I agree with almost all of your post, but cite for this?
As I understand it, the reason Little Boy was dropped first was because they were virtually certain it would work. The physics more or less demanded it. It was, however, very very inefficient.
Fat Man was a much better design, but was much more complex and required a test shot.
They had set one off in the US Desert first, of course.
Yeah, but it’s not like setting off regular ordinance where you’ve test fired hundreds. You’ve got a very limited number of that particular bomb and it wouldn’t just be embarrassing to drop a dud in front of the enemy but may very well likely to conclude that your super weapon was a lie.
But it was unannounced. If it had been a dud, all the Japanese would have known was that a single bomb had been dropped, failed to explode and left a rather large chunk of uranium (which might have landed in the Motoyasu River for all we know.) If the U.S. had staged a demonstration and Little Boy were a dud, if anything, it would have strengthened Japanese resolve to see the powerful weapon fail.
It was the first one ready to go, and the mechanism was straightforward, this is true, it didn’t require testing. Theoretically.
But the problem was fissionable uranium was in extremely short supply, they weren’t able to produce enough to build any more uranium bombs practically speaking, they had to put all their eggs in the implosion type weapon, because the “gun type” design was not possible with Plutonium. It would “fizzle” instead of detonating. This realization came rather late in the game and caused much consternation.
These were handmade, one-of-a-kind custom bombs, there was no guarantee any of them would work. The Interim Committee was made up of high level physicists and scientists and others, and they concluded that a “demonstration test” wasn’t practical for several reasons. They concluded a bit reluctantly they couldn’t see any alternative than using the limited number of bombs in the pipeline unannounced on military targets.
Even after the war, the number of nuclear weapons on hand was a very closely guarded secret. So secret, a few years after the war President Truman was astonished to find out there was only one (1) available, in a disassembled state, that would “probably” work. One wag put it “We didn’t have a stock, and we didn’t even have a pile”.
I have read extensively on the topic of the end of the war in the Pacific. Even after two nuclear attacks the military attempted a coup to stop the Emperor from surrendering. Nothing except the total wipeout of the Japanese population would have satisfied the military. I lost my uncle Roy in the S.P. theater and my Dad served in the Army Air corps for 2 years there (ending the war on Okinawa preparing for the invasion) . If he were alive he would tell you what that war was like.
Yeah, Little Boy was essentially a “we KNOW this will work, and we have it ready right now” type weapon.
it was woefully inefficient (in the sense of how much of the fissile material actually contributed to the explosion, and just using more highly enriched uranium could have dramatically increased the yield (if they’d got to 93% U235 instead of 80%, they’d have doubled the yield, for example), but the US wasn’t in a position to do them.
The implosion type bomb that was used at the Trinity test, Nagasaki, and in the two post-war tests with all the ships were vastly more complex, and dramatically more efficient.
The big issues after a certain point were fissile material availability and actually building the things, more than whether or not the designs would work.
Now this is something that maybe isn’t quite understood as well as it might be. An important distinction has to be understood here.
The physicists at Los Alamos were very confident that the “Gun type” design using enriched uranium would work, and that no testing was required. What they meant by that of course was, testing of the design itself; that is not the same thing as any given specific bomb actually working. They couldn’t or wouldn’t take the risk that a “demonstration” test would work as advertised.
Some context I think is important to add. The production line was shut down after the war ended so that they could reorganize and make it more efficient. (The production line was very ad hoc.) If they had kept the line, they thought they could produce 2 devices a month.
Right, but Truman (and nearly everyone else) simply assumed that there were dozens and dozens of bombs ready to go if needed. This revelation came as a shock, because the nuclear deterrence was considered pretty much the only option the West had, as the Soviets had a huge numerical advantage in ground troops, it wasn’t even close.
Huh? I don’t think that was the case at all. I always have understood that Truman, et al. knew exactly how many bombs there were, at what pace they could be produced, and so forth.
Beyond that, the Western Aliles had a colossal advantage in airpower independent of nuclear weapons. With B-29 Superfortress bombers, they could strike nearly anything in western Russia, and if they staged from places like Iran
The reason they stopped nuking stuff (cities, at least) is because the war ended, not because they had no more bombs or were not able to manufacture more bombs. It is true that they did not have hundreds of nukes, or whatever figure the Army ordered, before 1946. In 1946 they built 7 bombs, in 1947 4, and in 1948 they built 43 bombs. It took a few years for the Soviet Union to catch up.
Don’t take my word for it, it happened. Truman had just given a saber-rattling sort of anti-communist speech, which added to his outrage. The Western allies were, in effect, bluffing about their nuclear capability with respect to protecting Europe from invasion.
At the time there was much inter-service rivalry going on, between the Army, Air Force, Navy, and overall the civilian control through the A.E.C.,
The number of atomic bombs in the American arsenal was considered so secret that it could not be shared with the joint Chiefs of Staff—or even recorded on paper. After visiting Los Alamos, Lilienthal met with President Truman in the Oval Office and told him how many atomic bombs would be available in the event of a war with the Soviet Union: at most, one.
The bomb was unassembled but, in Lilienthal’s view, “probably operable.” The president was stunned. He’d just announced the Truman Doctrine before Congress, vowing to contain the worldwide spread of Communism. Admirals and generals were fighting over the atomic stockpile, completely unaware that there wasn’t one. “We not only didn’t have a pile,” Lilienthal recalled, “we didn’t have a stock.” The threat to destroy the Soviet Union, if it invaded Western Europe, was a bluff.
“Command and Control” Nuclear Weapons, David Schlosser
From what I’ve read, it’s a bit of nitpickery as to what having warheads meant. The US had all the components for 50 bombs including uranium pits and everything else by 1948, but hadn’t actually assembled them into working bombs, except for maybe one, hence Lilienthal’s commentary to Truman.
But it was only a 24-48 hour time frame to build one, which was a consequence of the design; they didn’t design it for peacetime readiness, so once it was built, it was largely ready to go. So it makes sense that they’d keep them disassembled, considering that in order to actually bomb the Soviet Union, they’d have had to get the bomb and perhaps a B-29 to somewhere like the UK in order to effectively bomb them.
The big limiting factor in that era, and really in all eras, was the availability of fissile material for pits. That was the single hardest problem to overcome, and the one that takes the longest- uranium enrichment and/or plutonium breeding and separation are not fast processes.
Yeah, that’s not going to work, not even a little bit. They had to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, not two days from now, and then ship them overseas. That’s essentially why Gen. LeMay revamped SAC and had a certain number of planes in the air at all times, and everyone else on 15 minute alert, with planes fueled, on the tarmac, loaded and ready to go. It was a crazy time, but there was a method to the madness.
In 1948, the Soviets didn’t even have nuclear weapons. It wasn’t a question of MAD or immediate readiness by that point.
There wasn’t an assured destruction type of stand off no, but the Soviets did have over a million troops ready to go for an invasion. The U.S.A. had stood its armies down, and only had a fraction of troops in comparison. It was absolutely a “trip wire” phenomenon. Any invasion of Europe was to be met with nuclear bombing of Soviet cities.
This was the Problem. War planners for their part had developed a doctrine around the use of nuclear weapons as the main deterrence, in lieu of non existent ground troops. Then everyone who mattered, found out there weren’t any nuclear weapons readily available, and very few qualified personnel available to assemble them.
I’m pretty sure launching an invasion with a million troops takes time. How much time? Quoting AI answer because it works.
Months Prior (Spring 1941): Spies like Richard Sorge in Tokyo and various diplomatic and military informants warned Moscow that an attack was coming in 1941. [1, 2]
Days Prior (Mid-June 1941): Captured German deserters, border crossers, and aerial reconnaissance on June 18, 1941, confirmed that German troops were massing at the border with heavy armor and zero concealment for an imminent strike. [1]
Hours Prior (June 21–22, 1941): Defecting German soldiers crossed the border hours before the attack to explicitly state the invasion would begin at dawn, yet Soviet forces remained under strict orders not to provoke the Germans. [1, 2, 3]
Stalin didn’t want to believe his ally would betray him in 1941, but that belief had been blown to bits, so to speak. The U.S. would have had every possible bomb ready months earlier and Stalin absolutely knew it.
Of course it would work. The Allies still had almost half a million men in Europe in this time period. Are you seriously suggesting that the Red Army is going to conquer West Germany in only 2 days? Germany’s deepest advance during Barbarossa didn’t even reach 50 miles after 2 days, and that was with complete strategic surprise against one of the most incompetent militaries in the world at the time.
I think you mean Eric Schlosser, right? Also, I think some context is important here. The Mark I (Little Boy) and Mark III (Fat Man) devices were designed for wartime and not peacetime use. They were very delicate and couldn’t be kept in bomb form for years at a time without their chances of becoming duds increasing dramatically. That is a reason the Uranium cores were kept separate until the Mark 4 was designed in 1949. This wasn’t a scandal or goof on anyone’s part.