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Post by beth on Aug 2, 2010 10:21:44 GMT -5
I'm going to add the last link in the Manhattan Project timeline, today, on this 2nd day of August, to leave some time for discussion and additional links and information before the anniversaries of the bombings on 8/6 and 8/9. Imagine it's 1945 and we are at war. What an enormous difference between what the American people know and what the insiders know about what's about to happen. If the Japanese had known what was coming, would they have surrendered without the bombings? ___________________________ 1945 The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the culmination of the wartime effort. January: Gen. Thomas Farrell named Gen. Groves' deputy. January 7: First RaLa test using exploding bridgewire detonators January 14: Second RaLa test using exploding bridgewire detonators May 7: Nazi Germany formally surrenders to Allied powers, marking the end of World War II in Europe. May 10–11: second meeting of the Target Committee, at Los Alamos, which works to finalize the list of cities on which atomic bombs may be dropped. June 11: Metallurgical Laboratory scientists under James Franck issue the Franck Report arguing for a demonstration of the bomb before using it against civilian targets. July 16: the first nuclear explosion, the "Trinity" test of an implosion-style plutonium-based nuclear weapon known as "the gadget", near Alamogordo, New Mexico. July 24: President Harry S. Truman discloses to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that the United States has atomic weapons. Stalin feigns little surprise; he already knows this through espionage. July 25: General Carl Spaatz is ordered to bomb one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, or Nagasaki as soon as weather permitted, some time after August 3. August 6: "Little Boy", a gun-type uranium-235 weapon, is used against the city of Hiroshima, Japan. August 9: "Fat Man", an implosion-type plutonium-239 weapon, is used against the city of Nagasaki, Japan. August 12: The Smyth Report is released to the public, giving the first technical history of the development of the first atomic bombs. August 15: Surrender of Japan to the Allied powers. August 21: Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., a physicist, receives a fatal dose (510 rems) of radiation from a criticality accident when he accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto a plutonium bomb core. He dies on September 15. October 16: Oppenheimer resigns as director of Los Alamos, and is succeeded by Norris Bradbury the next day.  |
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Post by mouse on Aug 2, 2010 12:33:34 GMT -5
i doubt the japanese would have stopped fighting even with pre knowledge
it took them time to surrender even after they had been bombed.....it was their mindset of the day...they had been fighting for years one way or the other....giving in and surrender wasnt the way the japanese went untill all was lost...some wanted imediate surrender....but...loss of face over rode common sense
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Post by beth on Aug 2, 2010 15:03:55 GMT -5
i doubt the japanese would have stopped fighting even with pre knowledge it took them time to surrender even after they had been bombed.....it was their mindset of the day...they had been fighting for years one way or the other....giving in and surrender wasnt the way the japanese went untill all was lost...some wanted imediate surrender....but...loss of face over rode common sense That seems incredible to me that, had they known, the leaders in Japan would have let it happen. Apparently, Stalin knew of our capabilities. So, what is the possibility Japan did NOT know? I am not a WWII scholar, and am also wondering exactly what Japan had to gain if they had been victorious. |
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Post by mouse on Aug 3, 2010 2:30:53 GMT -5
they had to gain at that point....saving face...... its as simple and as horrendous as that
we wanted them to surrender..while they wanted a cessation without penalties that wasnt seen as a surrender...all about saving face
dont forget they had been fighting the chinese and the koreans etc in the most brutal way
it was the japs who first used biological warfare..and experimentation[where germany got the idea from]
and of course at that point in time the emperor was still considered a god...and face was every thing in a country ridgid in tradition
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Post by mouse on Aug 3, 2010 2:33:21 GMT -5
oh and of course they did know...after the 1st bomb and still they hesitated
one of the reasons all though not the prime reason for dropping the bomb on japan was to send a message to stalin...that this could happen to him if he got too cocky in europe
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Erasmus
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Post by Erasmus on Aug 3, 2010 17:50:53 GMT -5
It reminds me of a line from a science-fiction novel For Japan it was the end of the world too but the end of the world happened in Japan every second generation so they just picked themselves up and built a new one. I think that, apart from the combination of Zen nihilism and Bushido perverted in the way it was (Yukio Mishima is good on what he considered the evil of westernization during the fascistic period - but then he was as mad as a barbed wire boat), the nature of the country makes disaster an affair regular enough not to worry about too much.
We are here, we die, we either come back here or manage to escape and the wheel keeps turning with or without us. If we live a few years longer in disgrace our next life will be less pleasant than if we go out in a blaze of glory. Building cities out of cardboard in an earthquake zone liable to hurricanes involves accepting the inevitable and just putting it all back up when it falls down instead of futile efforts to try and resist. Japan too, even more than the USSR and USA has a national paranoid outlook: the only safety against the world lies in controlling the world.
I have been unable to find any reference to The Other Hundred Years' War, a book by an ex-POW written in the 80s. He had become reasonably friendly with on of the guards who told him that Japan's war would last a hundred years if necessary. As the guard was leaving as a POW himself, the author asked where this hundred years was now "Ninety-five years to go" was the answer with a smile. So he researched and found that Japan did indeed have three plans in 1936 for world domination, two of them requiring war. They chose the wrong one but everything they have done since has still followed another directed to economic independence and domination through vertical integration of their businesses.
Pre-war they were Zaibatsu partly under government direction and usually a straight translation of the pre-1870 Second Shogunate Daimyo into directors with titles based (as was the constitution) on the German Empire. The Americans never fully broke the Zaibatsu up though they did separate some banks from the companies owning them and using them for internal fiance. Equivalents have grown back and where the West has looked to diversification and outsourcing, Japan has looked more to integration so that a big corporation typically owns its own transport, raw materials supply and housing and operates its own welfare system, making it a far more independent entity than a Western one reliant on hiring or employees to supply for themselves. In effect, the Corporation is a state within the state just like the old Daimyo's estate. They are still very fond of their uniforms and ironically, some of this, the Americans actually put in place based on their all-embracing companies of the time with their motivational meetings and company songs.
It is a fascinating book. So is Long the Imperial Way written in English by a soldier in the Imperial Army during and about the invasion of China - something Japan has been wanting to do for a thousand years! Somebody once remarked to me that all advanced alien civilization in science-fiction are basically Japan. It is a culture I find fascinating, partly because of its parallels and divergences with Britain. It occupies a similar geographical position and its known history is about as short; before 600CE legend takes over. Its native origins though are obscure. The language has been described as Central Asian with a Polynesian accent but has no obvious connection with any othre. It has even been suggested that the original Japanese were a troublesome Asian tribe deported en masse from early China. Otherwise they had to arrive by boat from the South (because they never completed settlement of the North, where the Ainu live), but have no maritime tradition, surprising if they are in any way related to Polynesians.
On the other hand, while Britain could rely on somebody with a European coast somewhere being friendly, from Japan there is only Korea and China and lots more China, both of them as hostile to outsiders as Japan itself. There is no encouragement to develop foreign relations. Both nations are xenophobic though owing a huge cultural debt to the continental mainland resulting in a nationally unique mixture. Both industrialized fast and furious, but in completely different ways. Both have had more than one commercial world empire but Japan's political attempt failed. Both have a relatively mysterious ancient history and are aware of it. Never mind Virgin Galactic, I am pretty certain that should there ever be an Imperial Spaceways, the Emperor concerned will be living in Tokyo.
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Post by mouse on Aug 4, 2010 5:00:17 GMT -5
that was intersting erasmus
incidently another thing the japanese and brits have in common...is the tea drinking which in fact had a large effect on the population..in that boiling water for tea saved both countries from water realated epidemics..thus giving both high survival populations when other countries were losing great numbers
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Erasmus
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Post by Erasmus on Aug 4, 2010 18:03:16 GMT -5
That's something I hadn't thought of. Unfortunately tea and coffee became affordable to the poor about the same time as public hygiene and modern medicine so it's not so easy to tell which had the greater effect. It would be interesting to see whether there was a marked difference in the 19th century between men and women above the poorest classes in endemic cholera because it is much more likely that the men would have been drinking unpasteurised beer and the women tea. The difference is that Japanese have been drinking tea for at least a thousand years. But then who knows what herbal teas the Brits might have drunk in the past?
Two major differences are that Japan was always a clean country, which is more than can be said of anywhere in Europe until modern times, and it has also always carried a much higher urbanised population. That no doubt helped too against plague-carrying fleas. I often think of each though as the other in a distorting mirror (St. Paul's misunderstood Through a glass darkly - a 16th century glass was a mirror).
Something horrible that almost looks like a racial characteristic, is the Japanese acceptance of 'refined' torture to an extent even the Romans might have balked at. I wonder if there is some racial characteristic simply because it seems true of not just all Orientals but their Native American cousins as well. There is some possibility I suppose in a warrior culture's show of personal bravery and indifference to individual life since putting up a good show means a better life next time round, and an acceptance of the bad as well as the good as equally transient but it still flies right in the face of the Buddhist injunction to Have Compassion on all living beings (because if they're stuck in life, they damnwell need it!) But then so do the evils wrought in the name of Love of Christ on all sides. When it comes to horrific cruelty, of all people, Tibetan Buddhists have a lot to answer for that followers of native Bön shamanism are furious that the otherwise beneficent Dalai Lama still will not address.
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Post by mouse on Aug 5, 2010 4:22:06 GMT -5
That's something I hadn't thought of. Unfortunately tea and coffee became affordable to the poor about the same time as public hygiene and modern medicine so it's not so easy to tell which had the greater effect. It would be interesting to see whether there was a marked difference in the 19th century between men and women above the poorest classes in endemic cholera because it is much more likely that the men would have been drinking unpasteurised beer and the women tea. The difference is that Japanese have been drinking tea for at least a thousand years. But then who knows what herbal teas the Brits might have drunk in the past? . tea uk predates modern hygene..coffee was more a middle class drink at the coffee houses[chocolate too]from the 17th century before tea as we know it was widely available ..... there was a poplular drink of cammomile and honey...also mint and nettle teas..the drinking of which went way way back also the brewed beers...ales ,,mead....ciders ...whiskey equivilents and of course the wines made by individual house holders from the various fruits such as gooseberries...rose hips etc one of the museaums has a huge drink holder..a highly carved decorated bowl from the earliest centuries in which beer/ale would have been served at gatherings..i forget just how wide across it is |
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Post by mouse on Aug 5, 2010 4:30:22 GMT -5
i have no problem with aknowledging racial/cultural/ethnic characturistics..they exist.. some good some bad to to deny they exist means we cannot look objectivly at any thing...some thing which often anoys me there are bound to be differences...[its all too often put down to racism to say some thing is inherent or speak of a racial difference......one has to have to be able look dispationately and unemotionally at some things..and be able to make coments without being constantly acused or racism or phobia etc etc ....[it really gets me down some times] and yes refinments in torture is quite prominent in their overall history...which was indeed a warrior culture...all very interesting trouble is life is to short to know the answers to all the questions |
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Post by mouse on Aug 5, 2010 4:36:21 GMT -5
I often think of each though as the other in a distorting mirror (St. Paul's misunderstood Through a glass darkly - a 16th century glass was a mirror).. yes indeed |
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