But nobody else knew that, and the bluffing and sabre-rattling could have continued effectively until a few more were built. That may be what kept Stalin from trying to overrun the Potsdam lines once the US troop withdrawal from Europe had become massive.
What divine Emperor cult? AFAIK the Japanese emperor is still considered divine, at least in name.
According to this site, the US had 6 warheads ready in 1945. OK, it doesn’t say anything about if this was before or after August 9, but I suppose there was at any time after completion of the Manhattan Project at least a small stockpile of bombs to deploy.
Is that why the US had such an easy time in Vietnam? :rolleyes:
He is still considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess, but he is not worshipped as a god himself as Hirohito was until WWII.
As the saying goes, “the night is young.”
True enough, but it does not change my argument at all. The U.S. was in a position to make the Empire of Japan literally a 49th state. That it did not choose to do so, that it chose to grant independence to the Phillipines and that it chose to support reunification for (at least western) Germany, rather than keeping that country broken up into smaller vassal states argues against what I infer from martinez’s OP – that the U.S. refrained from trying to conquer the world only because it was impractical.
Well, Kunilou, you do make a point or two, however, I believe you misinterpreted my OP. I personally do not believe the vast majority of America or even it’s government wanted to conquer the world, and what my Op was asking was more along the lines of “If the US wanted to, could they have?”
Neidhart, I am not inclined to believe this, because even though the average russians loyalty to Stalin was pretty low, when Stalin turned the war into a war for “mother Russia” the people were very quick to respond and unite. I assume if the US had tried to take over Russia, a similar thing would have occured.
Cervantes
Ahh. Thanks for the clarification, martinez. Since I’ve stuck myself this far into the discussion, I guess I can throw two more cents in.
No, I don’t think nuclear bombs would have been enough to conquer the world, or even the Soviet Union. Rather than Palestine, I think the parallel would have been closer to Vietnam, where the U.S. would keep throwing more troops and resources into the battle, only to see an enemy devise new and better ways to strike and then disappear.
The US has long had a touch of shizophrenia in its personality. We like to exert influence to keep world situations “under control”, yet we also a have strong isolationist bend to us. Because of this “schizophrenic” (if you will) nature of our public opinion and foreign policies, I think we’d have torn ourselves apart internally before military conquest of the world would have been possible. Truman would have been the LBJ of his times.
In addition, the U.S. is a capitalist nation. There was no money in world conquest of a decimated globe in the traditional sense, just a lot of sunk cost. There was money in global influence, however (world conquest in a non traditional sense).
Militarily, world conquest may have been theoretically possible, but I do not think the U.S. military operates on all cylinders without out a clear objective. There is no murkier objective than “conquer the world”, even in the decimated world of 1945. It would have too many different theatres of operation to be manageable.
So, my answer to the OP is no, the U.S. could not have conquered the world. The U.S. would have had immense internal strife that would have prevented it.
All of the above is mearly IMHO.
Why bother? The U.S. had what amounted to near hegemonic control over the world economy, no serious military challengers, and little appetite for trying to do what neither Napoleon nor Hitler was able to: defeat a Russian winter. Trying to “take over” and therefore have to administrate the entire world (or even Europe) would have been a nightmare. Better to install friendly governments and show that the U.S. had the ability to devestate any country that stepped out of line.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that if the U.S. had conquered Russia and ousted the communists it would have achieved little. Communism is an ideology, not a state; in some ways the best weapon the U.S. had against the possibility of communist revolutions (or takeovers) was the Russians as an example of communism’s limitations and the reality of a communist state turning into yet another dictatorship as it tries to compete strategically and economically with liberal democracy.
Let me add my voice to those who are asking, “What’s the point?” The U.S. is a democracy. If another country is also a democracy, that’s as good or better than it being an actual colony or state, unless it has some unique value. But since the U.S. is a democracy, then any country it would have ‘absorbed’ would be a democracy, and presumably vote its own interests anyway.
Back to the OP… No, the U.S. could not have ‘taken over the world’. It had nowhere near enough troops to pacify even medium-sized countries that wished to fight back. Look at what happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan, or the U.S. in Vietnam.
A more instructive question might be, “Could the U.S. have pushed further in WWII to its strategic advantage?” And the odds are that it could have. Specifically, the U.S. could have probably managed to push the Russians out of East Germany and a number of other countries it occupied, as well as rolled back Soviet land grabs in places like the Kamchatka islands. The U.S. probably could have overthrown a number of middle eastern governments that were unfriendly. The U.S. could have threatened the Soviets and even countered them militarily back before the Soviet Union had a gigantic missile arsenal. It could have picked and chosen some battles and succeeded at them.
It didn’t. That alone should tell the world something about the fundamental nature of the United States. Look at how much difficulty the Middle East has been. Look how much money we’ve had to pay to buy their oil, despite the fact that the U.S. could conquer that whole area without much difficulty. The U.S. could have taken Baghdad after the Gulf war, and installed a government that was willing to grant oil concessions to the U.S. to return the favor. The U.S. could have invaded pretty much all of South America and created a gigantic state throughout all of North and South America. The U.S. could have invaded Canada and added 12 more states to the union without breaking a sweat.
The U.S. doesn’t do any of those things, because fundamentally the U.S. is a good world citizen. The U.S. is a state governed by a people that have an innate sense of fairness and morality.