https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57194.html

People used to calculate definite integrals by carefully drawing a graph and then cutting it out of the sheet of paper and weighing it.

The functioning of the uranium bomb was comparatively simple: a cylindrical slug of uranium was shot down a gun barrel by artillery-type explosives, into a larger mass of uranium with a slug-shaped hole in it, instantly creating a critical mass, which triggered a chain reaction. This configuration’s functioning could be mathematically modeled fairly accurately.

The plutonium bomb was quite different, having a grapefruit-sized sphere of plutonium inside a larger multifaceted sphere of high explosives, precisely shaped to compress the plutonium sphere into a critical mass when triggered. The precise design and triggering of this configuration was much less well understood, so it was the one tested on July 16, 1945.

The uranium bomb was dubbed “Little Boy” given its slimmer shape, and was considered to be pretty much a sure thing, so it was first “tested” on Hiroshima. Indeed, it worked.

The first non-test use of the plutonium bomb, dubbed “Fat Man” due to its more spherical shape, was on Nagasaki a few days later. It worked too.

Rufus, David Foster:

I was going with what I had read on the web. What “electric calculator” exactly meant in 1946, I’m not sure:
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The Abacus vs. the Electric Calculator (Nov 12, 1946): Why did the latter lose?

https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/31/the-abacus-vs-the-electric-calculator-nov-12-1946-why-did-the-latter-lose
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The above link is interesting and includes a dependably funny story about Richard Feynman taking on a Japanese abacus.

It turned out that the more complicated the calculation was, the better Feynman did. He mopped the floor with the abacus on cube roots!

Anyway. Out of nostalgia last night I decided to order the same style abacus of my youth, and the same book I used to learn the abacus. Only $24! I’ll check what the book says about the abacus v. calculator challenge.

I still have my lime-green Pickett slide rule and the last great scientific HP calculator, HP-50g. I’m a sentimental guy.

but the a bomb was the great equalizer
that was employed to end conflicts, the likelyhood it would ever be employed as a defensive measure would be be very unlikely, in the future,

For decades we were told about the
USS’s vaunted industrial power and economic strides. We were told we were falling behind.

Then, unbelievably, the Iron Curtain fell. The truth was revealed. I read a story written by two adventurous fellows who rode bicycles from Moscow to Vladivostok. What they found, except for Moscow, was basically a Third World country. So much for the quality of our intelligence.

I heard stories from academics who had attended a conference in Moscow in the 1970s.

1. Big Brother was there. A Russian who was visiting foreign conference attendees in their hotel room got a nasty phone call in the hotel room. Shaken, he left, ASAP.
2. But Big Brother couldn’t be everywhere all the time. Some Russians initiated conversations with them on the street, and when asked about Big Brother, replied that BB couldn’t see all things all the time.
3. Even in Moscow, the crown jewel of the Soviet empire, the backwardness of the Soviet economy was evident. One Cold Warrior—Army Reserve—said that he no longer feared them, having seen their backward economy up close.

I recall Matthias Rust’s adventure of flying a small plane into the Soviet Union in the 1980s, able to elude Soviet air controls.

Your story about your Truman-disliking grandfather reminds me of a cousin of mine. His other grandmother, like your grandfather, was a staunch Republican. Knowing this, my cousin would work his grandmother up, getting her to fume about “that Roosevelt.”

There were mechanical calculators powered by electric motors…the logic performing the arithmetic was all mechanical, but the motor spared the operator the effort of repeatedly pulling the level. I mentioned early calculators in this post:

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73968.html

In 1960I worked for an officer who was Truman’s Navval attaché. He told me several stories about the “old man.”

I remember especially the one about how Truman got fed up with Stalin’s stalling tactics at Potsdam. He apparently told Stalin he was leaving because he had work to do in D.C., and to call him when Stalin was ready to do some negotiating. That broke the logjam and Stalin quit stalling.

Truman liked to play poker and would play low stakes games with his staff. My old boss loved the man. His stories certainly changed my view of Truman.

I agree that WWII and the atom bomb played a big role in our future conflicts. The use of force was always calculated so as not to trigger a bigger conflict. I blame a lot of it on faulty intelligence. For decades we were told about the
USS’s vaunted industrial power and economic strides. We were told we were falling behind.

Then, unbelievably, the Iron Curtain fell. The truth was revealed. I read a story written by two adventurous fellows who rode bicycles from Moscow to Vladivostok. What they found, except for Moscow, was basically a Third World country. So much for the quality of our intelligence.

WWII was supposed to put an end to nations invading one another. And democracies bought into the idea. The authoritarians didn’t. And they probably never will.
For that reason, democratic nations must always be prepared to defend and defeat authoritarian aggressors.

Speculation is that immense amounts of German combat resources would have been available to be used against the Western allies.