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    Lyco
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    The dark — and often misunderstood — nuclear history behind Oppenheimer | Alex Wellerstein
    ▻https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/7/24/23800777/oppenheimer-christopher-nolan-atomic-bomb-true-story-los-alamos-manhattan-proje

    There’s a whole line of scholarship now that is not new — it’s 20 to 30 years old, or older — which gets into the fact that the standard narrative that most people have about the use of the atomic bombs and World War II is wrong.

    We can call that the decision-to-use-the-bomb narrative, like just the idea that Harry Truman very carefully weighed whether to use the bomb or not. It was a question of, “Do you bomb? Or do you invade?” And so with a heavy heart, he chose to bomb and that was the lesser of two evils. That is just 100 percent not what happened at the time.

    It’s much less rationalized and thought out. They were planning to bomb and invade. And they didn’t know what the future would be. And Truman played very little role in all of this. This isn’t news to any scholars, but it hasn’t penetrated popular culture. And it’s not in this film at all.

    [...] So a lot of the discussions we have about the decision to use the atomic bomb — in elementary schools and high schools and even in college — it’s really a question of, if you have two bad options in front of you, are you allowed to take one of them? Are you forced to take one? So it’s about, what are the conditions in which you were allowed to destroy an entire city?

    And when we construct it that way, we are actually repeating a bad version of history that was invented by people trying to justify the use of the atomic bomb. Because if you get into the situation where you’re saying, is it better to use the atomic bomb or is it better to have this horrible, terrible invasion that will kill some giant number of people, it’s really hard to conclude that the atomic bomb wasn’t justified.

    That wasn’t how it was seen in 1945. One of the questions that often comes up is, did they have to use two bombs? Why #Nagasaki, so soon after #Hiroshima? There’s a whole way to justify that in this rational language: you say, the first bomb was to prove we had one; the second was to prove that we had more than one. And we had to do it because the Japanese didn’t respond to Hiroshima. So it was necessary. And that’s why they chose to do it. That’s all false.

    It’s false in the sense that there was no strategic choice about Nagasaki. Truman didn’t even know Nagasaki was going to happen. The [military] people on the island Tinian, who were in charge of dropping the bombs, had an order that they could drop the bombs as soon as they were ready to use, and they happened to have two bombs ready at about the same time. They got a weather forecast that said the planned date for the second bombing was going to have bad weather. So they moved it up a day to accommodate the weather. It had nothing to do with high-level strategy.

    The Japanese were, at this time, still trying to figure out what had happened at Hiroshima. They hadn’t actually concluded or even deliberated about it in any formal way. It wasn’t part of some grand scheme. It complicates the discussion quite a bit when you know those details.

    [...] There’s a colleague of mine at Princeton named Michael Gordin, and he has a book called Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War, which is all about how people thought about the atomic bomb in-between Hiroshima and the surrender of Japan. At that point, it’s not clear that the bomb has actually ended the war. And if that is the case, then your feelings on, “Well, is it some world-changing weapon or is it just a really efficient way of doing what they could already do?” [A single night of incendiary bombing killed more than 100,000 people in Tokyo on March 9, 1945.]

    So those guys on the island who decided to go ahead with the Nagasaki mission on their own choice, they see it as just another weapon. Whereas there are other people, including some of the politicians, who do not see it that way. They see it as this really core political strategic device. Once the war ends, the bomb as a special political thing, that viewpoint wins out. Looking at how people’s attitudes change, you can get a lot out of that.

    Lyco
    • @lyco
      Lyco

      Turns out Oppenheimer’s boss lied, repeatedly, about radiation poisoning
      ▻https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/08/oppenheimer-manhattan-project-radiation-atomic-bomb-declassified.html

      On Nov. 27 [1945], months after the memo about the biological effects of the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stafford Warren, the project’s chief medical officer, wrote Groves with even more definitive proof. Of the roughly 4,000 patients admitted to hospitals in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he wrote, “1300 or 33% showed effects of radiation and, of this number, approximately one-half died.”

      Nonetheless, three days later, in testimony before the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, Groves was asked if there was any “radioactive residue” at the two bombed Japanese cities. Groves replied, “There is none. That is a very positive ‘none.’ ”

      [...] in a comment that sealed his reputation among his critics, Groves said that irradiated victims who died not right away, but after some time, would do so “without undue suffering. In fact,” he said, “they say it is a very pleasant way to die.”

      Groves discounted, downplayed, then denied the reports about radiation sickness because, like many at the time, he thought that nuclear weapons would be the centerpiece of U.S. defense policy (as indeed they were for the next few decades) and that the American public would rebel against them if they were seen as something like poison gas—and thus beyond a moral threshold.

      Lyco
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