Did U.S. Have to Drop Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

My favorite arguement: Take something that didn't happen and make fun of how liberals would have reacted to it.

 

The fear that the Germans were working on an A-bomb was quite justified since they had scientists there who had split the atom before anyone else. It wasn't a very big leap from there to the bomb.

 

If Hitler had two bombs, would he have used them both on Russia?

 

Well, seeing as how FDR's right-hand man, Byrnes, was Truman's SecState at Potsdam and was decidedly in favor of dropping the bomb(s), I think it's pretty clear what advice FDR would have been getting.

 

Ernest Rutherford was the first person to split the atom. Did it in 1917.

And it was one hell of a big leap from there to the bomb.

 

Well the Nazis had Wernher Van Braun, head of the V-2 rocket program, who ironically went on to lead the NASA program that sent us to the moon, so yeah, they had some guys who knew some stuff.

 

Correction: It wasn't a very big leap from there to the belief that the Germans were working on the bomb. My apologies for the vague wording.

As for splitting the atom:

NOVA | Nazis and the Bomb

A nuclear program is born

In January of 1939, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published the results of an historic experiment: after bombarding uranium with neutrons—neutrally charged particles—they found barium, an element roughly half the size of uranium. Their former colleague Lise Meitner, who a few months before had been forced to flee Germany and seek refuge in Sweden, and her nephew Otto Frisch realized that the uranium nucleus had split in two. These revelations touched off a frenzy of scientific work on fission around the world.

Otto Hahn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I need to read up on why Hitler went away from building a nuke himself. He had the scientists to pull it off (granted we stole a fair number of them who actually did build the bomb), but for reasons that I forget at this moment, went away from actually developing the weapon. I don't remember if he instead went into developing other weapons of war (the V-2 for example), if his resources dwindled as the war went on or if there was something else. Whatever the reason, the world was lucky he didn't have the bomb.

 

You're right, their work had a tremendous effect. But Rutherford is credited with the first splitting of the atom. Meitner, who should have won a Nobel, and Frisch were the first to recognize the fissibility* of heavy elements could lead to the chain reaction anticipated by Leo Szilard, and they articulated a theory that explained the energy release in conformance with Einstein's special relativity.

*When I typed that in autocorrect edited it as "dissing kitty" ...

 

I bow to your superior information. I just watch NOVA, which ran an episode about the creation of nuclear weapons last week. In fact, PBS aired a whole bunch of programs last week about nuclear power, nuclear bombs and uranium. Pretty interesting stuff.

 

I don't put much weight in those ex-post comments from military leaders. Those are less criticisms of the decision, and more criticisms of the idea that the bombs won the war – a subtle difference maybe but an important one.

All those generals and admirals had a vested interest in advancing the idea that it was their leadership and their soldiers who really had won the war, and not a bunch of crackpot scientists in New Mexico.

 

Oh yeah, and quit dissing Kitty or Marshal Dillon is going to be mighty angry at you.