Hiroshima bombing was only 3 miles. Was it really that big of a deal?

Hiroshima bombing was only 3 miles. Was it really that big of a deal?

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  1. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >single bomb able to flatten 3 square miles
    >nbd

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      how would a bomb do square damage?
      shouldn't it be circular mile?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        rope trick
        >Rope trick is the term given by physicist John Malik to the curious lines and spikes which emanate from the fireball of certain nuclear explosions just after detonation.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          There's nothing curious about them. It's just the guy wires holding the tower up turning into plasma. You can literally see the wires attached to the tower in the first pic

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            This guy is correct.

            well those bombs got a lot bigger and you ended up with being able to drop what was the equivalent of hunga tonga hunga ha'apai on your enemy.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Japs love their squares

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      actually anon it was at least two bombs

  2. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Was it really that big of a deal?
    imagine being the railyards yardmaster and coming back to a radioactive bombsite where all the trains and rail cars used to be

  3. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Yes and no.
    Small nukes are mostly useless against anything that isn't a city/base. But they're a incomparable force multiplier.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      an*
      force multiplier for bombers*

  4. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    No, the Japanese deserved much bigger bombs.

  5. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    If nukes are so bad, why didn't Japan just intercept the bombers?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      out of gas

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Japan could track incoming b29 flights, but not adequately identify their intent
      so had they jumped at every chance they may have intercepted Meteorological or path finding flights

      https://i.imgur.com/rPAcJ2p.jpg

      out of gas

      also out of metals and other resources, keeping a turbocharged radial engine going is not easy even for the American forces

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      With the little air defense capability that they had, they were focused on trying to beat back large flights of B-29s.
      A lone bomber flying over an area was considered a waste of resources to try and pursue. What they didn't know is that the ordinance it was carrying was far from conventional.

  6. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Nuke is basically a big firebomb. Most of Japanese buildings at the time were wooden. And yknow, wood burns way better than concrete. Secondary fires were the main killer, not the physical blast nor the initial radiation burst.

  7. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Was it really that big of a deal?
    Given the results, it was just another day in the campaign of terror fire bombings against jap cities. The same was done many times before also in Germany. Military speaking, it was more of a logistics improvement, as one plane/missile could do what before it was a matter of hundreds.
    BUT the demonization of nukes served the purposes of all sides during the Cold War:
    >Japan got to play the victim
    >the US became a feared superpower with a big stick
    >the USSR got to play the propaganda angle of the evil americans for bleeding heart lefties while trying to match the US in the arms race (they were always behind in this)
    So, even without the nuclear winter boogieman, the taboo about nukes has served everybody well. It still keeps MAD real and has become ironically the cause of WW3 never happening.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      a few dead japs (they're horrible people anyway) to achieve world peace forever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever
      was a pretty good deal overall (proxy meme wars don't count!!)

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Peace as long as you're not from a third world shit hole

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >(proxy meme wars don't count!!)

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Nobody cares about those. Poor brown people have always fought over owning more land and more poor brown people

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Considering the level of devastation inflicted when major powers go at it, yeah I'd say it's a pretty big step up that we've just been reduced to proxy wars.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Define 'proxy war'. Do you mean countries/parties fighting each other as proxies of different world powers, or a world power fighting another country that's a proxy of another? The Russia-Ukraine war could be seen as the latter, though it's hard to tell where an assisted resistance ends and a proxy conflict begins (e.g. were the Free French proxies of the Allies against Nazi Germany during WW2?).

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Let's just say both because either one is still preferrable to a direct war between major powers

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              True. But assuming neither side wishes to use nuclear weapons, a war between world powers might actually incur less human cost in some cases. For instance, if the US directly intervened in Ukraine and successfully called Russia's nuclear bluff, we'd have peace by now instead of an interminable meatgrinder and missiles lobbed into supermarkets.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Or you know, we'd have the same number of casualities inflictted within a day

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      well those bombs got a lot bigger and you ended up with being able to drop what was the equivalent of hunga tonga hunga ha'apai on your enemy.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous
  8. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Seems like it was.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      did anyone inside of those still standing buildings survive?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Probably. About a third of the city died from it iirc so if 2/3rd survived, some must've been in those buildings.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous
      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >A resident of Nagasaki, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15 AM, on 6 August 1945. He returned to Nagasaki the following day and, despite his wounds, he returned to work on 9 August, the day of the second atomic bombing.

        A few. Ever read that manga about Hiroshima? The one by Tezuka i think, where a photographer goes to Hiroshima right after the bombing and shoots the 'shadows' people left by burning altogether. He ses the shadow of a man massaging the shoulders of his old mum and it becomes the theme of the whole book. There's a twist at the end.
        Anyway, there are tons of burned people and other kind of victims soon thereafter in what is left of the streets of Hiroshima. The twist itself is about a survivor.

  9. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Especially when the only buildings that were left standing were the few that were modern enough to be built out of reinforced concrete.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      These bombings were the only recorded use of nuclear weapons in war, it tells us a lot about how someone could survive a nuclear attack.

      You mention the concrete structures, which are effectively made out of stone, some re-enforced with rebar. You would be safe in a rural area, or under the cover of the Earth.

      But the fallout would still be carried by the wind, and would affect the weather and water and soil as well. Some sort of tunnels or caves could provide large scale protection from nuclear attack.

      However, in the capital city, bunkers would be targeted. Can any nuclear bunker we have today truly survive tens or hundreds of direct nuclear strikes? Wouldn't it be better to be located in an area that would not be targeted at all, let alone trying to protect yourself from the blast?

      That's more than you can ask of civilians though.

      Because this was a war crime and civilian attack.

      All those civilians did not need to die, but the president wanted to use their wunderwaffen.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        For a while, we had this notion of "peaceful nuclear explosions"

        That we could use nukes like TNT to clear out land and dig holes, as the bombs were tested and created massive craters.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          It's pretty crazy. I've read a bunch of old newspapers and magazines (like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics) from the Olden Days. It's pretty common to run across articles that describe, in all seriousness, the use of atomic bombs to dredge out &/or expand the Panama Canal, or crumble entire mountains into gravel to feed into smelters, or excavate reservoirs for municipal water supplies, or ... just a number of massive engineering projects.

          Simpletons today vaguely recall echoes of that era with no understanding at all of why it was all so moronic and then come up with big "brane" genius ideas like blowing up a hurricane with nukes. It's literally nuclear-powered fuddlore bouncing around in empty, demented skulls. Hollywood has done us no favors with their idiotic depictions of how atomic weapons and large explosions work.

          Some people even believe that you can detonate a nuke underwater and have a half-kilometer tall tsunami wash over Ireland and continue to the UK and drown everyone in Britain. Some of those morons are in charge of countries with massive nuclear weapons arsenals. Real fricking fun timeline we live on.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Then again the Japanese would have gladly done the same to us and not once question the moral dilemma. And that's why it needed to be done.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          People don't realize, don't want to face the fact of how bestial were the Nips. I don't know why idiots think they were some peaceful rice farmers in sandals when in reality they made the Nazis feel uncomfortable.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        I always find it funny when we talk about the bombs as war crimes when what we'd been doing prior to that with fleets of B-29s and incendiaries was far, far worse in terms of raw human suffering. I'm prepared to concede they were all crimes against humanity. That generation felt it justified. They were at the tail end of an interminable nightmare and it beat the hell out of having to invade.

        By 1945 we knew about Bataan and what the Japanese had done to the Philipino civilians, nevermind what we already knew about their conduct in China. We'd seen kamikazes and mass civilian suicides (and murders by army officers!) on Okinawa and Iwo Jima.

        My grandfather, who served in the Pacific and to his dying day would refer to anything that broke as "cheap Japanese junk" despite owning a Honda, remarked on this with something to the effect of "I liked every Japanese person I ever met after August 1945. Before that, though, all we saw was them beheading civilians and beating prisoners and savage, suicidal combat. I don't think there was an American west of Los Angeles who spared a thought for the Japanese civilian in 1945."

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >I liked every Japanese person I ever met after August 1945. Before that, though, all we saw was them beheading civilians and beating prisoners and savage, suicidal combat
          They just need a correction.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          nukes put an end to all out war like those up to WW2. the big superpowers are to scared to go beyond proxy wars in third-world shitholes. traditional war that was little more than a meatgrinder of young men for both sides isn't really a thing anymore for a reason, and that's nukes.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Look at the Donbass.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Apparently Putin didn't get the memo.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Nuclear weapons have changed dramatically since 1945

        IIRC little boy and fatman were only 17-20kt, a modern MIRV’d missile carries 4-5 warheads at 400-700kt EACH, and they all impact a city in overlapping blast patterns

        For reference, the Beirut blast was calculated at roughly .5kt

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Thankfully nuclear weapons don't produce that much fallout. A nuclear plant meltdown is a thousand times worse all things considered.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          That depends. Airbursts like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yes, are "clean". There is almost no neutron activation, which means that the only fallout is incompletely-burned Bomb fuel, and that gets vaporized and hurled into the stratosphere. By the time it comes down, it's passed through several half-lives and gotten scattered to harmless concentrations.

          Groundbursts, on the other hand, produce extra radioactive material through neutron activation, and it gets clumped up with dirt particles, which causes it to fall out of the atmosphere at times and concentrations where and when it's still dangerous for a couple of weeks.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            True, but a couple weeks is still nowhere near as long as what meltdowns do

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Depends on the meltdown. Chernobyl is what you get when godless commies design a reactor (seriously, look up the environmental destruction wreaked by the USSR sometime). TMI, on the other hand, melted down within its containment vessel without a fuss and they filled it up with concrete. One detector *might* have caught a whiff of radiation one time. That's it.

              It's possible to make reactors safe; in fact, we've had incredibly-safe reactor designs for 50 years now, and the next-gen stuff is largely designed to be almost impossible to mess up even if you try to sabotage them. It's not the boogeyman that the China Syndrome crowd has tried to make it into.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Chernobyl is what you get when godless commies design a reactor
                I thought it was more that they purposely turned off all the safeties for a test

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                It was an unsafe design that could easily meltdown if the conditions were right, and the test helped set those conditions up, along with turning off the safety measures. Another RBMK reactor had nearly suffered the same event previously. Also, there was no containment structure around the reactor, it blew up and it was venting everything straight into the atmosphere.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                There is a big ass containment zone in Japan too

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                It was testing whether the safetiws they had were sufficient. Which was stupid; the current safeties (time to EG startup) took too long to start up and provide power.
                Intrinsic safety with US and almost everyone else means that even if you moronicly disable your safeties, an accident still won’t spray fuel and corium all over.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Dumbass.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Because this was a war crime and civilian attack.
        >All those civilians did not need to die, but the president wanted to use their wunderwaffen.
        Why would you strike the city housing Second Army Command + the Japanese Marines, and the city housing nearly 2/3rds of imperial Japan's military industry? Truly heinous
        Any civilian deaths are tragic, even those supporting a militant belligerent regime, but the only people worth crying over are their Korean slaves who were caught in the blast (though the Japanese would have likely executed them en masse anyway if the US took over the island chain slowly by traditional means)

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >All those civilians did not need to die, but the president wanted to use their wunderwaffen.
        lmao even, invasion of jaoan would be a total hell
        they still use ww2 era purple heart intended for invasion of japan until 2008

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Purple hearts weren't made for Japanese civilians, but if we take Okinawa and Manila as examples of what would have happened to them they were fricked either way.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >You would be safe in a rural area, or under the cover of the Earth.
        >But the fallout would still be carried by the wind, and would affect the weather and water and soil as well. Some sort of tunnels or caves could provide large scale protection from nuclear attack.

        The nice thing about fallout is that it takes about an hour to start falling in the blast zone because it gets convected up into the mushroom cloud. If you live in a target city, your best chance for survival is to jump into a sewer or storm drain to ride out the blast, and then immediately hop back out again to loot supplies and secure some undamaged long term shelter.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >LE FIRE... BURNS... PAPER HOUSES?

      These bombings were the only recorded use of nuclear weapons in war, it tells us a lot about how someone could survive a nuclear attack.

      You mention the concrete structures, which are effectively made out of stone, some re-enforced with rebar. You would be safe in a rural area, or under the cover of the Earth.

      But the fallout would still be carried by the wind, and would affect the weather and water and soil as well. Some sort of tunnels or caves could provide large scale protection from nuclear attack.

      However, in the capital city, bunkers would be targeted. Can any nuclear bunker we have today truly survive tens or hundreds of direct nuclear strikes? Wouldn't it be better to be located in an area that would not be targeted at all, let alone trying to protect yourself from the blast?

      That's more than you can ask of civilians though.

      Because this was a war crime and civilian attack.

      All those civilians did not need to die, but the president wanted to use their wunderwaffen.

      the structural integrity of concrete doesn't even come close to stone

  10. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Google "Robert McNamara's The Fog of War" documentary. Here is the clip, really puts into perspective just how little of a deal the atomic bomb was. If anything Japan surrendered so it would fall only to the Americans and not the USSR. Else Japan could've been divided like Korea had Stalin made it beyond Manchukuo. We firebombed Japan to the ground long before the nukes. It's a mobile link because I'm on the shitter. Just remove the m.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Then, why did they drop the bombs? An experiment?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        A warning to the Soviet Union to frick off. Japan was America's prize not the commie's

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        You're surprised Americans jumped at the chance to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people?

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Fricking kek. Dropping the bombs was an imperialist move.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >why did they drop the bombs

        Similar the the Mallory quote “because it’s there” the USA dropped little boy on Hiroshima “because we can”
        Dropping fat man on Nagasaki a few days later was a combination of “because we can” and “because frick you, that’s why” along with wanting to see the difference in the two different designs and the results.
        As to the choice of those particular targets, look to Roosevelt’s and Truman’s advisors for that answer...

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Dumbass.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >dumbass
            NO YOU

            I could also go into the vagaries of the enriched uranium in little boy vs. the plutonium in fat man and how the USA could create more core material for the plutonium design while the enriched uranium took months to generate the core material.
            It was one of the ultimate displays of “because we can” it served notice to the whole world that the USA could push your shit in with one bomb...and would give you another if you weren’t convinced by the first one.
            Or are you just fixated on the presidential advisors, in which case NO YOU still applies.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >If anything Japan surrendered so it would fall only to the Americans and not the USSR.
      How would the USSR launch a seaborne invasion of Japan? D-Day was a multinational effort, the Soviets never pulled off anything similar. And this is on the other side of the USSR.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      The Soviets were less enthusiastic about invading the Japanese homeland than we were.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Don’t McNamara me, butthole.

  11. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    The original ATOM bomb is overrated fr fr no bussin. 200-250 B-29 would have created more destruction and death. The boosted fission and thermos are the real kings NO CAP

  12. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    That's just a tactical nuke, it doesn't count.

  13. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Yes, it was a nothingburger

  14. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    It was literally the first 2 atomic bombs ever developed. They were practically firecrackers to what nukes are now a days.

  15. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >Hiroshima bombing was only 3 miles. Was it really that big of a deal?
    Yes, because the issue was not the explosion but the firestorm that occured after. You need to remember that most buildings there were made out of wood, and the nuke created a hot air spot that caused winds to spin around the entire city, spreading the fire around the entire thing.
    While damage made directly by the explosion wasn't that big, the folowup enviroment turned everything to ash.

  16. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Hiroshima, like most cities in Japan, had buildings made entirely of bamboo wood, paper, and dry thatch. New York is a city made of brick, concrete, and steel.
    Needless to say, one of those suffers much worse from a fireball and pressure blast.

  17. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    If there is a double-linebreak after a post tag, the post is not worth reading.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      You seem to know way more about Reddit than we do.
      Go back.

  18. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I think today's Jap society is enough punishment to them.

  19. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Now I have become OP the destroyer of threads

  20. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Yeah we dropped em cuz we wanted to send the soviets a message.

    iirc we knew they were building their own so we dropped ours first to show we did it before them and unless they already had nukes they were fricked.

    Alao i am sure as hell betting the military would be pissed if they spent all that money and didnt get to use it at least once.

    It was basically a we already spent the money on it so lets use a couple....and also as a power flexing move in the geopolitical space.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Projection, the post.

  21. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >American's level entire Japanese City with one bomb
    >Guy from Colorado does all the urban planning for the reconstruction

    Honestly Hiroshima was the nicest city I went to in all of Japan since there was actually some fricking space. It's probably the one place I could have seen myself living.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      It's a pretty nice city. Nagasaki is quite charming as well.

  22. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I really should save this as copypasta for the next time this subject comes up. Or finish my essay on it and toss it on pastebin with the nu/ke primer.

    I'll start by recommending a video: MHV's interview with D. M. Giangreco. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4uDfg38gyk

    Here's the basic situation: Japanese leadership didn't care one bit about Japanese lives; as far as they were concerned, all civilians could just go and die for the dynasty at their command. But... internal police had produced reports by mid-'45 that if half the population of the Home Islands (40 million out of 80) died, there was a non-zero chance that enough of the survivors would rebel that they would be strong enough to overthrow the government, and *that* was not acceptable. Some generals, of course, were convinced that they could fight to the last civilian.

    The strategic plan at that point was to kill a million GIs, wounding several million more in the process. They still believed that Americans were "weak", and would never be willing to sacrifice half their population like Japan could. A million dead GIs, the thinking went, and the American public would demand that the US negotiate, at which point Japan would get most of what it wanted simply by threatening to continue the war. Honestly, dragging out a conflict and inflicting American casualties has worked pretty well against the US ever since; Japan just completely misunderstood how angry they'd made the US public.

    Japan guessed (correctly) when and where the invasion would begin, because they'd seen a dozen previous operations and could read a map. They had heavily-reinforced the correct areas, and had plans to launch an onslaught of kamikazes of all types, plus forcing women and children into suicidal attacks. The firebombings, submarine warfare, and aerial mining campaigns were bad, not enough to make them blink. US propaganda claimed that they had a devastating new weapon, but the US claimed lots of stuff.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      And then Hiroshima blew up. A single bomber did that, rather than a thousand. That's a problem, right?

      Well, not so much. Japan, it turned out, had possibly the second-best nuclear program on the planet. By analyzing the damage and taking samples, scientists were able to not just determine the strength of the Bomb, but to determine the amount of HEU it had used and correctly(!) estimate that the US would only be able to produce enough HEU for ~2 Bombs a year.

      Not a problem. That's far less than the firebombings were doing. Japan could hold out easily until the expected invasion, at which point they'd begin the killing in earnest and win the war at the peace talks. Stay the course.

      And then Nagasaki blew up. Problem? Problem! That's about 6 months too soon. Worse, samples indicated that the US had figured out how to make a Bomb out of plutonium, which is much, *much* easier to produce in bulk than HEU. Nobody else had any clue how to do it.

      Suddenly, there was a very real chance that the American claims that there were "hundreds" of Bombs ready to go didn't sound like a bluff; it could be real. And suddenly, there was a chance that Japan could lose 40 million people *before the first GI landed*. The government could be overthrown. The dynasty could be ended.

      Hirohito had a secret golden parachute from the US, despite the official claims of "Unconditional Surrender". You see, no IJA unit had *ever* surrendered en masse. It was believed (probably correctly) that the *only* man on the planet who could get them to stand down was the Emperor. So he was secretly offered a guarantee that the dynasty would continue--possibly even with him leading it--if he would issue that order. And, looking at possibly being the Emperor who *lost* the dynasty forever, Hirohito *blinked*.

      It was a partial bluff, but he didn't know that. There was a third Bomb almost ready, and after that, one could be made every 10 days or so. But the bluff worked.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Note that the Japanese surrenders in Manchuria happened *after* Hirohito threw in the towel. And don't forget that he almost got overthrown in a coup and placed under house arrest by generals who were convinced that they could *make* the Japanese people fight to the last drop of blood (ironically, while the coup never had much chance of succeeding, it was stopped in part by a nearby bombing raid that put the sentries on full alert). Japan had a plan to deal with the USSR, by luring them in, and then counterattacking from northern Korea and cutting off their supply lines. Would it have worked any better than trying to kill a million GIs? Hard to say. But, it's not hard at all to say that it was a combination of factors that convinced Hirohito to stab his generals in the back, or that the second Bomb was his breaking point.

        I always wondered if he ever found out just how few Bombs the US had, and if he ever second-guessed himself over that.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >Japan had a plan to deal with the USSR, by luring them in, and then counterattacking from northern Korea and cutting off their supply lines.

          Source? And maybe they had some plan, but there's realistically no fricking chance they could have pulled it off. the Kwantung army was in absolute shambles, severely outnumbered, basically no heavy equipment. Pure fantasy to suggest they could miraculously defend Korea and Manchuria

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            The source for that claim is actually the video I linked to. It was the first that I'd really heard of it, but Giangreco seems to have done his research on the subject.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Japan got smacked by Russia at Khalkin Gol/ Nomonhan; did they forget that fast?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        I read on Salo Forum a while back that the Japanese nuclear program was based partially around the Chosin Reservoir, and there was some spooky shit going on with the United States trying to Ransack it/blow it up before the Chinese communists got to it, and that the North Korean nuclear program was based in no small part in the scraps they still had after the Korean War.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      And then Hiroshima blew up. A single bomber did that, rather than a thousand. That's a problem, right?

      Well, not so much. Japan, it turned out, had possibly the second-best nuclear program on the planet. By analyzing the damage and taking samples, scientists were able to not just determine the strength of the Bomb, but to determine the amount of HEU it had used and correctly(!) estimate that the US would only be able to produce enough HEU for ~2 Bombs a year.

      Not a problem. That's far less than the firebombings were doing. Japan could hold out easily until the expected invasion, at which point they'd begin the killing in earnest and win the war at the peace talks. Stay the course.

      And then Nagasaki blew up. Problem? Problem! That's about 6 months too soon. Worse, samples indicated that the US had figured out how to make a Bomb out of plutonium, which is much, *much* easier to produce in bulk than HEU. Nobody else had any clue how to do it.

      Suddenly, there was a very real chance that the American claims that there were "hundreds" of Bombs ready to go didn't sound like a bluff; it could be real. And suddenly, there was a chance that Japan could lose 40 million people *before the first GI landed*. The government could be overthrown. The dynasty could be ended.

      Hirohito had a secret golden parachute from the US, despite the official claims of "Unconditional Surrender". You see, no IJA unit had *ever* surrendered en masse. It was believed (probably correctly) that the *only* man on the planet who could get them to stand down was the Emperor. So he was secretly offered a guarantee that the dynasty would continue--possibly even with him leading it--if he would issue that order. And, looking at possibly being the Emperor who *lost* the dynasty forever, Hirohito *blinked*.

      It was a partial bluff, but he didn't know that. There was a third Bomb almost ready, and after that, one could be made every 10 days or so. But the bluff worked.

      Interesting. If Japan hadn't bent the knee after Nagasaki where was the next place likely to be targeted?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        The plan was to hold the next three nukes in reserve and drop them at the same time as the first amphibious landings, to frick up the defenders.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          That was MacArthur's plan; it's hard to say which Bombs he would have gotten, or how many, because of all the different chains of command involved.

          Trent Telenko, among others, has suggested that MacArthur's staff (which included some real EW geniuses) had successfully located the major field HQs for the defense, and that the plan was to spread the Bombs out across them, leaving the defenders completely uncoordinated. It's hard to play alt-hist with this, because so many factors were lost to history or never known (MacArthur's staff took most of their secrets to their graves).

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Probably Kokura, which was *supposed* to be the second target, but which was obscured by smoke, leading to a switch to Nagasaki as the backup target.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          I thought it was supposed to be Osaka but Dulles had taken his honeymoon there and his wife "couldn't bear to see such a beautiful city destroyed"

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            You're thinking of Kyoto, and it was spared from ALL bombings as a result, it wasn't even firebombed

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Kyoto, that's right.
              I knew I was forgetting parts but I couldn't remember which parts.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      And then Hiroshima blew up. A single bomber did that, rather than a thousand. That's a problem, right?

      Well, not so much. Japan, it turned out, had possibly the second-best nuclear program on the planet. By analyzing the damage and taking samples, scientists were able to not just determine the strength of the Bomb, but to determine the amount of HEU it had used and correctly(!) estimate that the US would only be able to produce enough HEU for ~2 Bombs a year.

      Not a problem. That's far less than the firebombings were doing. Japan could hold out easily until the expected invasion, at which point they'd begin the killing in earnest and win the war at the peace talks. Stay the course.

      And then Nagasaki blew up. Problem? Problem! That's about 6 months too soon. Worse, samples indicated that the US had figured out how to make a Bomb out of plutonium, which is much, *much* easier to produce in bulk than HEU. Nobody else had any clue how to do it.

      Suddenly, there was a very real chance that the American claims that there were "hundreds" of Bombs ready to go didn't sound like a bluff; it could be real. And suddenly, there was a chance that Japan could lose 40 million people *before the first GI landed*. The government could be overthrown. The dynasty could be ended.

      Hirohito had a secret golden parachute from the US, despite the official claims of "Unconditional Surrender". You see, no IJA unit had *ever* surrendered en masse. It was believed (probably correctly) that the *only* man on the planet who could get them to stand down was the Emperor. So he was secretly offered a guarantee that the dynasty would continue--possibly even with him leading it--if he would issue that order. And, looking at possibly being the Emperor who *lost* the dynasty forever, Hirohito *blinked*.

      It was a partial bluff, but he didn't know that. There was a third Bomb almost ready, and after that, one could be made every 10 days or so. But the bluff worked.

      Thanks Anon.
      Thread almost feels like an Oppenheimer thread from back in the day.

  23. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Hiroshima was most wood buildings that got knocked over by the shockwave them set on fire. By contrast Nagasaki was a modern city that the bomb kinda missed and hit the outside and was significantly less damaged in the process.

  24. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Imagine a world where we actually followed through on Edward Teller's plans for the 10 gigaton bomb

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Honestly, it doesn't make much sense. A 3-stage device can easily produce an order of magnitude or two more than a single-stage device. But once you introduce fusion, there's really nothing more powerful than that other than antimatter (which is outside of the scope of this discussion). So, you can't get from megatons to gigatons just by changing the technology. Just like the Russians found out with Tsar Bomba, you have to add more Bomb fuel, and that rapidly becomes an inefficient use of resources (hence why they only fueled TB to 50MT instead of the planned 100MT).

      Being more accurate was the way to solve the conundrum. Hence, US warheads start *shrinking* in the '70s and '80s, allowing more Bombs to be made with the same amount of fuel.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Honestly, it doesn't make much sense.
        He wanted a bigger boom, he didn't have reasoning beyond that. Also the man was one of the greatest scientific mindsets in nuclear weapons, if he couldn't figure it out no one could. It was rejected because the US, according to the report, "didn't need a weapon capable of setting the entire British Isles on fire"

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >we get the gay timeline where the bombs get smaller but more accurate instead of the timeline where the bombs get bigger and more accurate.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            But if overall bomb production increased because of this change, then the potential for devastation increased as well as you could just hit more targets with more bombs instead of relying on one big boom to do everything.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >didn't need a weapon capable of setting the entire British Isles on fire

          About half the world disagrees with that sentiment...

  25. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    It was atomic not nuclear

  26. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    The Japs still seething about the nukes will never not be funny to me. How the frick do you start a war, commit countless atrocities, and then b***h and whine as the dindu nuffin victim when you get your shit slapped?.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      They really don't care that much anymore. If you actually ask the Japanese, even the ones who lived through the war, most of them by the end were more angry at their own government than they were at the Americans because the Japanese government was the whole reason the Americans bombed them in the first place. I was listening to an interview on NPR a couple years back with a Japanese author from Nagasaki who was born 9 years after and she kept pressing him on the whole traumatic aspect for his family and he said for the most part, the Japanese people were just glad the war was over and that it was just one big bomb after they had already been bombed to hell and back already. People who survived the bomb for the most part didn't talk about it after except in private to family members, they tried to put it behind them. He said that if you didn't have family members randomly come down with leukemia, you never would've known it happened because Nagasaki was completely rebuilt within 2 years and people chose not to discuss it.

      Oh also, he found humor in the fact that his mother never directly experienced the bomb and its aftereffects since it was dropped inaccurately and the city was mainly just hit by the shockwave, so she got smacked in the head by a roof tile and her family put her to bed to recover while they went out to burn bodies, and by the time she woke up they already came back home.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        I will say though, there are 2 groups who do still seethe and it's the communists and the ultranationalists, and they both seethe for the same reason: it's an excuse to b***h about America.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        I've lived in Japan for 20 years.

        A lot of Japanese civilians are still pissed about the end of the war and its aftermath. This includes the nukes. They are pissed at their incompetent leaders for using them as pawns (as you mentioned), but they are also pissed at being used as guinea pigs by the Americans, and they are EXTREMELY pissed at the fact that the descendants of the "nuclear bomb victims" (被爆者) also show some evidence of lingering congenital medical issues.

        There is also resentment at the fact that other nations have continued to build more nukes, and that America continues its defacto military occupation of Japan, and that American soldiers keep committing crime in Japan.

        This has fed into Japan's victim mentality, and people who feel victimized remain angry forever.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          I also live in Japan
          All American military men in Japan should be castrated and kept on base with no time outside base, for the good of the Japanese people.
          Frickers do nothing except rape kids and kill innocent people

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Sorry m8, best I can do is a 67 IQ black Black person who can’t read and a 4’7” cross-eyed Hispanic who harasses women incessantly

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          The Japanese are free to eject the US and rearm. No one can stop them. Their predecessors were free to surrender but chose getting nuked. Bit of an own goal.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Dumb. You, individually, have absolutely no control of what your idiotic government does. You have NO CONTROL. Stupid, corrupt old men have control, and all you have the privilege of dying in nuclear hellfire if your moronic political leaders frick up badly enough.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              And yet here you are, posting on a Mongolian basket weaving forum. If you really cared, you'd do something about it.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Dumb.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Okay this is the dumbest Black person brained argument on here I've seen in a while.
                Nobody fricking cares
                Post gun

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >Me: I live in Japan
                >Twink-armed dysgenic: POST GUN

                dumb

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                You are a moronic, communist, no-guns homosexual. Uppercut yourself and leave /k/.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Get your nasty arm hair caught in a zipper Mister Skeletal.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              so what? thats been every form of government since mesopotamia not exclusive to any system

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            No, they are ‘t.
            Have you even heard of the Treaty of San Francisco?

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >There is also resentment at the fact that other nations have continued to build more nukes
          Because they're naieve. For all we can say about how nukes didn't stop smaller wars from happening, name a country that has nukes that's been invaded since nukes came into the picture, aside from I guess Israel who pretends they don't have nukes when everyone knows they does. We wouldn't have the Ukraine conflict right now if Ukraine still had its nuclear arsenal. Nuclear weapons if nothing else have shown to be a deterrent in keeping others from invading you.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >I've lived in Japan for 20 years.
          Proof?
          >A lot of Japanese civilians are still pissed about the end of the war and its aftermath.
          Proof?
          >There is also resentment at the fact that other nations have continued to build more nukes
          Why is this relevant?
          >America continues its defacto military occupation of Japan
          Doesn't look like an occupation to me.
          >This has fed into Japan's victim mentality
          Certainly fed into yours.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >How the frick do you start a war, commit countless atrocities, and then b***h and whine as the dindu nuffin victim when you get your shit slapped?
      Have you ever heard of vatBlack folk? They listen to Japs whining and say "Hold my krokodil."

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      It ushered in a new era for mankind. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the "no turning back" points in history for warfare and world politics.

      Same reason Serbs, Russians, Armenians, Taiwanese, Americans, and Turks whine and cry about their recent losses. When you get beat in a real bad way you tend to stay pretty mad, especially if life was more or less unaffected for you afterwards.

      https://i.imgur.com/zcXFcxI.png

      Two towers wasn't a big deal either

      It was a big deal when it was obvious the US was actively getting more involved in the ME and was teetering already on invading some North African/ME shithole. It was clear to anyone paying attention that any attacks on the US by Islamists, staged or not, would lead to massive eruption of wars in the regions and an insane change for the way of life of most people in the world, especially the west.

      They got to the big boy table, and not only were they the first Asian nation to do so, but they did it by speed running 250 years of technical development in the span of a single generation, turning themselves from an isolated backwater into the most powerful country in Asia. Seriously, Japan went from foot carts and candles to railroads and electricity in about 50 years, it was insane. They had earned the world's (read: the West's) respect, or at least they thought so.

      Turns out imperialism is a hell of a drug and while the Western nations gave Japan props for coming into their own as quick as they did none of them were really willing to treat them as equals or cut them in on a piece of the pie. So Japan decided it needed to be very aggressive about its own empire building, and decided to try and speedrun colonialism the same way they did the industrial revolution.

      Thing is... imperialism is a hell of a drug. And their efforts to unite the people and forge a new national identity had made nationalism the hip new thing for the younger generation. Combine that with an idolization of medieval honor codes (since they were fresh out of the medieval period themselves), a culture that already believed the emperor was a divinely ordained absolute authority, and loads of racism (which to be fair the West had is spades as well), and they got really, REALLY high on their own supply.

      When things really started to go off the rails though was when the civilian government basically let a group of rogue military offices force them into an invasion instead of admitting they couldn't control their men and lose face. This eventually led to the military gaining control of the whole country and turning a nation already slipping towards radical nationalism into the full on Nihon master race militant imperialists they became.

      >military gains control
      Guess that's part of the reason why they don't want a bigger military nowadays?

      The worst part about the military leaders finding their way to power is that they all competed and disagreed with each other.

  27. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >7.1 square miles of city erased
    >in the time it takes to ignite a flash bulb
    Could (You) please go be supermoronic somewhere else? /misc/ is currently missing a village idiot and would like to offer (You) the job.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Honestly, it's a valid question, given the effectiveness of the firebombings and aerial mining campaign over the previous few months.

  28. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Pretty good during that meta as a flat damage dump but the cooldown was kinda long. Today's build focuses more on ability haste and multi-target because the DPS gains are just so much more efficient.

  29. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Why Imperial Japan government was such ridículous, anime levels of evil

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      This article provides a basic explanation for Imperial Japan's savagery. In summary: political extremism rooted in bushido, nationalism, and Emperor-worship, with a healthy dose of racism and hatred/envy of the West.

      https://www.historynet.com/a-culture-of-cruelty/

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Those cartoons from the 40s decried as racists were quite acurate about that Nip character.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          The problem with that view is that Imperial Japan was like no other period in Japanese history, especially compared to the earlier Shogunate and modern Japan. Yes, the militaristic and imperialist tendencies were always there, but it took the specific (and unfortunate) circumstances of the 20th century to refine them into that kind of inhuman tyranny.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          meanwhile, very racist propaganda (Chinese)
          >United China Relief was the largest humanitarian effort in the United States to aid the Chinese people up to that time. The organization, which was renamed United Service to China (USC) after the Second World War, raised over US$50 million in donations over ten years.
          it's almost like it had less to do with whether they were Asian and more to do with ideals and conflicts of nationalism

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            One more for the road, never forget what commies took from us all

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              A Western friendly China, the stuff of dreams. I always remember Mao thanked the japs for making him to take over China. A hardcore psycho congratulates another bunch of hardcore psycho.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        im kinda shocked that we didnt genocide the japanese after the war,McArthur was truly the man for the job any other person would have make the gulags look nice.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          As if America didn't do worse it's just it's not in the history books because they won
          God PrepHoleners are dumb

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            It literally didn't do worse. Nowhere close to unit 731 and nowhere close to the gulags which inspired 731 for the Japanese anyway. Cope homosexual.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              If America did MKULTRA to their own people, and Abu Grahib to arabs, you are a fool for believing that

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                >muh psychological torture!!!
                Still not as bad as human vivisection lmao

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                1. Japan didno such thing. Japan has never commited a warcrime, it's all ally lies, like the holocaust
                2. Even if they did it was against ally soldiers, and as we all know they are all unforgivable warcriminals who deserve it

                All American soldiers should be vivisected

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      They got to the big boy table, and not only were they the first Asian nation to do so, but they did it by speed running 250 years of technical development in the span of a single generation, turning themselves from an isolated backwater into the most powerful country in Asia. Seriously, Japan went from foot carts and candles to railroads and electricity in about 50 years, it was insane. They had earned the world's (read: the West's) respect, or at least they thought so.

      Turns out imperialism is a hell of a drug and while the Western nations gave Japan props for coming into their own as quick as they did none of them were really willing to treat them as equals or cut them in on a piece of the pie. So Japan decided it needed to be very aggressive about its own empire building, and decided to try and speedrun colonialism the same way they did the industrial revolution.

      Thing is... imperialism is a hell of a drug. And their efforts to unite the people and forge a new national identity had made nationalism the hip new thing for the younger generation. Combine that with an idolization of medieval honor codes (since they were fresh out of the medieval period themselves), a culture that already believed the emperor was a divinely ordained absolute authority, and loads of racism (which to be fair the West had is spades as well), and they got really, REALLY high on their own supply.

      When things really started to go off the rails though was when the civilian government basically let a group of rogue military offices force them into an invasion instead of admitting they couldn't control their men and lose face. This eventually led to the military gaining control of the whole country and turning a nation already slipping towards radical nationalism into the full on Nihon master race militant imperialists they became.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >military gains control
        Guess that's part of the reason why they don't want a bigger military nowadays?

  30. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Worse than the holocaust
    America needs to pay reparations

  31. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >America write's Japan's constitution
    >They make it like their own
    >They leave out the right to bear arms part because this time around THEY are the tyrannical overlords who need overthrowing
    Hypocrites

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      They amended that like 10 minutes later when they realized Japan needed SOME kind of military to hold out in the event of Soviet invasion until the US arrived.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        I think he meant the 2nd Amendment.

  32. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Which is worse, serb victim complex or nip victim complex?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      American victim complex.
      After 9/11 they literally turned the entire western world into a police state, and they fricking never shut up about how they were wronged
      How many people died? Like 5000?
      That's not even 1/10 of the people who died by the nukes

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        the western world? the entire world went to shit because of the mutt chimpout after that inside job.

  33. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Two towers wasn't a big deal either

  34. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >What if 9/11, but during a war and it was 45 skyscrapers of similar size and occupancy and they were filled with even more asbestos

  35. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

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