I missed my Foxtrot dance lesson last week, which would have been a good one to catch.
Reading about the history of Foxtrot was interesting. The very first version was coupled to one or more blues songs, but it rapidly took off as a dance to go with ragtime. That’s a bit of a surprise to me.
And in the mid 20th century it was one of the most popular dances. So much so, that when the groundbreaking song, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” came out, the record label saw it as a Foxtrot song.
Another science video – kind of. Freeman Dyson in a very long interview, but well worth the time in my opinion.
At around the 35 minute mark he makes an argument that few Americans are even familiar with – that the Japanese surrender in WW2 had little to do with the dropping of the atomic bombs.
Hard to believe, but this is a very smart, well-informed man who was well placed to view the facts as they were unfolding.
I found it interesting, thought others here may as well.
it was gar alperovitz, who set the ridiculous narrative, it was about one upping the soviets who didn’t even have a bomb yet till 1949, thanks to oppenheimer’s leaky shop
Daym! The first BGs song I ever liked! Score One!
Dyson seems to have a motive behind his story about the non-bomb impetus to the surrender of Japan, and that is to promote the idea that unilateral nuclear disarmament would be safe. Didn’t work when we tried it with tac nukes, and now we don’t have them, and they do!
He makes the valid point that the Japanese Army would fight to the last man, unless the Emperor told them to surrender. And the Russian military is just as fanatical, but there is no sane emperor in sight there!
Mike Plaiss – Freeman Dyson was alive at the time and worked on the Manhattan project, but there’s really no reason to believe that he was in a position to know about diplomatic goings on, at least much beyond what he read in the papers.
He’s basically stating a common argument of those who question the decision to drop the bomb. There were plenty of others who were better positioned to know and who believed that the alternative to the bomb was an allied invasion of Japan that would have been as bloody as Okinawa. miguel cervantes is not wrong that US estimates for that invasion were for roughly a million casualties. I recall that the Purple Hearts ordered for the invasion of Japan were used throughout the 20th century.
I strongly suspect that Harry Truman wouldn’t have dropped the bombs if you could have told him with a high level of certainty that Japan would surrender on its own after Russian entered the war. But Truman didn’t have anything approaching a high level of certainty, and there’s no indication that he even believed that Russian entry into the pacific theater would lead to a quick Japanese surrender. He was also staring down the barrel of an invasion scenario that, between US and Japanese casualties, would have caused casualties an order of magnitude greater than those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I’ve studied the Hiroshima and Nagasaki decisions. The most significant thing I’ve learned is to pray that I’m never in the position of Harry Truman and the US military leadership in 1945.
it was a gamble that worked, sometimes terrible things have to be done, the civil war could not have ended without the horrendous loss of life, which I think was squandered for three generations by plessy,
miguel cervantes – A lot of our problems today can be traced to the reconstruction-era Supreme Court.
At around the 35 minute mark he makes an argument that few Americans are even familiar with – that the Japanese surrender in WW2 had little to do with the dropping of the atomic bombs.
==
Buy my bridge.
I think they tried to fix things, as much as could be done,
beck pointed out some interesting details from the film, the mass leaflets dropped on japan, conversely the unique status of nagasaki
By the way, I think it is not widely realized that the Hiroshima weapon was untested, being of the gun-barrel type that shot a slug of enriched uranium into a cylinder of the same, creating criticality.
The Trinity test was of the Plutonium implosion weapon used later at Nagasaki, that was deemed to be riskier because of the complexities of achieving the spherical implosion required for criticality. I am not sure whether the use of Plutonium was itself seen as more risky, beyond the engineering of the implosion.
And, except for that uncouth man, the Lincolns had a fine night at the Ford Theatre.
Another, Dyson version, of history.
Pu 239 was faster to produce than enriching U 235. We are still at work cleaning up and stabilizing nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project and follow on weapons production here at the Hanford Site.
plutonium is the more dangerous one, didn’t one of the physicists die from critical radiation exposure,
I love these guys!!!!! Listening and dancing to this group in a good bar would up my bar bill and guarantee I’d need to call an Uber for the ride home. Get out there folks and kick up your heels.
ee cervantes:
Do a YouTube search on the “Demon Core.”
A young physicist was doing manual manipulation of two Pu 239 half spheres with screwdrivers to measure sub critical radiation rates (1945 or 46). The screwdrivers slipped, the spheres came together forming a critical mass, blue flash (neutron flux >>>>). He immediately separated the spheres. Lethal dose received. He knew he was going to die. And he did a few days later.
Pu is highly carcinogenic if inhaled or injected. Not 100% lethal, but pretty bad, or so they tell us worker bees.
Several decades ago I did some fairly extensive research on what information our leaders had available to them when deciding on whether or not to drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
This was many decades ago, but from what I recall they were given estimates of huge numbers—more than a hundred thousand or so, just in the first couple of weeks or months–of projected deaths and injuries, if our troops had to stage an amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Also to be taken into account was the fact that, as the decisive time approached, the Japanese government was running a propaganda campaign, telling all Japanese that—if the Allies invaded sacred Japanese soil—each Japanese—young or old, man, women, or child–had a sacred duty to the Emperor to take whatever potentially lethal implement they could get their hands on—a rake, a hoe, an axe, a piece of wood—to go down to the invasion beaches, and to kill at least one invading soldier.
If I recall correctly, the estimates for the number of Japanese civilians who would likely be killed or injured, if Japanese civilians did come into the combat area and tried to kill our soldiers, was even higher than the death and injury estimates for our own troops.
Then, there were the blood thirsty statements of some of the Japanese Generals who would likely be the ones defending these likely landing sites and invasion routes, and they were positively salivating at the thought of a grand “Final Battle” on the Kanto plain.
Also to be considered were our intelligence estimates of the amount of war material—oil and lubricants, rations, bombs, and bullets, weapons—ships, aircraft, tanks, artillery pieces, machine guns, various explosives, etc., and the troops that the Japanese had managed to reserve to throw into such a “Final Battle.”
P.S.–As soon as the surrender was signed, specialized groups of U.S. troops fanned out, all over Japan, to survey the war damage, and to catalog the resources the Japanese had to rebuild.
What they found was that the Japanese military had managed to save far more in the way of troops, ships, aircraft, supplies and weapons for that Final Battle than our estimates had predicted.
Thus, had we invaded, the Battle would likely have lasted far longer, been more intense, and produced far more casualties than our already horrendous estimates had projected.
Re: Truman’s decision – what does Truman say to American mothers if he hadn’t used everything at his disposal to end the killing of their sons. By 1945 Japanese lives counted little in the American mind compared to American ones, and rightly so, IMO. I give Dyson credit for seeing that.
So I’m to believe that the Japanese would have folded with only a Russian declaration of hostilities and no Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If I were to put numbers on it, I would say 70/30, bombs/Russians.
The emperor ended the stalemate in the war council to end the war, and even then a last minute hothead faction attempted to derail his decision. As Dyson admits no one can know the emperor’s thinking that brought him to this point.
Something that I think is not appreciated enough is how the emperor viewed himself. He was steeped since birth in the centrality of the emperor to Japan, particularly from his grandfather – the Meiji emperor – onward. The continuance of this system, so central to Japan’s identity, and of the regal artifacts stored at Ise since the beginning of time were, IMO, one of his main concerns and this was staring him in the face by the end of the war. Nagasaki was to show that Hiroshima wasn’t a one off event. And thus he now knew – incorrectly as it turned out, US only had the two bombs at that point – that the Americans could end it all that with one more bomb.
I remember the gist of the story, yes there were some generals like prince chiribayashi, who would have sent wave after wave of conscripts against marines
Now someone is threatening a reporter for wanting the trans shooters manifesto:
This has got to be something that reflects badly on the agenda.
P.S.—From what I remember, near the end of the war, and in anticipation of a possible invasion of the Japanese home islands–“Operation Downfall”–U.S. troops –some having just finished fighting in Europe–were getting orders to head for the Pacific Theater.
Richard Cook–
Yeah, I agree, that when the authorities won’t release such a “manifesto” it’s a good bet that it’s because releasing it will damage the “narrative”– the supposed accepted “truth” that politicians, the MSM, Academia, etc. have spent a lot of time and effort establishing.
Same type of reason for why the authorities quite often–these days–won’t release the pictures, names, or backgrounds of criminals after some violent crime or incident; they don’t want the facts to contradict the phony “narrative” they’ve established.
One tactic is to slowly dribble the information out over a period of weeks or more, or, to release it, all of a sudden, months after the crime was committed, all in the hope that–by then–people will have lost interest or even forgotten about the matter.
Snow on Pine, I had a very good friend who fought in Europe and, when the war ended, he and his outfit were in California practicing beach landings. No one could tell him that the bombs should not have been used.
Here’s a good discussion on the issues of uranium versus plutonium bonds
The Uranium bomb design was straight forward with little risk that it would not work but in summer 1945 it still took six months for the United States to separate the U235 for a bomb. On the other hand, the plutonium bomb used at Nagasaki was much trickier to make work, but the reactors at Hanford Washington could produce sufficient plutonium for a bomb in about a week. The Japanese had good physicists and they knew this. The Japanese did not surrender after Hiroshima, but once they got the data from Nagasaki, Japan surrendered in a week.
This piece by Melanie Phillips appears to be a public Substack post (no paywall):
It concerns the recent judicial reforms in Israel and the Knesset’s passage of one of the reforms’ first provisions. Neo, I hope you will be writing about this, too.
But sometimes you should try.
(shudder)
P.P.S.–Richard Cook
Prime examples of this “dribble the facts out” tactic, coverage of the 2002 D.C. Beltway Snipers–and especially that of Muslim convert John Allen Muhammad–and coverage of the case of Muslim Army Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 and injured another 30 in his 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood.
In both of these cases we were lectured/scolded by the MSM that to think that Islam might have something to do with either one of these shootings was to be prejudiced, and to be indulging in “wrong think.”
mWilliams, IIRC they had another plutonium core ready to go after Nagasaki. But someone gave the order not to ship it from San Francisco. Had the order not been given the third bomb would have been ready on Tinian two weeks after Nagasaki.
There was a map published in U.S. newspapers after Nagasaki, but before the surrender, showing that 500 bombs would reduce the survivors in Japan to pre-industrial life. It was published in my family’s newspaper. I think it was distributed by United Press.
Of course 500 bombs would have required at least two years of flat out production, and a good thing it wasn’t needed. But people forget that atomic bombs did not have the eerie mystique they have today. It was a big freaking bomb with some interesting side effects. Curtis LeMay’s bombing campaign killed more in one night in Tokyo than both A-bombs combined.
And that sort of bombing campaign was considered unthinkable by military planners in the late 1930s.
Speaking of movies, The Sound of Freedom has nine daily showings at a large cineplex near me. Indiana Jones and the Stronk Empowered Woman has four.
But New York doesn’t have “a better plan”. Arguably, it never did but if so, those who voted Warren Wilhelm Jr. aka ‘Bill de Blasio’
into two terms as mayor, drove a stake through its heart.
Gordon Scott, thanks for correcting me on that.
There wasn’t a 3rd bomb on the shelf ready to ship, but as you say the folks at Los Alamos could have one ready in a week or so. That would mean, I guess, that one could have been ready to detonate over Japan sometime around the 20-25th of August ’45, about two weeks after Nagasaki.
Hey. I’m alive.
My father, an Army paratrooper in 1945, would have had to jump into an invasion of the Home Islands.
Instead he was part of the occupation forces, came home and married his best friend’s sister, my mother.
QED.
Perhaps it was COVID which brought out the crazy in a lot of people.
As if the cops didn’t have enough to deal with, in addition to the pestilential “sovereign citizens,” and Moorish aboriginal citizens, I have discovered another category of pests.
These are people—usually men—who buy themselves a steadicam, and proclaim themselves to now be “independent journalists,” or even “investigative journalists,” and they loiter around or barge their way into various places–police precincts, and local government and other offices seem to be their favorites–some loiter outside of correctional facilities, they look into cars and film their contents, and they demand that they be able to wander around, poke into things, and to film whatever they want to, under the auspices of the First Amendment.
They seem to have a lot of time on their hands, and there are apparently several often arrested “frequent flyers” who are well known to police.
Apparently a lot of these pests deliberately provoke people, in one case I saw one of these pests repeatedly pressing his camera up against the windows of NYPD police cars, and even tapping on their windows to get a response that they can put upon the web and get clicks i.e. income from.
When challenged, they make all sorts of threats of all of the suits they are going to file and, in fact, they do, sometimes file such nuisance suits.
Fascinating “Open” thread today.
I agree with Snow on The Pine about the closing of the war.
To summarise the dispute between Dyson Freeman and many others, wasn’t there a crucial element in achieving Japanese surrender? The entry of Russia, taking out a few hundred thousand Japanese troops in only weeks? Or the dropping of the atomic bomb(s) itself?
Freeman, and I think Niall Ferguson is in his camp, arguing that it was cumulative erosion of Japan’s military and industrial might that mattered. The Bomb simple shortened the time.
A final case is made for historical contingency in the details of how the Emperor came around to support surrender. It was the key political development that stanch the Island’s “all out war against surrender”, which was, indeed, the alternative.
And on this debate there remains doubt in diplomatic history circles, which leaves the question unsettled.
The other factor to share that deeply informs my long study of WWII is this: that both Japan and Germany were very ignorant about the United States — its people, culture, and vast resources.
In this way, we waged a happy war with the surprise of surprises. And not only the A-bomb as the most important one – but only the obvious one.
I believe that Americans of the time and long afterwards were deeply unaware of this truth. And later surprised that the nation had underestimated itself (See Arthur Herman’s “Freedom’s Forge” for the riveting details).
In “The Marxist Librarian” topic I mentioned “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” (1965).
I’ve rewatched it and it is indeed brilliant. I believe I finally got all the plot twists and betrayals.
Anyway. If you ever want a good old-fashioned take on good, evil and ambiguity in a tightly-scripted film with immaculate cinematography, not to mention the granite-faced Richard Burton in one of his defining roles, “Spy” is for you.
Le Carre revisited that territory in “A Most Wanted Man” (which turned out to the great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last film) but didn’t make it, though I would have to see the film again to say why.
Snow on Pine
Agree.
TJ–
It has been argued—and I think that this idea has a lot of merit–that the real reason that the U.S. won WWII was not that our generals and their tactics were superior, but, rather, that we won the “battle of production.”
For every aircraft, or tank, or weapon s our solders expended or lost we produced a couple more replacements.
Some statistics from WIKI on WWII production–
System Allies Axis
Tanks
and
self-propelled
vehicles 4,358,649 670,288
Artillery, mortars,
guns 6,792,696 1,363,491
Aircraft
637,248 300,000
Missiles
Only for testing 45,458
Ships 54,931 1,670
Meanwhile, our forces were bombing the hell out of key German war industry factories, so that they couldn’t manufacture replacements for whatever they lost in battle. We also destroyed the heavy water facilities which manufactured a key item essential for nuclear research.
It was said by British soldiers in WWII that they could tell when they were sent to a battlefield that Americans had fought on, because of all of the discarded items—weapons, rations, vehicles, artillery, rifles, ammo, etc. laying around–which they thought could still be used.
Those damned Americans both sheltered by the vast oceans (our U boats will sink all their shipping! until we can’t), and have to haul all their artillery, ammunition, and tanks on trucks, men and material across those oceans to fight us. They have to reley on on radar, proximity-fused ammunition, homing torpedoes, reliable abundant tanks, fighters, attack bombers, heavy bombers, and atomic weapons. Yes those Americans, their British,
and Soviet henchmen wouldn’t win in a fair fight. (sarc) “We Germans are superior soldiers and generals!” Whose country was totally destroyed by 1945?
Germany and Japan didn’t start a fair fight and wars aren’t about fighting “fair.”
Well, om: the average Wehrmacht soldier out killed every other nation’s military. That’s not nothing and almost succeeded becoming all that mattered.
Snow on the Pine, indeed. The “Arsenal of Democracy” became “Freedom’s Forge.”
Arthur Herman points out that an astounding 70% of all allied materiel for war was produced by the US. Yet in the run-up yers prior to war’s entry, the US has only the 18th largest Army in the world — even bested by little Holland’s defense force, even Hungary’s in size.
For those in a hurried but interested frame of mind, you can easily do worse than spending time with Arthur Herman’s talk on his book, “Freedom’s Forge”, from booktv about a decade ago. Start at 4m to start immediately. https://www.c-span.org/video/?305982-1/freedoms-forge
Roosevelt steeled himself to ramping up by recruiting titans of industry, with the task of improving on America’s failures in The Great War, which were numerous.
It is an astonishing tale, here well told but in brief.
To illustrate the success of US’ wartime production — the theme of this topic — by the end of 1942, it amounts to more than the output of the three Axis powers combined.
And by the end of 1943, this amounts to more than the combined production of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Britain. No other nation could have done this. Just stunning
It’s worth recalling that Churchill’s mother was American. And the man bet his country’s survival on its vast productive resources to achieve it. (Herman on booktc, at 34m). The man knew the US far better than the enemies did..
War production: The Soviets got enormous amounts of it. Roosevelt shoveled it out the door to them, often stiffing the Brits. And the Soviets paid pennies on the dollar, while the UK was still paying off theirs after 2000.
In the far East the stuff we gave the Sovs was passed on to Mao, who used it to run Chaing off to Taiwan.
Sadly, if we had to ramp up production today, in a way similar to what we did in WWII–an all out, 24/7, men and women both, a total effort–I don’t think that we could do it.
It’s not only that we no longer have the plant and equipment to do it.
More importantly, it appears that not enough of us, today, have the patriotism, the unity, the focus, the will, the spirit, the character, the skills, and the work ethic to do it.
In that sense, we didn’t really win the war, the Communists did, because they have infected us with their Gramscian virus, and it has gravely confused, fragmented, and weakened this country, us.
Democrats sticking to their strengths:
lying, concealing, deceiving and covering up….
Margot Cleveland, with another damning article:
“FBI agents told the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office they had already corroborated multiple details in the FD-1023, a source told The Federalist.”— https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/24/fbi-told-delaware-u-s-attorney-it-had-already-partially-corroborated-biden-bribery-claims-source-says/
H/T Powerline blog.
Concluding grafs:
‘…But not only did the Delaware office apparently ignore the allegations contained in the FD-1023, as well as the corroborating evidence already allegedly accumulated by the Pittsburgh FBI office, but U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s office allegedly secreted the very existence of the FD-1023 from the whistleblowers. Both IRS whistleblowers testified last week that they did not even learn of the existence of the FD-1023 until Barr publicly confirmed he had sent the information to Delaware for further investigation.
‘Delaware Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf also excluded the IRS agents working the Hunter Biden investigation from the meeting at which the Pittsburgh FBI agents briefed the office on the FD-1023 and the corroborating evidence they had already uncovered. The IRS whistleblowers further testified that portions of Hunter Biden’s laptop were withheld from them and they were explicitly prohibited from taking any investigative steps connected to Joe Biden — or questioning anyone by using Joe Biden’s name, “Dad,” or “the Big Guy.”
‘Under these circumstances, even if the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office comes forward now to say it did investigate the FD-1023, its belated claim would be meaningless because the individuals with the knowledge and skill necessary to investigate a complex, international money laundering, bribery, and tax fraud scheme were cut out of the process and barred from interviewing the necessary witnesses.
‘The Delaware office remains mum, however, not even pretending to have investigated the FD-1023’s allegations. That failure is even more scandalous now that we know Pittsburgh had already corroborated several aspects of the CHS’s reporting and briefed Weiss’s office on the corroborating evidence.
‘Yet the Biden White House continues to falsely claim the FD-1023 charges “have been debunked for years.” On the contrary, the only thing debunked to date has been the lies of Biden’s Democrat apologists, such as Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee Jamie Raskin, who doubled down on his claim that Barr had found the FD-1023 not credible and not meriting further investigation.’
Oops. Here’s the final graf from the above:
‘Americans now know not only that Raskin and his Democrat colleagues lied, but that President Joe Biden lied — both when he said he knew nothing of his son’s business ventures and in claiming now that the FD-1023 has been debunked.’
…Should also add that as we all—HAD BETTER—know, the 2020 election was the cleanest, most honest, most transparent election in the history of the country.
And we know this because the Democrats have told us so.
Repeatedly.
To the point of practically tarring anyone with doubts about it as an “INSURRECTIONIST”…so STRONGLY, so PASSIONATELY, so INTENSELY do they feel about the integrity and transparency of that election….
Gordon Scott, you may enjoy a book called Stalin’s War, by Sean McMeekin. He details the lend lease program pretty thoroughly, something I thought I knew a bit about. But I had no idea the magnitude and the details.
McMeekin is one of the best Soviet and Russian historians out there, he puts the Kornilov action (which of course john reed misred) in proper perspective,
I read it, Mike! Being one of those people to avoid at parties, I’m always interested in what went on behind the scenes. The question being, was FDR a total naïf in thinking that generosity without end would make Stalin nicer, or was it so that the Sovs would keep the Japanese army in China tied up while we invaded?
We now know that there were a lot of communists in key positions to feed FDR false and misleading data. When people look at the McCarthy era thinking it was all paranoia or politics–well, it was worse than people ever guessed.
By early 1944 FDR was clearly dying and increasingly dependent on aides. Harry Truman had no idea how bad FDR was until a luncheon after being nominated for VP in the summer of 1944. Afterward, a friend told Truman, “Harry, you’re not running for vice-president. You’re running for president.”
Truman replied, grimly, “I know.” Eight months later he was in the hot seat.
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I missed my Foxtrot dance lesson last week, which would have been a good one to catch.
Reading about the history of Foxtrot was interesting. The very first version was coupled to one or more blues songs, but it rapidly took off as a dance to go with ragtime. That’s a bit of a surprise to me.
And in the mid 20th century it was one of the most popular dances. So much so, that when the groundbreaking song, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” came out, the record label saw it as a Foxtrot song.
Another science video – kind of. Freeman Dyson in a very long interview, but well worth the time in my opinion.
https://youtu.be/QEe76a9hZZA
At around the 35 minute mark he makes an argument that few Americans are even familiar with – that the Japanese surrender in WW2 had little to do with the dropping of the atomic bombs.
Hard to believe, but this is a very smart, well-informed man who was well placed to view the facts as they were unfolding.
I found it interesting, thought others here may as well.
well certainly it played a factor, spared us a million allied casualties
https://twitter.com/ClownWorld_/status/1683228025809403904
it was gar alperovitz, who set the ridiculous narrative, it was about one upping the soviets who didn’t even have a bomb yet till 1949, thanks to oppenheimer’s leaky shop
Daym! The first BGs song I ever liked! Score One!
Dyson seems to have a motive behind his story about the non-bomb impetus to the surrender of Japan, and that is to promote the idea that unilateral nuclear disarmament would be safe. Didn’t work when we tried it with tac nukes, and now we don’t have them, and they do!
He makes the valid point that the Japanese Army would fight to the last man, unless the Emperor told them to surrender. And the Russian military is just as fanatical, but there is no sane emperor in sight there!
Mike Plaiss – Freeman Dyson was alive at the time and worked on the Manhattan project, but there’s really no reason to believe that he was in a position to know about diplomatic goings on, at least much beyond what he read in the papers.
He’s basically stating a common argument of those who question the decision to drop the bomb. There were plenty of others who were better positioned to know and who believed that the alternative to the bomb was an allied invasion of Japan that would have been as bloody as Okinawa. miguel cervantes is not wrong that US estimates for that invasion were for roughly a million casualties. I recall that the Purple Hearts ordered for the invasion of Japan were used throughout the 20th century.
I strongly suspect that Harry Truman wouldn’t have dropped the bombs if you could have told him with a high level of certainty that Japan would surrender on its own after Russian entered the war. But Truman didn’t have anything approaching a high level of certainty, and there’s no indication that he even believed that Russian entry into the pacific theater would lead to a quick Japanese surrender. He was also staring down the barrel of an invasion scenario that, between US and Japanese casualties, would have caused casualties an order of magnitude greater than those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I’ve studied the Hiroshima and Nagasaki decisions. The most significant thing I’ve learned is to pray that I’m never in the position of Harry Truman and the US military leadership in 1945.
it was a gamble that worked, sometimes terrible things have to be done, the civil war could not have ended without the horrendous loss of life, which I think was squandered for three generations by plessy,
miguel cervantes – A lot of our problems today can be traced to the reconstruction-era Supreme Court.
At around the 35 minute mark he makes an argument that few Americans are even familiar with – that the Japanese surrender in WW2 had little to do with the dropping of the atomic bombs.
==
Buy my bridge.
I think they tried to fix things, as much as could be done,
beck pointed out some interesting details from the film, the mass leaflets dropped on japan, conversely the unique status of nagasaki
By the way, I think it is not widely realized that the Hiroshima weapon was untested, being of the gun-barrel type that shot a slug of enriched uranium into a cylinder of the same, creating criticality.
The Trinity test was of the Plutonium implosion weapon used later at Nagasaki, that was deemed to be riskier because of the complexities of achieving the spherical implosion required for criticality. I am not sure whether the use of Plutonium was itself seen as more risky, beyond the engineering of the implosion.
And, except for that uncouth man, the Lincolns had a fine night at the Ford Theatre.
Another, Dyson version, of history.
Pu 239 was faster to produce than enriching U 235. We are still at work cleaning up and stabilizing nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project and follow on weapons production here at the Hanford Site.
plutonium is the more dangerous one, didn’t one of the physicists die from critical radiation exposure,
I love these guys!!!!! Listening and dancing to this group in a good bar would up my bar bill and guarantee I’d need to call an Uber for the ride home. Get out there folks and kick up your heels.
ee cervantes:
Do a YouTube search on the “Demon Core.”
A young physicist was doing manual manipulation of two Pu 239 half spheres with screwdrivers to measure sub critical radiation rates (1945 or 46). The screwdrivers slipped, the spheres came together forming a critical mass, blue flash (neutron flux >>>>). He immediately separated the spheres. Lethal dose received. He knew he was going to die. And he did a few days later.
Pu is highly carcinogenic if inhaled or injected. Not 100% lethal, but pretty bad, or so they tell us worker bees.
Several decades ago I did some fairly extensive research on what information our leaders had available to them when deciding on whether or not to drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
This was many decades ago, but from what I recall they were given estimates of huge numbers—more than a hundred thousand or so, just in the first couple of weeks or months–of projected deaths and injuries, if our troops had to stage an amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Also to be taken into account was the fact that, as the decisive time approached, the Japanese government was running a propaganda campaign, telling all Japanese that—if the Allies invaded sacred Japanese soil—each Japanese—young or old, man, women, or child–had a sacred duty to the Emperor to take whatever potentially lethal implement they could get their hands on—a rake, a hoe, an axe, a piece of wood—to go down to the invasion beaches, and to kill at least one invading soldier.
If I recall correctly, the estimates for the number of Japanese civilians who would likely be killed or injured, if Japanese civilians did come into the combat area and tried to kill our soldiers, was even higher than the death and injury estimates for our own troops.
Then, there were the blood thirsty statements of some of the Japanese Generals who would likely be the ones defending these likely landing sites and invasion routes, and they were positively salivating at the thought of a grand “Final Battle” on the Kanto plain.
Also to be considered were our intelligence estimates of the amount of war material—oil and lubricants, rations, bombs, and bullets, weapons—ships, aircraft, tanks, artillery pieces, machine guns, various explosives, etc., and the troops that the Japanese had managed to reserve to throw into such a “Final Battle.”
P.S.–As soon as the surrender was signed, specialized groups of U.S. troops fanned out, all over Japan, to survey the war damage, and to catalog the resources the Japanese had to rebuild.
What they found was that the Japanese military had managed to save far more in the way of troops, ships, aircraft, supplies and weapons for that Final Battle than our estimates had predicted.
Thus, had we invaded, the Battle would likely have lasted far longer, been more intense, and produced far more casualties than our already horrendous estimates had projected.
Re: Truman’s decision – what does Truman say to American mothers if he hadn’t used everything at his disposal to end the killing of their sons. By 1945 Japanese lives counted little in the American mind compared to American ones, and rightly so, IMO. I give Dyson credit for seeing that.
So I’m to believe that the Japanese would have folded with only a Russian declaration of hostilities and no Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If I were to put numbers on it, I would say 70/30, bombs/Russians.
The emperor ended the stalemate in the war council to end the war, and even then a last minute hothead faction attempted to derail his decision. As Dyson admits no one can know the emperor’s thinking that brought him to this point.
Something that I think is not appreciated enough is how the emperor viewed himself. He was steeped since birth in the centrality of the emperor to Japan, particularly from his grandfather – the Meiji emperor – onward. The continuance of this system, so central to Japan’s identity, and of the regal artifacts stored at Ise since the beginning of time were, IMO, one of his main concerns and this was staring him in the face by the end of the war. Nagasaki was to show that Hiroshima wasn’t a one off event. And thus he now knew – incorrectly as it turned out, US only had the two bombs at that point – that the Americans could end it all that with one more bomb.
I remember the gist of the story, yes there were some generals like prince chiribayashi, who would have sent wave after wave of conscripts against marines
Now someone is threatening a reporter for wanting the trans shooters manifesto:
https://justthenews.com/nation/crime/man-allegedly-threatening-kill-journalist-over-nashville-shooter-manifesto-arrested
This has got to be something that reflects badly on the agenda.
P.S.—From what I remember, near the end of the war, and in anticipation of a possible invasion of the Japanese home islands–“Operation Downfall”–U.S. troops –some having just finished fighting in Europe–were getting orders to head for the Pacific Theater.
Richard Cook–
Yeah, I agree, that when the authorities won’t release such a “manifesto” it’s a good bet that it’s because releasing it will damage the “narrative”– the supposed accepted “truth” that politicians, the MSM, Academia, etc. have spent a lot of time and effort establishing.
Same type of reason for why the authorities quite often–these days–won’t release the pictures, names, or backgrounds of criminals after some violent crime or incident; they don’t want the facts to contradict the phony “narrative” they’ve established.
One tactic is to slowly dribble the information out over a period of weeks or more, or, to release it, all of a sudden, months after the crime was committed, all in the hope that–by then–people will have lost interest or even forgotten about the matter.
Snow on Pine, I had a very good friend who fought in Europe and, when the war ended, he and his outfit were in California practicing beach landings. No one could tell him that the bombs should not have been used.
Here’s a good discussion on the issues of uranium versus plutonium bonds
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/71047/why-did-the-united-states-drop-a-uranium-bomb-instead-of-a-plutonium-bomb-on-hir
The Uranium bomb design was straight forward with little risk that it would not work but in summer 1945 it still took six months for the United States to separate the U235 for a bomb. On the other hand, the plutonium bomb used at Nagasaki was much trickier to make work, but the reactors at Hanford Washington could produce sufficient plutonium for a bomb in about a week. The Japanese had good physicists and they knew this. The Japanese did not surrender after Hiroshima, but once they got the data from Nagasaki, Japan surrendered in a week.
This piece by Melanie Phillips appears to be a public Substack post (no paywall):
https://substack.com/inbox/post/135406706
It concerns the recent judicial reforms in Israel and the Knesset’s passage of one of the reforms’ first provisions. Neo, I hope you will be writing about this, too.
But sometimes you should try.
(shudder)
P.P.S.–Richard Cook
Prime examples of this “dribble the facts out” tactic, coverage of the 2002 D.C. Beltway Snipers–and especially that of Muslim convert John Allen Muhammad–and coverage of the case of Muslim Army Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 and injured another 30 in his 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood.
In both of these cases we were lectured/scolded by the MSM that to think that Islam might have something to do with either one of these shootings was to be prejudiced, and to be indulging in “wrong think.”
mWilliams, IIRC they had another plutonium core ready to go after Nagasaki. But someone gave the order not to ship it from San Francisco. Had the order not been given the third bomb would have been ready on Tinian two weeks after Nagasaki.
There was a map published in U.S. newspapers after Nagasaki, but before the surrender, showing that 500 bombs would reduce the survivors in Japan to pre-industrial life. It was published in my family’s newspaper. I think it was distributed by United Press.
Of course 500 bombs would have required at least two years of flat out production, and a good thing it wasn’t needed. But people forget that atomic bombs did not have the eerie mystique they have today. It was a big freaking bomb with some interesting side effects. Curtis LeMay’s bombing campaign killed more in one night in Tokyo than both A-bombs combined.
And that sort of bombing campaign was considered unthinkable by military planners in the late 1930s.
Speaking of movies, The Sound of Freedom has nine daily showings at a large cineplex near me. Indiana Jones and the Stronk Empowered Woman has four.
But New York doesn’t have “a better plan”. Arguably, it never did but if so, those who voted Warren Wilhelm Jr. aka ‘Bill de Blasio’
into two terms as mayor, drove a stake through its heart.
Gordon Scott, thanks for correcting me on that.
There wasn’t a 3rd bomb on the shelf ready to ship, but as you say the folks at Los Alamos could have one ready in a week or so. That would mean, I guess, that one could have been ready to detonate over Japan sometime around the 20-25th of August ’45, about two weeks after Nagasaki.
Hey. I’m alive.
My father, an Army paratrooper in 1945, would have had to jump into an invasion of the Home Islands.
Instead he was part of the occupation forces, came home and married his best friend’s sister, my mother.
QED.
Perhaps it was COVID which brought out the crazy in a lot of people.
As if the cops didn’t have enough to deal with, in addition to the pestilential “sovereign citizens,” and Moorish aboriginal citizens, I have discovered another category of pests.
These are people—usually men—who buy themselves a steadicam, and proclaim themselves to now be “independent journalists,” or even “investigative journalists,” and they loiter around or barge their way into various places–police precincts, and local government and other offices seem to be their favorites–some loiter outside of correctional facilities, they look into cars and film their contents, and they demand that they be able to wander around, poke into things, and to film whatever they want to, under the auspices of the First Amendment.
They seem to have a lot of time on their hands, and there are apparently several often arrested “frequent flyers” who are well known to police.
Apparently a lot of these pests deliberately provoke people, in one case I saw one of these pests repeatedly pressing his camera up against the windows of NYPD police cars, and even tapping on their windows to get a response that they can put upon the web and get clicks i.e. income from.
When challenged, they make all sorts of threats of all of the suits they are going to file and, in fact, they do, sometimes file such nuisance suits.
Fascinating “Open” thread today.
I agree with Snow on The Pine about the closing of the war.
To summarise the dispute between Dyson Freeman and many others, wasn’t there a crucial element in achieving Japanese surrender? The entry of Russia, taking out a few hundred thousand Japanese troops in only weeks? Or the dropping of the atomic bomb(s) itself?
Freeman, and I think Niall Ferguson is in his camp, arguing that it was cumulative erosion of Japan’s military and industrial might that mattered. The Bomb simple shortened the time.
A final case is made for historical contingency in the details of how the Emperor came around to support surrender. It was the key political development that stanch the Island’s “all out war against surrender”, which was, indeed, the alternative.
And on this debate there remains doubt in diplomatic history circles, which leaves the question unsettled.
The other factor to share that deeply informs my long study of WWII is this: that both Japan and Germany were very ignorant about the United States — its people, culture, and vast resources.
In this way, we waged a happy war with the surprise of surprises. And not only the A-bomb as the most important one – but only the obvious one.
I believe that Americans of the time and long afterwards were deeply unaware of this truth. And later surprised that the nation had underestimated itself (See Arthur Herman’s “Freedom’s Forge” for the riveting details).
In “The Marxist Librarian” topic I mentioned “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” (1965).
I’ve rewatched it and it is indeed brilliant. I believe I finally got all the plot twists and betrayals.
Anyway. If you ever want a good old-fashioned take on good, evil and ambiguity in a tightly-scripted film with immaculate cinematography, not to mention the granite-faced Richard Burton in one of his defining roles, “Spy” is for you.
Le Carre revisited that territory in “A Most Wanted Man” (which turned out to the great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last film) but didn’t make it, though I would have to see the film again to say why.
Snow on Pine
Agree.
TJ–
It has been argued—and I think that this idea has a lot of merit–that the real reason that the U.S. won WWII was not that our generals and their tactics were superior, but, rather, that we won the “battle of production.”
For every aircraft, or tank, or weapon s our solders expended or lost we produced a couple more replacements.
Some statistics from WIKI on WWII production–
System Allies Axis
Tanks
and
self-propelled
vehicles 4,358,649 670,288
Artillery, mortars,
guns 6,792,696 1,363,491
Aircraft
637,248 300,000
Missiles
Only for testing 45,458
Ships 54,931 1,670
Meanwhile, our forces were bombing the hell out of key German war industry factories, so that they couldn’t manufacture replacements for whatever they lost in battle. We also destroyed the heavy water facilities which manufactured a key item essential for nuclear research.
It was said by British soldiers in WWII that they could tell when they were sent to a battlefield that Americans had fought on, because of all of the discarded items—weapons, rations, vehicles, artillery, rifles, ammo, etc. laying around–which they thought could still be used.
(Sorry for the formatting problems.)
Don’t leave out Operation Starvation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Starvation
Snow on Pine:
Those damned Americans both sheltered by the vast oceans (our U boats will sink all their shipping! until we can’t), and have to haul all their artillery, ammunition, and tanks on trucks, men and material across those oceans to fight us. They have to reley on on radar, proximity-fused ammunition, homing torpedoes, reliable abundant tanks, fighters, attack bombers, heavy bombers, and atomic weapons. Yes those Americans, their British,
and Soviet henchmen wouldn’t win in a fair fight. (sarc) “We Germans are superior soldiers and generals!” Whose country was totally destroyed by 1945?
Germany and Japan didn’t start a fair fight and wars aren’t about fighting “fair.”
Well, om: the average Wehrmacht soldier out killed every other nation’s military. That’s not nothing and almost succeeded becoming all that mattered.
Snow on the Pine, indeed. The “Arsenal of Democracy” became “Freedom’s Forge.”
Arthur Herman points out that an astounding 70% of all allied materiel for war was produced by the US. Yet in the run-up yers prior to war’s entry, the US has only the 18th largest Army in the world — even bested by little Holland’s defense force, even Hungary’s in size.
For those in a hurried but interested frame of mind, you can easily do worse than spending time with Arthur Herman’s talk on his book, “Freedom’s Forge”, from booktv about a decade ago. Start at 4m to start immediately.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?305982-1/freedoms-forge
Roosevelt steeled himself to ramping up by recruiting titans of industry, with the task of improving on America’s failures in The Great War, which were numerous.
It is an astonishing tale, here well told but in brief.
To illustrate the success of US’ wartime production — the theme of this topic — by the end of 1942, it amounts to more than the output of the three Axis powers combined.
And by the end of 1943, this amounts to more than the combined production of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Britain. No other nation could have done this. Just stunning
It’s worth recalling that Churchill’s mother was American. And the man bet his country’s survival on its vast productive resources to achieve it. (Herman on booktc, at 34m). The man knew the US far better than the enemies did..
War production: The Soviets got enormous amounts of it. Roosevelt shoveled it out the door to them, often stiffing the Brits. And the Soviets paid pennies on the dollar, while the UK was still paying off theirs after 2000.
In the far East the stuff we gave the Sovs was passed on to Mao, who used it to run Chaing off to Taiwan.
Sadly, if we had to ramp up production today, in a way similar to what we did in WWII–an all out, 24/7, men and women both, a total effort–I don’t think that we could do it.
It’s not only that we no longer have the plant and equipment to do it.
More importantly, it appears that not enough of us, today, have the patriotism, the unity, the focus, the will, the spirit, the character, the skills, and the work ethic to do it.
In that sense, we didn’t really win the war, the Communists did, because they have infected us with their Gramscian virus, and it has gravely confused, fragmented, and weakened this country, us.
Democrats sticking to their strengths:
lying, concealing, deceiving and covering up….
Margot Cleveland, with another damning article:
“FBI agents told the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office they had already corroborated multiple details in the FD-1023, a source told The Federalist.”—
https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/24/fbi-told-delaware-u-s-attorney-it-had-already-partially-corroborated-biden-bribery-claims-source-says/
H/T Powerline blog.
Concluding grafs:
‘…But not only did the Delaware office apparently ignore the allegations contained in the FD-1023, as well as the corroborating evidence already allegedly accumulated by the Pittsburgh FBI office, but U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s office allegedly secreted the very existence of the FD-1023 from the whistleblowers. Both IRS whistleblowers testified last week that they did not even learn of the existence of the FD-1023 until Barr publicly confirmed he had sent the information to Delaware for further investigation.
‘Delaware Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf also excluded the IRS agents working the Hunter Biden investigation from the meeting at which the Pittsburgh FBI agents briefed the office on the FD-1023 and the corroborating evidence they had already uncovered. The IRS whistleblowers further testified that portions of Hunter Biden’s laptop were withheld from them and they were explicitly prohibited from taking any investigative steps connected to Joe Biden — or questioning anyone by using Joe Biden’s name, “Dad,” or “the Big Guy.”
‘Under these circumstances, even if the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office comes forward now to say it did investigate the FD-1023, its belated claim would be meaningless because the individuals with the knowledge and skill necessary to investigate a complex, international money laundering, bribery, and tax fraud scheme were cut out of the process and barred from interviewing the necessary witnesses.
‘The Delaware office remains mum, however, not even pretending to have investigated the FD-1023’s allegations. That failure is even more scandalous now that we know Pittsburgh had already corroborated several aspects of the CHS’s reporting and briefed Weiss’s office on the corroborating evidence.
‘Yet the Biden White House continues to falsely claim the FD-1023 charges “have been debunked for years.” On the contrary, the only thing debunked to date has been the lies of Biden’s Democrat apologists, such as Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee Jamie Raskin, who doubled down on his claim that Barr had found the FD-1023 not credible and not meriting further investigation.’
Oops. Here’s the final graf from the above:
‘Americans now know not only that Raskin and his Democrat colleagues lied, but that President Joe Biden lied — both when he said he knew nothing of his son’s business ventures and in claiming now that the FD-1023 has been debunked.’
…Should also add that as we all—HAD BETTER—know, the 2020 election was the cleanest, most honest, most transparent election in the history of the country.
And we know this because the Democrats have told us so.
Repeatedly.
To the point of practically tarring anyone with doubts about it as an “INSURRECTIONIST”…so STRONGLY, so PASSIONATELY, so INTENSELY do they feel about the integrity and transparency of that election….
File under: “…passionate intensity…”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/nyts_thomas_friedman_publishes_an_astonishing_open_letter_to_biden_.html
Gordon Scott, you may enjoy a book called Stalin’s War, by Sean McMeekin. He details the lend lease program pretty thoroughly, something I thought I knew a bit about. But I had no idea the magnitude and the details.
McMeekin is one of the best Soviet and Russian historians out there, he puts the Kornilov action (which of course john reed misred) in proper perspective,
https://twitter.com/CynicalPublius/status/1683619245249400832
By the way, the book is about much more than lend lease, that would be pretty boring.
https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-War-New-History-World/dp/1541672798/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=bf2a47a6-f415-4014-a9d2-9d9738791c24
NEO: You can’t keep a good song down
That’s what YOU thought. Apparently you haven’t yet heard what Darlene Edwards, a.k.a. Jo Stafford, did to the song. Stayin’ Alive – Jo Stafford (As Darlene Edwards with Jonathan Edwards)
Here is Jo as Jo, not as Darlene.Jo Stafford I’ll Be Seeing You 1944
I read it, Mike! Being one of those people to avoid at parties, I’m always interested in what went on behind the scenes. The question being, was FDR a total naïf in thinking that generosity without end would make Stalin nicer, or was it so that the Sovs would keep the Japanese army in China tied up while we invaded?
We now know that there were a lot of communists in key positions to feed FDR false and misleading data. When people look at the McCarthy era thinking it was all paranoia or politics–well, it was worse than people ever guessed.
By early 1944 FDR was clearly dying and increasingly dependent on aides. Harry Truman had no idea how bad FDR was until a luncheon after being nominated for VP in the summer of 1944. Afterward, a friend told Truman, “Harry, you’re not running for vice-president. You’re running for president.”
Truman replied, grimly, “I know.” Eight months later he was in the hot seat.