I haven’t seen the film yet so I don’t know if they get into this, but a large number of the scientists involved with the Manhattan Project were working because they were terrified that the Nazis would build a bomb before the Allies. When, for several reasons, that failed to happen, they were relieved that the bomb wouldn’t have to be used. They felt betrayed when it was used against Japan, who were not developing a bomb and who could have been defeated using conventional means.
the argument put forward was that continuing the war (with a possible drawn-out ground invasion of japan) would cost more lives than demonstrating 2 nukes.
Continued firebombing (which absolutely would not have stopped, and would've increased in intensity) alone would have killed far more than the bombs did.
Yes. that was the argument put forward. Similar arguments have been put forward for almost every military and major terrorist action ever taken. People can subscribe to the justifications, or not, as they see fit. The real thing to be cautious about is if you accept such justifications but only when your country is the one making them.
Yeah, but the argument put forward for everyone may not have been acceptable to some working on the project.
It is important to note that the physicists working on the gadget came from diverse backgrounds and had wildly different politics and moralities when coming to decide if they should work on what they saw as a doomsday weapon.
I always see it posed as "we either nuked Japan or we invaded", but the nukes were absolutely used in preparation for a land invasion. Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit into the highly controversial US strategy of strategic bombing Japanese industry prior to a land invasion, and they were not even the most deadly of our strategic bombing campaigns against Japan (the fire bombing of Tokyo was worse). A proper invasion of Japan post introduction of nuclear bombs commanded by one of our most infamously nuke happy commanders, Douglas MacArthur, planned to have US troops marching through the radioactive wasteland formerly known as Japan slaughtering anything that resisted them. It wasn't an either or, we weren't nuking Japan as an alternative to a land invasion, we were nuking them in preparation for a land invasion
The usa looked at Nazis and went "wtf only we get to be like that" and thenattacked nuked Japanese civilians
The history behind Japan is far more complex. No one can tell what would have been the worst outcome but there were worse outcomes than the two bombs.
Though one interesting thing is that we only had 30 years between WW1 and WW2, both being horrible wars, and it has now been almost 80 years without WW3. What was the big change between the first two that made us so scared of a third?
I was in the business for a while, and I’m not going to offer an opinion about to what extent mutually assured destruction prevented a third world war and whether the risks of a catastrophic event were borne out except in the hindsight that it didn’t happen yet. My views on the questions have evolved over time.
I would point out that, had the US remained the sole nuclear power, the world would possibly not have seen a lack of a major war in Europe, and that the intention of the US developing strategic weapons wasn’t to prevent war. The US didn’t volunteer nuclear technology to the Soviets in order to create detente because we wanted to balance on a knife edge for the better part of a century. The US tried to prevent the USSR from developing such weapons, and has tried experiment hard to prevent other countries from developing them. The DPRK wants weapons so they won’t be invaded. The US doesn’t want them to have weapons because we think they’ll make the situation less stable. I’m not saying the DPRK should have weapons. I’m just saying that narratives are conveniently spun to justify the things countries want to do anyway.
With the first 2 bombs, there was only 1 country that had nukes, and the rate of production was slow.
After Japan's surrender, no democratic country is going to want to initiate a whole new war of a similar scale to wipe out other countries. Countries make bad decisions sometimes it'd still be insane to do that, if for no other reason than the public would disapprove.
Fast forward a few years, you had multiple countries building up nuclear stockpiles, hydrogen bombs that were orders of magnitude more powerful were invented, and you had development of ICBM's that were difficult to intercept and could reach anywhere on Earth in 30 minutes
