What would have happened if the Japanese had chosen to surrender on the eve of the Trinity test? I presume that the test would have been conducted anyway. Would we have just committed Fat Man and Little Boy to plain old nuclear testing? Would we have tried to keep them a secret? I saw a fictionalized account of the events leading up to the bombings and in it, Szilard goes to see the Secretary of State to advise him not to even test the bomb in order to prevent Stalin from being sure that the bomb was even possible as well as for presumably pacifist reasons. Did this happen?
It would probably have been used in the Korean War.
The Soviets knew about it anyway, and the energetic and capable Beria was placing in charge of making the Soviet bomb project work even in 1944.
I doubt anyone would stop the test. The world’s problems didn’t end when the Japanese surrendered. They may have just been starting. And since we knew that the Soviets were pursuing nuclear weapons it would have been foolish to count on a lack of a test to dissuade them. What would we do, just tell them that we didn’t test our bomb? They wouldn’t believe us anyway.
Did we know this? According the movie I referenced, Szilard said that we spent a considerable amount of money for the Manhattan Project on security and we were about to give away the biggest secret of all: that it can be done. He claimed that the Soviet infrastructure was smashed and that if Stalin didn’t know it was possible, he wouldn’t bother to try. (How true that is is left as an excercise for the reader).
That will take some research to determine. I was under the impression that we knew the Soviets were after German physicists by that time. Perhaps we didn’t have that information yet.
Many of the European physicists were against using the bomb when it would not be used on the Germans, including Einstein who started the whole thing with a letter to Roosevelt.
Truman told Stalin on July 25, 1945. When liberals found out how little Truman shared with Stalin, some were appalled, but the disclosure was deliberate.
It’s of course impossible to know the answer to the OP, but the safest idea is that the general direction of world history would be unchanged. The debate over the morality of the US using nuclear weapons would still be with us, in the form of a debate over the morality of the US having been first to create the weapons, and having been ready to use them on civilians.
I also question the premise – that the Japanese might have surrendered earlier. While a number of top Japanese leaders individually believed the US was unbeatable even in 1941, it is hard to conceive them admitting to each other the war was hopeless prior to US landings on the core Japanese islands (of which Okinawa was not one). To believe the Japanese might have surrendered on July 15, you have to believe they were way less determined than the Germans. I find this implausible. If Japan’s leaders had been the type of people who were willing to be honest with each other before the nuclear shocks of August 6 and 9 and the Soviet declaration of war on August 9, maybe they would have been honest with each other about the folly of Pearl Harbor.
One does wonder about that. One of the Admirals warned against the attack on Pearl. Perhaps the rest of them were overconfident in their results so far.
I think there would have been serious discussion about whether a test detonation should be conducted or even that a failed test be staged. Without proof that the American program had succeeded the Soviets would be far less motivated to pursue the Bomb themselves. The first test could be postponed until it could be used at a more productive juncture in American/Soviet oneupsmanship.
I believe that a failed test would have opened the USA to ridicule and reinforced Japanese resistance to end the war. Stalin was out to screw everyone, and may have tested one before the USA, as the Soviet Union gained respect or fear by orbiting the first satellite.
But why would they believe us if we told them we didn’t test it. We didn’t know that they knew about our bomb program, so we’d have to tell them we had it, and then tell them we didn’t test it. In 1947 we didn’t trust the Soviets to tell us about their own bomb tests, leading to an entire industry based on the existence of UFOs.*
*One of the stories behind Roswell being that it was balloon carrying a radiation detector.
Wait! The premise is that the Japanese surrendered before the test. And no one would know about the “failed” test except a handful of Mahattan project staff, top military and government officials and whatever Soviet spies were on hand.
Nobody would tell anybody anything officially. Pretty much every major player in WWII had a bomb program. The trick would be to convince the rest of the world that the US did not have a workable design yet, so that potential enemies wouldn’t be compelled to devote all their resources to a new arms race.
I could see some sort of misguided efforts along those lines, but it would probably be obvious to everyone that it wasn’t working. We wouldn’t believe that they weren’t proceeding with their bomb programs, and they wouldn’t believe we weren’t either. And we’d both be right.
