Actually, Little Boy (the Hiroshima Bomb) was a one-off design which was much less efficient than the Fat Man type (which was the same as the Trinity device.)
Cite will be forthcoming.
And here they are:
Basically, the Little Boy design was abandoned after the Manhattan Project team discovered that the implosion method was simpler for several reasons:
[ul]
[li]A ‘Little Boy’ type bomb could only use Uranium as a base for a fission reaction.[/li][li]The finished bomb was more hazardous to deploy than a comparable implosion-based weapon.[/li][li]It was also less efficient in terms of explosive energy achieved (a lower yield-to-mass ratio, an important factor in nuclear weapon design, and the reason why bombs have gotten smaller but more destructive ever since.)[/li][li]The implosion bombs offered a better chance of successful (or consistantly reliable) detonation.[/li][/ul]
Random de-lurk… I’m always somewhat surprised that the use of nuclear weapons on Nagasaki and Hiroshima is viewed in somewhat of a vacuum. The targeting of civilians was accepted as simply part of total war in World War II. Both sides did their utmost to obliterate the cities of their enemies with absolutely no regard to the protection of civilians. In fact, civilians were the target. After all, civilians run the factories that produce the weapons that armies use to fight. As such, they were viewed as ‘legitimate’ targets. Such was the world as it was back then. The real difference between the use of atomic as opposed to conventional weapons was that while the bombing of Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, London, Rotterdam, Coventry, etc. required the use of huge numbers of bombers dropping enormous quantities of bombs, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki each required one plane and one weapon. The overriding reason that Tokyo wasn’t seriously considered as a target for an atomic bomb was that there simply wasn’t much left to target after the continual firebombing.
Dissonance,
Good post. Also remember that the Japanese were working on developing an atomic bomb of their own and other WMD. The Japanese were clearly developing WMD targeted for American civilians(esp in the case of their work on germ, biological, bacterial, balloon bombs, etc).
Dropping the “second” bomb proved to the japanese that the damage effects of the first bomb was not unintentional nor accidental and the resulting horror from our bombs were understood by us and would not preventing us from dropping many more.
I think the real question is: How many bombs do you have to drop on a nation of Kamakazis who think it is better to die than surrender?
Frankly, I was surprised they surrendered after only 2 bombs were dropped.
Classic case of demonizing the enemy in order to justify killing their ass. I suggest a viewing of the excellent Japanese movie Grave of the fireflies. There is no such thing as a “nation of Kamakazis”.
::checks to make sure this is Great Debates::
::yes, OK to post this here::
It is difficult to provide a cite for intentions and attitudes, but I’m under the impression that things played out kinda like this:
a) We are attacked at Pearl Harbor and after we declare war on Japan, Germany declares war on us.
b) Many of the research scientists who end up being available to the US and allies are ideological or literal refugees from Germany and Germany-controlled lands, and give a heads-up to the fact that Germany is trying to develop some scary-ass weapons. Herr Einstein, prominent among them, warns that nuclear fission could lead to a weapon that could give you nightmares.
c) Worried about Germany getting nukes first, the US races to develop an atomic weapon.
d) Before nuclear weapons are successfully developed, Germany is defeated in Europe. An adversary remains: Japan. And the military being the quintessential bureaucracy, and nuclear weapons continuing to look like serious ass-kicking weapons, it continues to be a mission statement. We’re gonna develop them and we’re gonna deploy 'em and damn are we ever gonna be formidable when we do. There may have been some genuine—perhaps even well-founded–reasons for thinking Japan might be on the verge of being able to deploy nukes but my general impression is that they weren’t and that our planners did not seriously think otherwise. Not as had been the case with Germany.
e) We turn the war against Japan in our favor, to the point that an allied victory appears inevitable.
f) The Trinity test succeeds. We have nukes, and an entire funding stream and a project with a history are invested in it, along with reputations and the weight of previous policy decisions. The whole reason for developing the atomic bomb was to utilize it and be formidable in the war. In support of immediate deployment are two additional arguments (both of which, I maintain, were peripheral to what I just said): the Soviet Union might get involved and get its personnel into Japan and use that as an opportunity and excuse for extending its ideological reach there; and the Japanese are not giving up easily, so although it’s pretty apparent that they are going to lose, they seem willing to lose the hard way, one island at a time. Truman says “do it”.
g) There are two models for a successful atomic bomb, described far better by Michael Ellis than me in my earier post. There are separate sets of people for whom one model or the other has their research efforts (and ego) more closely associated, and the military wants to see what each will do against real targets. Given a rationale for droppng them both, or the lack of a compelling reason not to, both will be dropped and further development efforts will be directed according to the results, and additional bombs developed or improved subsequent to the first two will be deployed as necessary. Seeing both in action is largely a tactical and research-centric decision, in other words.
h) Additional bombs are not necessary, and in fact the question eventually arises as to why it was thought necessary to drop more than the first one. It was necessary because we wanted to see what each of them would do, which in turn was desirable in order to know which flavor we should pursue. There was no prior military history in which deploying one example of a new weapon was enough to stop a war, and I doubt that the planners and administrative types really believed that one could. You just don’t plan on your opponent being taken out. You plan on what you’re going to hit them with next, you know? And ultimately, once the military gears up to pursue a course of action, very little, aside from military defeats and setbacks, tends to stop that course from being pursued, which (I maintain) has a lot to do with our most recent military adventures.
I’m willing to rescind any of these assertions in the face of forthcoming hard evidence to the contrary.
One factor that led to the choice of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki as targets for atomic bombardment was the fact that neither one of them had been bombed extensively, thus making bomb damage assesment easier (both for us AND the Japanese).
I agree that merely demonstrating the bomb in an uninhabited area wouldn’t have caused the Japanese to surrender, but what if we had used the first bomb on a military target like an air base or navy yard? That would prove to the military leadership that this new weapon was not only useful against “soft” targets, but “hard” targets as well. IIRC (and it’s been many years since I wrote a term paper on this very subject) there were several fortified islands in Tokyo bay that would have fit the bill. Plus, the explosions would have been visible from Tokyo (and the resultant tsunamis wouldn’t have escaped their notice, either), thus having a great psychological effect. Sure, lots of people would have been killed, but many of them would have been soldiers and there’s a distinct possibility that less than 200,000 civilians would have died as a result.
That’s just speculation, of course. I suspect the real reason we bombed Nagasaki had everything to do with institutional inertia. The wheels, once in motion, were difficult to stop.
That was not the practice from the outset of WWII. It was only after a squadron of German bombers became disoriented on a night mission and dropped their bombs over a civilian area, and the British retaliated the next night by dropping bombs on Berlin, that the " targeting of civilians began.
Actually, that term is misleading. Military targets always took priority over civilian ones when it came time to plan out bombing missions.
There weren’t any such reasons in the case of Japan. While I’d expect that someone somewhere in the Allied war effort tried assessing the risk, Japanese nuclear physics simply wasn’t regarded as a threat. There had a few good physicists, a couple of whom had been trained in Germany, but nobody expected them to get anywhere near as far as the Germans.
But it’s worth realising that the ALSOS mission established that a German bomb was unlikely in 1944. There was clearly a case for continuing the Manhatten Project at full speed until this was finally proven shortly before VE Day, but the threat wasn’t as pressing as it’d been in, say, 1943.
This argument is often made and I’m partial to it as part of the explanation. There are clear statements by the likes of Groves that the investment was too great not to exploit the weapon. Some historians go so far as to argue that there was no real decision to use it, as such. In a climate where conventional bombing could routinely kill tens of thousands in a raid, everybodies assumption had become that it would be used.
The complication is that some of those involved did hesitate and some did try to stop it. For the latter, the best known example is the “scientists’ revolt” led by Szilard in Chicago. After VE Day they explicitly questioned the reasons for using a weapon developed because of Germany being used against Japan. There is a complicated debate amongst the scientists, but this had little impact on the political process. I doubt Truman, for one, was ever aware of this dissent.
Furthermore, it’s very striking that many of those involved in the actual decision process did realise what was involved. This was never just another raid to them. Stimson seemed to regard what was happening in almost messianic terms, telling subordinates things like the bomb would change Man’s relationship with the universe. When first told of the weapon, Byrnes spent most of the meeting in shock, trying to conceive of the magnitude of what was being talked about. As already noted, Spaatz went out of his way to have the order on paper, realising that what he was being required to do was unprecidented.
As far as I can tell, the arguable exception may be Truman. While he clearly appreciated the magnitude of the weapon, there’s the notorious diary entry where he seems to think that it won’t be used against women and children (see Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, ed. by Robert H. Ferrell, Harper & Row, 1980; Penguin, 1982, p55).
But all this was a decision about using it at all. Once authorised overall, the politicians left the details to the military.
There are several problems with the two bombs = two targets argument. The first problem is that there’s no evidence anybody ever proposed this as a reason. No doubt people did realise that using both models would give information about any differences in their effects. But nobody seems to have regarded that as a reason for using both. It was an incidental benefit.
(As a parallel, this is also my problem with the Alperovitz thesis that they were used to intimidate the Soviets. Sure the State Department thought about the effect on the them. They’d have been negligent not to. But that doesn’t prove this was the reason for using them.)
Furthermore, this doesn’t fit with what is known about the development of the designs. Particularly following the publication of Hoddeson et al’s Critical Assembly (Cambridge, 1993), a lot is known about precisely such issues in relation to the organisation inside Los Alamos.
We should distinguish several types of people involved. Ouside Los Alamos, there are sites that are effectively committed to one or other design, depending on whether they’re producing plutonium or enriched uranium. But most of even the management on such sites have no idea what the Project is for. No doubt many of them took pride in their acheivement after the war, but during it they were in no position to pressurise anybody in order to justify what they were doing.
Inside Los Alamos, the scientists and engineers did know what they were working on, but the ethos doesn’t appear to have been competitive. Furthermore, up till August 1944, the gun design was the attractive option. Once it became obvious that this wouldn’t work for plutonium, two things happen. Everything was reorganised to throw most of the talent at the implosion design. And since the gun design was only going to be used for uranium, that became a much simpler problem. That design went from top priority to filling in the engineering detail. But this means that virtually everybody on site worked on both designs. If anything, the one that got used first was the design that institutionally weaker at the time, in the sense that fewer people were actively working on it in the run up to its use. And Hiroshima was seen as a collective achievement by all those on the mesa, even though most effort had been directed towards the impolsion device during 1945.
Amongst those taking the targeting decisions, you might suspect E.O. Lawrence as the most plausible for pressuring to use both designs. Certainly after Trinity, the gun design was regarded as a dead end. Enriching uranium to the required degree was massively slow and cumbersome, involving industrial plant on an unparalleled scale. Electromagnetic seperation was Lawrence’s baby and some have argued it was correspondingly a massive waste of resources. Now he was politically smart and he might just have covered his tracks, but I don’t know of any evidence that even he pressurised for using Little Boy just to justify his scheme.
But then, he didn’t have to. The whole timescale of deployment was set by the difficulty of amassing the required critical masses. Coincidentally, Little Boy was delivered to Tinian a few days ahead of the second Fat Man, the production timescales having been fixed by unrelated factors. (The first Fat Man had been used at Trinity.) The uranium weapon arrived first, so it was used first. And if the second Fat Man was used just to see what would happen, you have to explain why those who had the authority to make these decisions were also going to use the third Fat Man once it arrived. The more plausible explanation is that they were just going to bomb until they ran out of targets. And then stock them up for tactical use during an invasion of the home islands.
Just because we’re willing to use it on an air base and kill 1000 people, that doesn’t mean we’re willing to use it on a city and kill 100,000. The Japanese would know we had the weapon, but not the conviction to use it to kill so many civilians. It’s like in the cheesy suspense movies, where the Meek Heroine is pointing a gun at the Evil Bad Guy, and the EBG approaches anyway, saying “You don’t have what it takes to shoot me.” The Heroine has to shoot him in the arm to prove she really means it.
Jeff
May I ask you guys, since you seem to be in total agreement here:
If the US did not have the bomb. If the Japanese had it, and dropped it on the Grand Canyon. If they threatened to bomb New York and Los Angeles next.
Would you surrender? Or would you risk it?
First of all, are we assuming that I’m the leader of the nation that’s being bombed? Also, what am I assuming to be the result of surrender? Does it simply mean that I stop attacking Japan, and leave them to do what they please? Or does it mean that Japan comes over and colonizes the US? If the former, I would probably surrender, with an eye towards remobilizing, to confront the Japanese again should they become more of a threat. If the latter, it would be a hard choice. On the one hand, I subscribe to the “millions for defense, not one penny for tribute” brand of philosophy. On the other, I have a responsibility to my people to not get them all killed. Then again, I also have a responsibility to not allow them to become Japanese citizens against their will. If it was truly futile, I would surrender, regardless. But if it was just risky? Hard to say.
Jeff
So you would probably surrender… But, then maybe you would rather sacrifice some million citizens just to wait a little longer to give up.
Did I get that right?
I’d keep fighting. I’d argue that the Japanese didn’t have the courage to use it on a populated area and even if they did, I’d state that it simply proves what cowards they are (by attacking civilians). I’d fight until someone killed me. Period, paragraph. Of course, I don’t think that for a moment the Japanese would have used the bomb on such an uninhabited area. Their mindset was such at the time that they’d have dropped as many as they could on as many populated areas as they could manage.
Remember the context: The Japanese were being driven back from all their conquered territory. The choice was to fight to the last person or surrender and remain alive. Their home islands were about to be invaded anyway, and would eventually have been defeated, since they would have been isolated and would run out of material resources.
The closest analogous situation would be if they were already at all our borders with an overwhelming force and we were running out of ammo, food, etc.
So, you’re saying they wouldn’t dare it…
…but your also saying they’d gladly nuke as much as possible… This hardly seem very consistent, Tucker 
Care to elaborate?
MLS:
I agree on the analogy. So, what’s your conclusion?
Well, sort of, yes. They were prepared to die like, in the Emporer’s words, “A hundred million shattered jewels”. And apparently, they fully intended to do it, if rather numbly. certainly they were being urged to die like kamikazes, and in the time, no one was sure they wouldn’t. Heck, I’m not sure now!
Think for a moment. Read it again. He was saying the first was the mindset of the Japanese leadership. The second was his own response about the evil brutality of the Japanese leadership, which rightly burns in hell for their crimes.
I also think the Allied command hoped that the Japanese would come around to full surrender after realizing what happened (and maybe we did jump the gun and assume they already decided against it). However, its apparent that even after the first bomb, the military council was not going to surrender.
Well, it’s very hard for me to imagine that in the mid-1940s that situation could have occurred, given the distances and relative resources.
However: I think any country or group in the position of being about to be completely demolished by an overwhelming force would surrender, since their fighting spirit would be devastated by then as well. It would be due to more than the effect of the bomb threat.