Another Japanese view

[royal744]

@Rising_Sun

Thank Christ that the Soviets attacked and America dropped the A bombs or that would have been implemented by Japan.

Not a popular view I know, particularly in Japan among those who like to present it as a victim of the Allies, but if they’d been left to their own devices they’d have been a victim of the militarists and nationalists and there’d have been a bloody sight fewer of them alive at the end of the war, when Japan was inevitably defeated.

Let’s put this to rest. The Japanese were working towards their own A-bomb. It doesn’t matter that they hadn’t gotten very far; what matters is that they too were interested in it and working on it. I suppose most people on this site know that one of the very last submarines sent out by the Kriegsmarine before Germany surrendered, was on a long-range mission to Japan. It was filled to the gills with U-235 intended to aid the Japanese in their bomb research. The reason we know this is that the submarine surfaced mid-Atlantic after the captain had decided he didn’t want to do this anymore. There was at least one Japanese officer aboard and he committed suicide by jumping into the ocean. The captain surrendered to the US Navy and the sub was towed to Virginia and its cargo impounded. Now if there is anyone here who believes for a nano-second that the Japanese would not have used this if they had achieved such a bomb, I have a good deal on a bridge in Brooklyn for you. Oh, the hypocrisy!

[Unstopable]

excellent story

[Wizard]

@Schuultz

I’m not denying that it was important for the entire point of the A-Bomb that the people realized the horror that the weapon was capable of. But this could have been achieved by bombing any area on the main Japanese islands. The bomb would have been big and horrifying enough to force the capitulation of Japan, without actually killing and crippling the amount of people it ended up doing.

Unfortunately, you are wrong.

A demonstration of the atomic bomb was seriously considered by the Manhattan Project scientists, but they correctly concluded that it would not work without attendant damage and casualties. Destruction of a remote military base would have been useless because the Japanese militarists would simply have closed off the area and denied that anything had happened, or at best they would have claimed that an accidental explosion had obliterated the facility. As it was, the militarists tried to downplay the extent of destruction at Hiroshima. They claimed the effects of the atomic bomb could easily be countered by moving important facilities underground. They also argued that the United States couldn’t have more than one atomic bomb. That is why it was important to drop a second bomb on Nagasaki soon after the first one.

Incidentally, testing of the atomic bombs wasn’t a factor in their use. The gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima didn’t need to be tested; all the scientists knew it would work. The implosion type bomb was tested at Alamogordo in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, thus the need for a test was satisfied.

@Schuultz

This sounds like a threat

And I am aware that the Manhattan Project was all about developing the bomb against Germany, before the Germans developed it themselves. But if IIRC (could be wrong here), the Project would have needed a good bit longer if the US weren’t able to US knowledge from captured German scientists who, despite being further away than the Americans from creating one themselves, had solved someproblems the US hadn’t yet.
Also, even if Germany hadn’t surrendered when it did, there wouldn’t have been any real targets in Germany anymore - the war was pretty much already won, whereas in Japan, there was still a major danger involved in landing on the mainland.

The atomic bomb project certainly was a threat to Nazi Germany. Had German managed to stave off defeat until the summer of 1945, the atomic bomb almost certainly would have been dropped on Germany as well as Japan. Col. Tibbets’ original orders specified that one half of the bomber group he trained to drop the bombs would be sent to Europe to operate against Germany. It was only Germany’s early capitulation that saved it from Japan’s fate.

And no, no “captured German scientists” had any input to the US atomic bomb project. Germany was in the forefront of nuclear physics research until 1934, and it was German scientists who first split the atom, although they didn’t realize until afterwards that they had. After 1934, the center of nuclear physics research had moved to Britain and the US because that is where Jewish physicists, exiled by Hitler, sought refuge. The Manhattan project started in 1941, and relied mainly on American, British, and Hungarian scientists to solve the theoretical problems of producing an atomic weapon. Most of these problems had been solved by early 1943, and the project had moved on to the engineering and production problems; German scientists never got beyond the theoretical stage and never even managed to produce a working reactor. Fermi, an Italian scientist working on the Manhattan project, had done that at the end of 1942 in Chicago. It was, ironically, the engineering and production phase that proved most troublesome and costly, and the German scientists had no insight or experience with these problems.