I'm very interested in getting a hold of the writings of George Weller, to read every detail of what he recorded there.
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I'm very interested in getting a hold of the writings of George Weller, to read every detail of what he recorded there.
Thank you, Al, for your earlier, very articulate post.
Here's a link to an expanded description of Chrysler's role in the Manhattan project: http://www.allpar.com/history/military/a-bomb.html
Let's also not forget both Germany and Japan had atomic bomb programs. They wouldn't have thought twice about using it on us. They wouldn't have stopped at 2.
Luckily we got there first.
In war good people do terrible things. That is why you avoid going to war at all costs.
But Japan was warned. Repeatedly. Their leaders are to blame for the deaths by A Bomb.
The Japan that invaded Manchuria in 1931?Quote:
They were talking as if Japan was a victim of the war.
The Japan that invaded China in 1937?
The Japan that killed 2-300,000 civilians within 60 days after they conquered Nanking in 1937, i.e. The Rape of Nanking?
Note - this was all before war broke out in Europe in September 1939. The League of Nations protested and Japan walked out of the meeting, never to return.
All true. And you could definitely pile a lot more on top of that. But it's also true, as noise says above, that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were killed by U.S. bombing, and many thousands more maimed for life, for a crime no worse than just being in the wrong country at the wrong time.
It's also pretty likely that the people lpg spoke to were either not alive yet or were children at the time of WW2. So I very much doubt that they would have had any role whatsoever in the fate of his father 70 years ago.
The American Heroes Chanel [[AHC) had an interesting 2 hour program last Saturday titled ”How We Built The Bomb”. It’s one of my favorite channels, many war specials. As a history major, I found this program enlightening and making and dropping the bomb was absolutely necessary.
Correct. The people who overheard my comment to my wife were probably in their mid-20's. If there are any lessons to be learned from this is the fact that politicians start wars, but the suffering is done by people who would just prefer to live their lives in peace.
Replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy. Little Boy, a U-235 Bomb, was used on Hiroshima; while Fat Man, a plutonium bomb, was used on Nagasaki. In 1945, these photos would have been top secret for years to come. Anyway, the intent of my original post was just to express the memories of a 1945 nine-year old boy. That much is true.
Lowell, Hiroshima was intentionally left intact during the war so the damage caused by the bomb to be assessed on a pristine city. Also the one south eastern Michigan connection I know of. I have my great uncle's Los Alamos ID card from the Manhattan Project. He was a professor at the University of Michigan and was involved with the project from the beginning. My mom talks about the brand new electric refrigerator he and my great aunt purchased for their summer cottage during the war that was filled with butter at a time when everything was rationed.
So much to be proud of, those theoretical physicists that were at Los Alamos were the preeminent scientists of their time. Given the monumental task to create and build this gadget [[they didn’t call it a bomb – but rather a gadget) knowing that failure would mean the end of life as Americans knew it.
http://www.detroityes.com/mb/attachm...1&d=1439418682
WOW, Ray, You really need to clean some of that stuff out of your garage......
In what sense? Despite the post-Pearl Harbor panic on the west coast [[including Japanese-American internment) there was never any actual danger of a Japanese invasion or attack on the U.S. mainland. Even Hawaii was beyond the practical reach of the Japanese navy, and was never attacked again after Pearl Harbor.
Once the Battle of Midway ended with a conclusive U.S. victory it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that the U.S. would win the war in the Pacific theatre. The only questions were how long it would take and how many lives it would cost.
As I said above, I am of a mind that the atomic bombs saved lives, both American and Japanese, by bringing a swift end to the war. Probably hundreds of thousands of lives, although of course the exact number is unknowable. But to say that a failure to build workable bombs would have somehow imperiled "life as Americans knew it" seems more than a little bit of a historical stretch to me.
The race to build this gadget had to do with Germany, not Japan. America was in a race against the Nazi’s – Germany had a year head start, some historians would say maybe a two year head start. Then low and behold Germany surrendered. The race was to beat Germany in building a super bomb. As it turned out, Germany was nowhere near as far along with their experiments as we feared they may have been. There was a fear that American cities would be nuked if Germany was successful.
WOW, Ray, You really need to clean some of that stuff out of your garage......
So the wife keeps telling me...... :)
By National Geographic. Total duration 46 minutes:
Quote:
This program tells the second-by-second story of a moment that changed the world forever: the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945. Through the eyes of those in the air and on the ground, including the last interview with the weapons test officer who armed the bomb, we'll experience the events as they unfolded that tragic day.