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Yesterday, in 1945, the third atomic weapon ever detonated exploded just above Nagasaki, Japan.
Also noteworthy:
Second detonation of an implosion, plutonium device.
Last use of atomic weapons in war (so far).
78 years and counting since the last atomic war!
In 1950, I'll bet you wouldn't have found a single expert that would have predicted we'd have made it to 1965 without a second atomic war, let alone to putting the Soviet Union in its grave without one.
Well, as we have discovered, the experts don't make money off of common sense and actual facts, they make their bank off of wild speculation and fear mongering, along with a good amount of under-the-table money from agenda pushers.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the fear of the Cold War was pushed by the USSR overtly, through massive displays of supposedly working launch systems, and covertly, through various KGB schemes that bought journalism schools, news desks, activist organizations (a lot were actually created by the USSR) and others pushing The Agenda of Nuclear Death!!!! Like the concerned scientists with the nuclear doomsday clock. Yeah, no actual facts backing up their system, just fearmongering and agenda-pushing.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the world the horrors of a nuclear bomb. Well advertised tests in the Pacific and in the US showed the increasing power and destruction of fission and fusion explosions. And the big mistakes at Johnson Atoll showed that even big-badda-boooms were survivable and recoverable.
And, really, look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki now. Except for a few memorials the cities are doing fine. No increase in multi-generational cancers or mutations, no real damage to the ecology overall. H and N proved air-bursts were and are the way to go for inflicting damage without lasting issues.
Ground strikes, on the other hand, like the Soviets seemed to have favored in their targeting parameters, are just nasty.
I think the Soviets were to a certain point bluffing but they relied on the nuclear threat because they knew in a conventional war they didn't really have nearly the capabilities that they claimed to have or even what the rest of the world believed they had. We saw that when they were in Afghanistan and with their skirmishes with the Chechyns, and we're seeing some of that in the Ukraine where it turns out that Russia's inventory is far smaller and more poorly maintained and their conscripts more poorly prepared than we expected. Frankly without the US supplying them in WWII, the Nazis would probably have won despite Hitler's complete blunders in the timing and the way he went about attacking Russia. The USSR sank a huge percentages of their budgets on their military but because Communism and Socialism (neither of which the Russians, truly being more of a military oligarchy, really practiced) don't work, they couldn't last in the long run against being outspent by the west.
DeleteYou are abolutely correct though that the USSR actively puffed up their capabilities through propaganda and used the useful idiots in the west (press and other libtards like those you mention) in their favor.
I bet the Ukranians really wish they had retained the nukes they possessed at the time of the disollution of the USSR.
Damn... can't remember now if I signed that one... spent too much time writing it and forgot.
Delete-swj
In a just and right world, we would have let the national socialists and the international socialists kill each other without supplying the international socialists with anything.
DeleteSeriously, Germany and Russia should have pummeled each other. Our support should have gone to England and in the Pacific. Think about how much quicker Japan would have been pushed back if we didn't send our supplies to the USSR.
I don't disagree... We should probably have let the Russians go it on their own. But FDR was a closet pinko sympathizer as were most of the Democrats even back then. We really should have listened to people like Patton and MacArthur who wanted to "finish the job" after WWII and topple the USSR and make sure that the Nationalists beat Mao in China. Imagine history since WWII if there was no USSR and CCP. No cold war. It sure would have been different. Maybe some other horrible turn would have happened, who knows. But I think we might have been a lot better off.
DeleteWhat if Hoover had been re-elected instead of having 20 years of FDR and Truman that slid America so far left. WWII might not have even happened. The Great Depression might have ended sooner. So many alternate histories that could have been...
-swj
I can tell you that most people when we were kids believed that another world war was inevitable and that it would be nuclear. We all went through all the drills. I'm really surprised it never happened.
ReplyDelete-swj
The local airport here in Small City New Mexico has a P2V twin engine Navy anti-submarine patrol bomber just behind a fence beside the parking lot. Checking revealed that some of them were used as short term expedient nuclear bombers, to be launched from carriers on a one way trip. Around half a dozen Little Boy bombs were built because, well, they pretty much had most of the parts.
ReplyDeleteThere was no guarantee that Japan would surrenfer after the 2nd bomb was dropped. I imagine there was a lot of doubt after the 1st failed to get a surrender. I'm sure there were lots of contingency plans to deliver more to Japan or possibly even drop them on fleets or critical individual ships. If we were going to invade, they may have been planning multiple simultaneous strikes to cities across Japan or even a sustained campaign of bombs until there was a surrender. I would guess most of that kind of thing is still classified. Little Boy type bombs are easier to make than Fat Man because they don't require complex and specialized critical timing circuits for the implosion like Krytrons. As far as bombs go they are more or less just a fizzle, but enough to be a fearsome weapon. Used against the largest cities and military installations in Japan even a 1/2 dozen of them would have taken a lot of the fight out.
Delete-swj