The article mentions how this sub can operate up to 6,000M underwater and throws out this juicy bit
> The craft reportedly was used to target undersea communications and other cables.
I doubt it's more than speculation but...
I believe it's in the order of $5M + 2 weeks to fix cables breaks near the shore and >$10M + 8 weeks to fix them in the middle of the ocean which sounded like a lucrative opportunity for blackmail
Probably tap undersea cables than bust them - which a fishing trawler could do with more deniability. Regardless, prototype Nuclear espionage sub, all officer crew of 25, 7 of the dead were Captain 1st Rank (right under admiral), 2 recipients of the Hero of the Russian Federation. My interest is certainly piqued.
Growing up in an Eastern Eu country (former communism), nobody there underestimates the professionalism of soviet military. They are many, but not brilliant - see MH17 and so on.
An old friend of mine has recently finished his term in the Russian military. According to his words explaining his own experience, and things he heard during military exercises from guys from other parts of the country, most soldiers are being trained not to defend their country, but to do three things: paint walls, wash their clothes, and clean up the premises.
It's no wonder you can mistake a passenger airplane for a military aircraft after such a stimulating experience.
Russia still has military draft. Gotta do something with all that free labour. They do however also have actual professional soldiers, and lots of them. Those should be more trained / competent.
Considering that Americans who shot down Iran Air Flight 655 were given medals, shooting down a passenger plane is quite an achievement for a well-trained Navy.
I'm not comfortable sharing details because they can be traced back to specific people and events, but I've seen people doing highly-skilled high-demand tasks under alcohol influence "to calm their nerves".
MH17 was shut down because the radar operator could not read his screen / correlate with other sources of information regarding civilian flights. Can tell you a bit about how professional those operators were.
So basically personnel can't access the reactor and engine compartments from the life support units, the sub has to surface. Here's a bigger version of the same diagram with readable text:
Are any of these details more than speculation? I had the impression that the best information was some not-so-clear pictures which happened to catch it on the surface, plus the admission a few days ago that it is in fact nuclear powered, and had a suspiciously high-ranking crew.
I agree that tampering with cables seems like the obvious reason for the military to go super-deep. With recovering sunken things made by your adversary a close second. And in the mid-1980s, they were much better at titanium than at video cameras.
Not sure if when the knowledge about it's design was made public, but name Losharik gave everyone a hint. It is a cartoon character that's made from spheres/balls connected with a wire. This is a logical way to create a submarine that's intended to go very deep, spheres are the best shape to handle high pressures. So logical conclusion based on the name was that internally it's based around connected spheres.
Submarine itself looks cigar shape, but that is just her outer shell, it's pretty certain that outer shell is not pressure sealed but rather that internal spheres withstand the pressure while the just the shell around it.
Could the fire that the crew fought with their lives indeed have damaged the reactor (and thus have caused the "planetary catastrophe" - I assume that is what the article hints on)?
Or basically, was the reactor designed in such a way that a regular fire could damage it that it would become unstable?
And where is the planetary scale when a nuclear explosion occurs? There have been many nuclear explosions on the Bikini Atoll etc. without planetary catastrophes.
Not to speak of the fact that an underwater nuclear explosion would do even less, except for a Tsunami maybe, which again is localized.
The only thing I can think of is preventing nuclear war. A rogue ballistic sub or so. But that is not very plausible.
The suggestion is the sub may have been carrying a Cobalt Bomb, a nuclear weapon encased in cobalt to increase fallout. In the case of a water detonation I'm guessing massive radioactive contamination that would end sea life for a large area - perhaps even planetary.
Pure speculation to fit the "planetary catastrophe" remark.
A truly massive amount of radioactive material has been dumped into the ocean. No amount of 'cobalt bomb' or other fantasy devices will appreciably affect the truly large (geological scale) ocean. Even if you dump every nuclear reactor, nuclear waste, nuclear fuel and blow up every nuke in the ocean, that will simply not seriously affect the ocean.
I would put it into the category of tribute to fallen comrades. Nice guy, good soldier. The type of thing that almost certainly isnt true for all dead soldiers.
Exactly. It's much better to say they died valiantly saving everyone than to say that for example, someone lit up a cigarette that started a fire and then they realized half of oxygen masks wasn't working.
Losharik is a type of a spy sub, probably intended to tap into undersea cables. There shouldn't be a "wonder weapon" on the ship.
None of the leaked diagrams of the Losharik show any torpedo or missile tubes. The "bomb" hypothesis is pure speculation. However, they show a hydraulic manipulator and skegs, so it's clearly designed to tamper with stuff on the sea floor (eg. submarine communications cables).
I don't understand how they made the jump from "200 mega-tonne tsunami bomb" to cobalt bomb. I'm certainly no nuclear physicist, but I thought a cobalt bomb was purely to spread radioactivity and had effect on the strength of the bomb. Even a nuclear bomb creating a tsunami seems quite questionable, as does a fire setting it off.
The whole thing just seems like an odd mix of Russian propaganda, crazy conspiracy theories and scientific misunderstanding.
I suspect a "cobalt bomb" would be less effective in terms of explosive yield than an equivalent normal multi stage weapon design - the neutrons from the fusion reaction in the secondary being used to activate the cobalt rather than into fissioning the fissile jacket of the secondary where most modern weapon designs actually get most yield.
> a nuclear bomb creating a tsunami seems quite questionable,
Yes, a "trunami bomb" is nonsense. We've done underwater nuclear tests (e.g. operation Hardtack's Wahoo test). Water pressure prevents most of the physically destructive effects[2][3]. (it does make the local water radioactive for a while, but much less than the fallout generated by the same bomb on land. (water is a better at absorbing radiation than air) The idea that it might produce a tsunami is anti-nuclear fear mongering and/or baseless paranoia.
> as does a fire setting it off
The could only hypothetically be possible if the bomb was a "gun" design, which was quickly abandoned after the trinity test proved implosion designs were possible, because the "gun" method was inherently risky. (too easy to accidentally detonate the conventional explosives) (gun designs also had a high-ish risk of "fizzling", because they might not hold the critical mass together long enough)
Given that the statement originated from a Russian official in 2019, we can safely assume the opposite. The crew's tragic death was preventable and pointless.
No, water is a very good radiation shield and also cools down the reactor. So basically the subs are quite safe under hundreds of feet of water until the material leaks out and contaminates the sea floor.
Yes, but "normal" nuclear subs can still not go very deep without being crushed. Thus, they can still be hunted for. But a nuclear sub which can go thousands of meters deep in hiding mode, would change the theater of war considerably.
It's not that simple. Launching an nuclear weapon from the deep is very hard, normal nuclear missile subs do not launch from deep. There are multiple reason for this. One of them is that they eject the missile by using steam/gas, if you are too deep, your missile won't reach the surface and thus won't be able to fly away. Second reason is that the missile and the missile tube needs to be under normal pressure. Missiles aren't built to handle hundreds of atmospheres of pressure even if the sub could eject them into the water.
I know. I was thinking about the scenario hiding very deep, and only surface to strike. You could deliver M.A.D. even months after the earth bound battle has come to a halt.
Besides, the talk was also about a submarine drone more like a long range torpedo. While you maybe can't launch such a thing from the very deep, at least you should be able to launch it from much deeper than a missile.
The Russians never did Hiroshima/Nagasaki, which I consider to be a underappreciated moral crime, just like the Bengali famine at the hands of Churchill.
I know this is a form of 'whataboutism,' but I don't think laying the blame on the Russians is the right way to go. Neither side should have developed nuclear weapons in the first place.
I think there is a different argument being made. The Russian nuclear program has suffered a lot of potential and actual nuclear catastrophes due to questionable safety standards and protocol.
I think that nuclear weapons is a different topic. But the safety of ongoing nuclear use worldwide, including by the US, is perhaps the topic here.
Do you know who motivated the US to take on the Manhattan Project? Albert Einstein. Life-long pacifist and, I've heard, reasonably intelligent human who knew something about quantum physics and relativity. Are you certain that you would have made a different decision?
No, quite specifically, Einstein's letter to FDR is what motivated the Manhattan Project. Hitler (parent's "austrian boi") may well have had a tremendous weapons program in the works, but Einstein's fear was motivated as much by what he knew of his colleagues in Berlin and the German zeitgeist(1) as anything to do with Hitler specifically. What Hitler wanted would have been trivia if it were not for the capabilities of the scientists who elected to stay in Germany during the rise of Nazism.
(1) what an awful yet accurate application of such a nice word, but I digress.
Well, agreed, in last instance, the letter was responsible, but it wouldn't have been written if the authors were not concerned about the autrian boi misdemeanors.
What are you talking about? Einstein's discovery motivated the project, but he was always against the bomb.
"Several weeks before America dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein begged our government to reconsider."
"After he found out about Hiroshima in the news, Einstein was literally horrified. First, because he mourned for the more than 100,000 people killed at Hiroshima. But also, he and other atomic scientists knew that the promise of “benign” uses of atomic energy had been dealt a cruel blow, if not a fatal one. Einstein believed the decision to nuke Hiroshima would be a public perception disaster concerning his discovery"
He was wrong, since the Manhattan project was and is still celebrated as a great achievement. Hiroshima is considered a regrettable necessity. Anyone willing to read about fire bombing of cities before the A-bomb would consider it a reasonable alternative.
> On the night of February 13, the British Bomber Command hit Dresden with an 800-bomber air raid, dropping some 2,700 tons of bombs, including large numbers of incendiaries. Aided by weather conditions, a firestorm developed, incinerating tens of thousands of people.
The U.S. Eighth Air Force followed the next day with another 400 tons of bombs and carried out yet another raid by 210 bombers on February 15.
It is thought that some 25,000–35,000 civilians died in Dresden in the air attacks, though some estimates are as high as 250,000, given the influx of undocumented refugees that had fled to Dresden from the Eastern Front. Most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly.
The letter signed by Einstein (1) was literally what motivated FDR to a course of action which became the Manhattan Project, as made clear by FDR himself (2).
As most will not read the links below, despite tremendous historical importance, Einstein specifically recommended 2 things:
* secure a uranium ore supply for the US, and
* speed up this line of research (that leads to a bomb).
Please explain to me how this isn't advocating for the development of a nuclear bomb?
Feynman also worked on the Manhattan Project and was so horrified at the outcome he refused to work for the government again, up until the challenger investigation.
Lots of these guys thought they were doing it just to beat the Germans at it; they didn't expect it to actually be used. They thought they were the good guys!
I guess not … scientists you know … they probably just thought they were doing cool stuff. Oppenheimer probably knew how it would all fit together though.
A far smaller moral crime than a land invasion of the home islands would've been. There's a reason five hundred thousand Purple Hearts were manufactured in anticipation of it.
D. M. Giangreco agrees with this assessment. His book "Hell to Pay" examines many complex issues involved in the strategic and tactical planning of both the U.S. and Japan using documents from both sides, including postwar reports that the Japanese wrote for General MacArthur. The U.S. planned to use as many as nine A-bombs as tactical weapons in the invasion of Kyushu. He feels such an invasion would have been worse for both Americans and Japanese.
There was no plan to deal with japan that wouldn't have involved hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the conflict losing their lives. The trade instead was 250k Japanese civilians.
The planning for Operation Downfall expected a minimum of 5 million Japanese civilian deaths. The Japanese plan for defending the home islands, ketsugō sakusen, involved conscripting the entire population into a militia. The propaganda term was literally "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million." If you don't think that would've killed more than 250 thousand civilians you're a fool.
The target choices, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are a good topic for debate. There's ample argument to be made that there were better, more militarized targets that would have shaved significant fractions off the ultimate civilian death toll. There is no sane argument, however, that the bombings themselves didn't kill an order of magnitude fewer people than any other method of defeating the Japanese Empire.
Er, what? Japan was the aggressor, their allies started the war. If Americans wouldn't drop the bombs, even more civilians would lose their lives.
From the utilitarian perspective, the bombs and quick end of the war actually saved lives, so it was the right thing to do.
If you want to argue against the morality from the deontological perspective, I wonder about your argument. Japan initiated the fight, and unless Americans planned to surrender, they would end up killing even more people. Are you arguing that it matters that they did it all at once, compared to doing it bit by bit?
Also, to shine some perspective - Japan's losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 250k. Their allies killed 400k Jews in Warsaw Ghetto alone.
> Japan's losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 250k. Their allies killed 400k Jews in Warsaw Ghetto alone
Judging them based what their allies did makes it a bit of an unfair comparison, especially when those allies were half a world away with little actual input [0]. I'm sure the Japanese were responsible for their own share of carnage caused without "consolidating" numbers. Russia was on the Allied side and received active support even after committing massacres, mass arrests, executions, and deportations [1]. So consider that if you want to tally "by team".
Also killing 250.000 civilians "because they also did it" kind of puts them all in the same bucket. There's no moral high ground to claim in this situation unless you're always willing to justify anything as long as it fits your personal views. Would it be justified or moral for you to kill some random Russians as payback for Katyn?
[0] You wouldn't be judged based on what your grandparents did, and there might be a stronger connection between you. Or for what your fellow countrymen do.
On top of this, there’s fairly well established historical record showing that the dropping the bombs was unnecessary, even for attaining Japan’s Surrender. You can find this in sources as mainstream as Oliver Stone’s _Untold History of the United States_
Wasn't it [as much or more] about demoralizing the enemies on the Western front? Oliver Stone... I hesitate to rely on him as a sole source for such information. No slight on him—but it's as editorialized an outlet for information as there ever was.
There was an attempted military coup by the ministry of war when the emperor decided to surrender. That was after the second bomb had been dropped. Part of the terms of surrender was the emperor admitting he was not a god. They were not close to surrender pre-bomb in my opinion, most of my info is from podcasts though so who knows.
> From the utilitarian perspective, the bombs and quick end of the war actually saved lives, so it was the right thing to do
No, it was very mixed opinions even among high militaries about the decision. Some people saying that the war was in fact over, and the losses would have been less just waiting out the Japanese. You can have different opinions about this, but it is not a fact that it is the utilitarian perspective to nuke.
Even without an invasion they still probably saved lives.
Had the same cities been bombed using conventional bombs, similar numbers of civilians would have died as the fires caused most civilian casualties. The reality is the nukes caused about 1% of the just civilian casualties (50 to 55 million) in WWII, making them a rounding error in the overall war.
I’ve asked a family member who was on a boat on the way to invade Japan until the bombs fell. They also stayed half of the occupation working in General McArthurs office. The sentiment was the bombs would cause much less casualties on at least one of the sides (US would drop more if they didn’t surrender). The surrender saved lives on both sides.
"Whether it was the use of nuclear weapons or Soviet invasion that more forcefully led to surrender has been hotly debated between historians. Hasegawa places greater emphasis on the Soviet invasion, suggesting that Japan would likely have stood steadfast under multiple atomic bombings as it had done in the face of firebombing. Asada directly references and disputes his account, claiming that nuclear weapons and the threat they posed to the homeland reflected a much more "direct" impetus to end the war rather than the invasion of Manchuria, and offered an easier way out for the leadership. Further, they came as a complete surprise to Japanese leadership, whereas eventual conflict with the USSR was expected. Frank's account, and most other anti-revisionist historians support this thesis." [1]
I think it can be fair to say that the perception of the Allies/America was the bombs would lead to surrender, but from the Japanese perspective that isn't so cut-and-dry.
I am not sure I understand your criticism here. Your original assertion was "The sentiment was the bombs would cause much less casualties on at least one of the sides", which you quoted a family member. That is fine, but I am confused what you want to know.
If you want to know what people thought, who weren't leaders, then assuredly most people thought the bombs would stop the war, but probably the same way they thought the fire-bombing would stop the war, and all other actions before that like basically wiping out the Japanese fleet. So, your family member's perspective is fine, but it doesn't tell us why the war did actually finally stop. Just what random people thought caused it to end.
If you wanted to know what leaders, who were making decisions about the war and trying to decide what to do, you could see from the Historian's report that many Japanese leaders were in conflict over whether to surrender and how to surrender before the bombs dropped, after the bombs, and after the Russian invasion. Even after the Emperor agreed to surrender there were still factions vying to prevent such a surrender for different reasons.
On r/AskHistorians, sources are not required to be given when composing a post, however they must be given upon request. If you are really interested in the sources and not my blase summary, I recommend just pinging the Historian directly for the kinds of sources you are interested in. Even if their post wasn't to your liking, they surely know where to find the sources you would want given their expertise.
For that matter, you could even open a question on r/AskHistorians itself!
I don't have the sources now, but I've read that Japan had earlier made peace overtures which were ignored.
Also, the US was intent on getting an unconditional surrender from Japan, whereas Japan was hoping for a conditional surrender.
If Japan's peace overtures were accepted, even if at the cost of some conditions, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved and Japan need not have been the world's first nuclear casualty.
This is not to mention that there were some high ranking US military men who tried hard to get the first nukes used against even larger population centers than Hiroshima or Nagasaki (Kyoto was their desired target, if I remember correctly) so that they could get better data on the nuke's effectiveness. And not to mention the widespread anti-Japanese racism in the US, which viewed Japanese people as subhuman.
It's far from clear that nukes were used against Japan merely to save lives on both sides, nor (even if we disregard the intent) is it clear that they did so.
I toured the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima. It was awful, but one thing that I took from it (which I don't think I was supposed to take from it) was just how small the bomb really was overall. I really thought it had leveled the city, but when you see the size of it over a map of the city, it wasn't as big as one might have thought.
The Nazis were already developing nuclear bombs, Hitler just didn't really put a priority on it. Even if the US had never developed it, when the Soviets and Americans took the Nazi scientists in they would have eventually developed them anyways.
A honest question, is it (and was it then) legal to destroy an entire city full of civilians?
Or only the ones that lose the war are accused of war crimes?
A different question, what happened with the guys that droned(or was an helicopter I do not remember) those civilians. I am referring at the incident where the video tape was leaked, was anybody found guilty?
There's no such thing as international law. It's just a set of treaties. With no one to enforce it, it's not real law, so things like war crimes and the like are decided by the victors, there is no legitimate objective body.
Is the Churchill the new thing to divert from Holodomor they promote in Petrograd? Been seeing it mentioned by Russian trolls/bots/“patriots” a lot recently
Thought experiment: if the Russians, Germans or Japanese had the nukes first, would they use them in the same way? I'd probably say Stalin and Hitler were more bloodthirsty than Roosevelt. Given the circumstances at the time, it was the best possible outcome.
that is always the line of thought avoided at all costs by those seeking to vilify the United States using the bombs. The simple fact is, all three nations you mentioned had demonstrated a complete lack for respect of life and rights of others. Considering just how Germany and Japan treated captured civilians and military members should be more than enough to know what they would have done.
Secondly, Truman was quite bloodthirsty: "If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible. . . ." [0].
Thirdly, Churchill was even more bloodthirsty and advocated for nuking Moscow in the years following WW2 [1].
Of course, should have included both Truman and Roosevelt.
But the point still stands. We were up against leaders who were much more bloodthirsty and had trumendous disrespect for human life. The entire world decended in to madness - the morals basically went out the window. It was kill or be killed.
Is it really 'whataboutism' if its very clear that there is just a bigoted prejudice against Russia? The post you replied to has not facts, no real information, no true data - just prejudice, really. And worse, its prejudice that is currently propagated and encouraged by an insidious collective groupthink currently infecting us all at mass scale.
We may as well just assume that the Russians discovered an alien base and the real incident involved them fighting an alien intruder. This is just as valid a perspective as "Russia sucks at submarines, lol."
Both perspectives are fictional. Russia is very good at submarines. Also, there are no alien bases.
This article chases clicks by parroting hyperbole from a remembrance service as fact.
This is not the first, nor the worst fire aboard a nuclear submarine. Komsomolets burned and sank with both a nuclear reactor and nuclear warheads on board. The reactor scrammed and was not damaged by the fire; the warheads' biggest risk was leakage of radioactive material.
Losing a nuclear submarine in a fire is a potential catastrophe for the local environment and a tragedy for the fallen crew, but hardly an event that justified the "planetary" scale.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] threadI doubt it's more than speculation but...
I believe it's in the order of $5M + 2 weeks to fix cables breaks near the shore and >$10M + 8 weeks to fix them in the middle of the ocean which sounded like a lucrative opportunity for blackmail
Fire drill is like a number 1 drill in the fleet, and a submariner, moreover a captain should be able to do it with his eyes closed
An old friend of mine has recently finished his term in the Russian military. According to his words explaining his own experience, and things he heard during military exercises from guys from other parts of the country, most soldiers are being trained not to defend their country, but to do three things: paint walls, wash their clothes, and clean up the premises.
It's no wonder you can mistake a passenger airplane for a military aircraft after such a stimulating experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Post-tour_...
MH17 was shut down because the radar operator could not read his screen / correlate with other sources of information regarding civilian flights. Can tell you a bit about how professional those operators were.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F_hX-QjDQw
basically a series of interconnected bathyspheres with a hydrodynamic shell over them.
http://www.hisutton.com/images/Ru_Losharik_Cutaway.jpg
Skegs, hydraulic manipulator, no weapons. It's clearly ment to tamper with undersea cables.
I agree that tampering with cables seems like the obvious reason for the military to go super-deep. With recovering sunken things made by your adversary a close second. And in the mid-1980s, they were much better at titanium than at video cameras.
Submarine itself looks cigar shape, but that is just her outer shell, it's pretty certain that outer shell is not pressure sealed but rather that internal spheres withstand the pressure while the just the shell around it.
Some of the most speculative (but with little to no support) seem to think they were carrying a cobalt nuke larger than the Tsar Bomba.
Seems more like fantasy than speculation.
Or basically, was the reactor designed in such a way that a regular fire could damage it that it would become unstable?
Not to speak of the fact that an underwater nuclear explosion would do even less, except for a Tsunami maybe, which again is localized.
The only thing I can think of is preventing nuclear war. A rogue ballistic sub or so. But that is not very plausible.
Pure speculation to fit the "planetary catastrophe" remark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-media-nuclear-torped...
A truly massive amount of radioactive material has been dumped into the ocean. No amount of 'cobalt bomb' or other fantasy devices will appreciably affect the truly large (geological scale) ocean. Even if you dump every nuclear reactor, nuclear waste, nuclear fuel and blow up every nuke in the ocean, that will simply not seriously affect the ocean.
I would put it into the category of tribute to fallen comrades. Nice guy, good soldier. The type of thing that almost certainly isnt true for all dead soldiers.
Losharik is a type of a spy sub, probably intended to tap into undersea cables. There shouldn't be a "wonder weapon" on the ship.
The whole thing just seems like an odd mix of Russian propaganda, crazy conspiracy theories and scientific misunderstanding.
Yes, a "trunami bomb" is nonsense. We've done underwater nuclear tests (e.g. operation Hardtack's Wahoo test). Water pressure prevents most of the physically destructive effects[2][3]. (it does make the local water radioactive for a while, but much less than the fallout generated by the same bomb on land. (water is a better at absorbing radiation than air) The idea that it might produce a tsunami is anti-nuclear fear mongering and/or baseless paranoia.
> as does a fire setting it off
The could only hypothetically be possible if the bomb was a "gun" design, which was quickly abandoned after the trinity test proved implosion designs were possible, because the "gun" method was inherently risky. (too easy to accidentally detonate the conventional explosives) (gun designs also had a high-ish risk of "fizzling", because they might not hold the critical mass together long enough)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hardtack_I#Underwate...
[2] https://what-if.xkcd.com/15/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tbxDgcv74c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floodland_(album)
https://www.businessinsider.com/sunken-soviet-nuclear-sub-le...
Besides, the talk was also about a submarine drone more like a long range torpedo. While you maybe can't launch such a thing from the very deep, at least you should be able to launch it from much deeper than a missile.
History is full of stories where Russian subs are close to causing catastrophes because of rushed production, poor maintenance, training, etc.
Reality is that they didn't have to sail around in a nuclear sub in the first place.
I know this is a form of 'whataboutism,' but I don't think laying the blame on the Russians is the right way to go. Neither side should have developed nuclear weapons in the first place.
I think that nuclear weapons is a different topic. But the safety of ongoing nuclear use worldwide, including by the US, is perhaps the topic here.
Perhaps it was more like an austrian boi looking for mehr lebensraum, but who am I to say.
(1) what an awful yet accurate application of such a nice word, but I digress.
He was also a misogynist and a xenophobe.
I am not trying to whitewash his accomplishments in terms of physics, but frankly he's a questionable character in terms of morals or ethics.
I wouldn't trust that guy writing the laws for me, for example.
"Several weeks before America dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein begged our government to reconsider."
"After he found out about Hiroshima in the news, Einstein was literally horrified. First, because he mourned for the more than 100,000 people killed at Hiroshima. But also, he and other atomic scientists knew that the promise of “benign” uses of atomic energy had been dealt a cruel blow, if not a fatal one. Einstein believed the decision to nuke Hiroshima would be a public perception disaster concerning his discovery"
https://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/before-the-beginning.html
As most will not read the links below, despite tremendous historical importance, Einstein specifically recommended 2 things:
* secure a uranium ore supply for the US, and
* speed up this line of research (that leads to a bomb).
Please explain to me how this isn't advocating for the development of a nuclear bomb?
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...
Lots of these guys thought they were doing it just to beat the Germans at it; they didn't expect it to actually be used. They thought they were the good guys!
Well, they haven't stopped working on the bomb after Germany had capitulated.
The target choices, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are a good topic for debate. There's ample argument to be made that there were better, more militarized targets that would have shaved significant fractions off the ultimate civilian death toll. There is no sane argument, however, that the bombings themselves didn't kill an order of magnitude fewer people than any other method of defeating the Japanese Empire.
From the utilitarian perspective, the bombs and quick end of the war actually saved lives, so it was the right thing to do.
If you want to argue against the morality from the deontological perspective, I wonder about your argument. Japan initiated the fight, and unless Americans planned to surrender, they would end up killing even more people. Are you arguing that it matters that they did it all at once, compared to doing it bit by bit?
Also, to shine some perspective - Japan's losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 250k. Their allies killed 400k Jews in Warsaw Ghetto alone.
Judging them based what their allies did makes it a bit of an unfair comparison, especially when those allies were half a world away with little actual input [0]. I'm sure the Japanese were responsible for their own share of carnage caused without "consolidating" numbers. Russia was on the Allied side and received active support even after committing massacres, mass arrests, executions, and deportations [1]. So consider that if you want to tally "by team".
Also killing 250.000 civilians "because they also did it" kind of puts them all in the same bucket. There's no moral high ground to claim in this situation unless you're always willing to justify anything as long as it fits your personal views. Would it be justified or moral for you to kill some random Russians as payback for Katyn?
[0] You wouldn't be judged based on what your grandparents did, and there might be a stronger connection between you. Or for what your fellow countrymen do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes#World_War_II
No, it was very mixed opinions even among high militaries about the decision. Some people saying that the war was in fact over, and the losses would have been less just waiting out the Japanese. You can have different opinions about this, but it is not a fact that it is the utilitarian perspective to nuke.
Had the same cities been bombed using conventional bombs, similar numbers of civilians would have died as the fires caused most civilian casualties. The reality is the nukes caused about 1% of the just civilian casualties (50 to 55 million) in WWII, making them a rounding error in the overall war.
I’ve asked a family member who was on a boat on the way to invade Japan until the bombs fell. They also stayed half of the occupation working in General McArthurs office. The sentiment was the bombs would cause much less casualties on at least one of the sides (US would drop more if they didn’t surrender). The surrender saved lives on both sides.
I’m sure some officers didn’t agree.
I think it can be fair to say that the perception of the Allies/America was the bombs would lead to surrender, but from the Japanese perspective that isn't so cut-and-dry.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15kb3w/why_d...
I’d like to know what the Japanese thought at the time not what certain historians think after the fact.
The Soviets invaded a part of Japan and a few hours later the second bomb dropped. It’s inconclusive. From the American perspective it still worked.
If you want to know what people thought, who weren't leaders, then assuredly most people thought the bombs would stop the war, but probably the same way they thought the fire-bombing would stop the war, and all other actions before that like basically wiping out the Japanese fleet. So, your family member's perspective is fine, but it doesn't tell us why the war did actually finally stop. Just what random people thought caused it to end.
If you wanted to know what leaders, who were making decisions about the war and trying to decide what to do, you could see from the Historian's report that many Japanese leaders were in conflict over whether to surrender and how to surrender before the bombs dropped, after the bombs, and after the Russian invasion. Even after the Emperor agreed to surrender there were still factions vying to prevent such a surrender for different reasons.
On r/AskHistorians, sources are not required to be given when composing a post, however they must be given upon request. If you are really interested in the sources and not my blase summary, I recommend just pinging the Historian directly for the kinds of sources you are interested in. Even if their post wasn't to your liking, they surely know where to find the sources you would want given their expertise.
For that matter, you could even open a question on r/AskHistorians itself!
Also, the US was intent on getting an unconditional surrender from Japan, whereas Japan was hoping for a conditional surrender.
If Japan's peace overtures were accepted, even if at the cost of some conditions, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved and Japan need not have been the world's first nuclear casualty.
This is not to mention that there were some high ranking US military men who tried hard to get the first nukes used against even larger population centers than Hiroshima or Nagasaki (Kyoto was their desired target, if I remember correctly) so that they could get better data on the nuke's effectiveness. And not to mention the widespread anti-Japanese racism in the US, which viewed Japanese people as subhuman.
It's far from clear that nukes were used against Japan merely to save lives on both sides, nor (even if we disregard the intent) is it clear that they did so.
Or only the ones that lose the war are accused of war crimes?
A different question, what happened with the guys that droned(or was an helicopter I do not remember) those civilians. I am referring at the incident where the video tape was leaked, was anybody found guilty?
Is the Churchill the new thing to divert from Holodomor they promote in Petrograd? Been seeing it mentioned by Russian trolls/bots/“patriots” a lot recently
Secondly, Truman was quite bloodthirsty: "If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible. . . ." [0].
Thirdly, Churchill was even more bloodthirsty and advocated for nuking Moscow in the years following WW2 [1].
[0] http://movies2.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0... [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2826980/Winston-Chu...
But the point still stands. We were up against leaders who were much more bloodthirsty and had trumendous disrespect for human life. The entire world decended in to madness - the morals basically went out the window. It was kill or be killed.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
We may as well just assume that the Russians discovered an alien base and the real incident involved them fighting an alien intruder. This is just as valid a perspective as "Russia sucks at submarines, lol."
Both perspectives are fictional. Russia is very good at submarines. Also, there are no alien bases.
This is not the first, nor the worst fire aboard a nuclear submarine. Komsomolets burned and sank with both a nuclear reactor and nuclear warheads on board. The reactor scrammed and was not damaged by the fire; the warheads' biggest risk was leakage of radioactive material.
Losing a nuclear submarine in a fire is a potential catastrophe for the local environment and a tragedy for the fallen crew, but hardly an event that justified the "planetary" scale.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_subma...