gotten their hands on ... well, industrially there was no way they could have pulled this method off, we could just barely do it. They couldn't build reliable airplane engines with > ~1,000 hp of output.
Niels Bohr dismissed the concept of A-bombs for WWII early on, he thought "you would have to turn the county into a factory". When "Nicholas Baker" showed up in the US, he observed we'd indeed done just that.
I guess my point here is that the Germans realized uranium separation was a no-go for them, were trying reactor based approaches, and they might have rolled the dice that way and tried the plutonium path. I'm saying the pieces were in play to possible success, not that it was at all likely without 20/20 hindsight.
Other than that the other critical factor is coming up with the correct model/theory for nuclear weapons. Something that the Japanese got right, the Americans and British got right, and the Germans (specifically Heisenberg) ended up getting extremely wrong.
Fine tuning critical mass calculations was important in optimizing the bomb later on but it wasn't necessary to developing the basic underlying theory of how bombs work or of pointing the way toward implosion assembly and Plutonium breeding.
It's true that Japan, or some other country, could have built a bomb much cheaper and faster if they used that method alone, but there was no way for anybody to know that. They'd have to be incredibly lucky to happen to guess right the first time, instead of wasting their time going down the wrong rabbit-holes.
The idea of them pulling off a Manhattan Project-scale effort - even if they knew exactly what to do - is utterly preposterous. You'd be talking about a very large-scale effort that utilized a great deal of rare resources, energy, and scientific+high-end engineering capacity and it's utterly implausible even if they abandoned everything else. Let alone being able to effectively deliver it in anything except a tactical attack. No heavy bombers, no carrier fleet, no overseas bases? Not gonna happen. Best case is you sneak it into a west-coast harbor with a long-range sub on a one-way trip (if there's one thing that could have made us angrier than Pearl Harbor...). Most likely case you blow it retaking some random island. Worst case, well, they did kinda have the suicide cult thing going on.
Now that said they were clearly doing basic research/groundwork on the topic, even if they didn't have the capability to execute mass production or an effective attack. The general concepts of fission were pretty well known even pre-war - it was more of an industrial problem than a conceptual one, in the sense that they would have had to figure out the exact rates/constants involved in fission and the exact technologies/designs needed to cause effective fission, figure out the purification/refining processes and scale them up. The specifics weren't known, but pre-war physicists pretty much understood how to build an atom bomb in principle, looooong before they got their hands on workable quantities of material. Otherwise the US never would have devoted that quantity of expertise and resources.
Same thing with breaking enigma and purple. There are some funny contemporaneous enemy quotations floating around about how it would be impossible to break the codes without huge buildings full of computers, which is what was in fact done.
Apparently, the act of enriching Uranium is too expensive (in more ways than just money) for any organization other than an entire nation, and a rich nation to boot...and that is why we don't have terrorist attacks involving nuclear weapons. Let's hope it stays that way.
https://www.revealnews.org/article/new-mexico-thrives-on-nuc...
This is scary, as the higher-precision guidance and adjustable lower yields make it more likely to be used; and sad, that President Obama and the various contractors and New Mexico politicians are pushing this.
The socio-political aspects are a much broader topic. Personally I don't like them, but I realize that once Pandora's Box Of Technology has been opened, there's no going back.
Not only that, but, because of the secrecy and security, many of the processes for building these exotic materials have been lost.
(I think my knowledge comes from one of Freeman Dyson's accounts.)
I have not heard a clear explanation of why those earlier weapons designers were wrong, only concerns about how they might have been wrong. That more nebulous caution sounds identical to the sorts of statements someone might make as a justification for designing new weapons - for some people designing nuclear weapons and watching them go BOOM is a lot of fun.
In my very limited understanding of the topic, the largest unknown is the changes to the plutonium-gallium alloy of the core. Some worry that it has degraded. Others say "most plutonium pits have a credible lifetime of at least 100 years". Even if it's a problem, one solution is to re-smelt the cores, though currently we do not have the facilities for that. However, we could make those facilities without testing new weapons.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_Replacement_Warhead and http://depletedcranium.com/do-our-nuclear-weapons-work/ for some of the discussion. Also bear in mind the annoying calculus of game theory. A higher inability to use a nuclear weapon may make it less likely to be used.
Nuclear weapons with much, much smaller yields have been in the US arsenal for a long time (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54 for an example of one with a yield of 10 tons of TNT, as compared to the 300 ton minimum claimed in the article for the B61-12) and we haven't used them in war, so I don't see how this one is any different in that respect.
Furthermore, the "high-precision" argument is also not convincing. You can make an argument -- dubious, but it can be made -- that existing precision conventional weapons are more likely to be used because it's possible to destroy an enemy target even if it's located right next door to noncombatants. But even at its lowest setting, the B61-12 would completely destroy dozens of square blocks and cause additional damage dozens farther out; there's no way that wouldn't lead to massive civilian casualties if it was used in a city.
That's what I call cruel irony. I wonder how much of a role those 1200 pounds of ready-made u235 made for the timetable/viability of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima/Nagasaki? A few more days/weeks and Japan would most likely have capitalulated from the terrorcampaign of firebombings among other factors.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/...
It would have been natural uranium.