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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were August 6+9, 1945. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was published in 1950. Bikini Atoll was March 1, 1954. We already had a really good understanding of the consequences of nuclear weapons without needing to tow the Independence back to SF, sandblast it and sink it off the coast nearby. This was just stupidity. This was just the military ignoring what we already knew at the time.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads was in July 1947, so chances are fairly good its data was used to write “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” (couldn’t find a first edition online to verify that)

March 1, 1954 was 3 years after this ship was scuttled, so mentioning it is irrelevant.

Also, dumping waste in sea may be stupid, but it was the norm for decades. And yes, that includes dumping nuclear waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...: ”From 1946 through 1993, thirteen countries (fourteen, if the USSR and Russia are considered separately) used ocean disposal or ocean dumping as a method to dispose of nuclear/radioactive waste“

I couldn't find it either and I finally figured out why. The name changed between editions. The first edition was named The Effects of Atomic Weapons. The revised first edition is from Sept 1950. Searching the Google Books scan mentions the Independence. So you are correct on that.

I still think these tests and towing the Independence back to SF were stupid. But I'll grant that I got the timelines wrong.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Just how much information does the bombing of Japanese cities provide about the survivability of US naval assets against a nearby nuclear detonation? Ditto for an H-bomb on an island? Ditto for decontamination procedures?

Between your post calling the military stupid when it was just as likely a political decision (money?, who knows.) and the top level parent expecting people in the '40s and '50s to have the knowledge we do in 2019 I'm not sure what to think of this current generation. A very Clintonian version of US history...

My 13 year old often has issues putting himself in the position of those with less knowledge than him. He somehow thinks young children should know as much about things they should and shouldn't do as he does.

Or that animals have a cognitive ability similar to humans "I don't know why the dog wants the cookie, he knows chocolate is bad for him"

I don't know what to make of it. I hope it's just the age, but since it seems to be a wide-spread problem....maybe it's something in the water.

I don't remember having those kind of gaps in understanding at that age.

Well, obviously you wouldn't remember any thought processes as being weird, because at the time it would be subjectively normal.

When it comes to the poor judgement of teenagers, most of the brain literally isn't completely assembled yet until age 21.

You're talking about theory of mind more or less and being bad at it doesn't have to be anything more than an opportunity to learn and be taught.

I agree. But it seems to be something lacking in the general population today. They're unable to grasp the theory of the 1945 mind that had just seen one world war and was in the middle of a second world war that involved the wholesale slaughter of an entire population.

The world was a different place then yet people are passing judgement on decisions made then but colored with the 20/20 vision that hindsight provides and a life lived in the mostly stable world we have today.

Feel free to rewind to nearly any known history period and the entire world would be barbaric compared to today's standards, but that doesn't make the people that lived and fought during that time wrong.

When it comes to dropping the bomb twice on Japan, the people making the decisions and those advising them knew exactly what they were doing. Japan was already defeated and everyone knew it. The selection of civilian targets and especially the decision to drop the second bomb was known to be completely unnecessary with respect to Japan. It is hard to think of them as anything but atrocities perpetuated by people who know exactly what they were doing, the difficulty being that even if they were only done for political strategy they might have been entirely necessary to prevent something much more disastrous than WWII.

The reasons those bombs were dropped were to scare the fuck out of Stalin and keep his armies away from Japan. Perhaps unstated, but pretty obviously so. There are so many ways the world could have been very much worse after WWII, all in all it went very well (despite what many people think).

As for the testing there were people actively protesting it's beginning and continuation, but the effects and persistence of effects were not fully understood for some time. That is what you're getting at it seems. It wasn't so much about the world being a different place but that the consequences of radiation being unknown.

I won't pretend to know what was in the minds of the people at the time. Maybe there were multiple reasons and not one single "real reason."

Looking at the world today I think most people would prefer that a device that can cause such massive destruction simply not exist. I can only imagine what will happen once the ones that have been 'lost' start showing up in the wrong hands. The destruction was bad enough when in the 'right hands' (scare quotes, because I don't feel so great about what we(USA) did either.)

We can play what-if all day but we will never know what would have happened if things didn't happen as they did. I just hope that the actual version of what happened doesn't get 'corrected' in history books so that our future descendants can learn from our mistakes.

Unfortunately the bomb is obvious. It is not some eldritch construction which could be forgotten and lost forever without great effort to recreate. Once you have developed atomic physics the idea of a bomb is inevitable and once you know it can be done building one is trivial requiring only mundane resources (but a lot of them). You could explain how to build one to a child.

Increasing power is a consequence of expanding knowledge.

This is absolutely true.

All these leaders:

- Adm. William Leahy (President Truman’s Chief of Staff)

- Henry Arnold (US Army Air Forces commanding general)

- Adm. Chester Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet)

- Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, (head Bomber Command)

- Gen. Dwight Eisenhower

are all on record as acknowledging that "Japan was already defeated". [1]

[2] Japan knew they could not win and were concentrating on obtaining the best possible terms of surrender, hoping that Stalin might be convinced to mediate a settlement between the United States and Japan. This hope was dashed by the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island, which happened at 1 minute past midnight on August 9, 1945 [3].

Another important factor is that Japan had good reason to be wary of USSR military might [4]. It's arguable that Japan's fear of fighting the USSR is the reason Japan went east (to Pearl Harbour) instead of west (to eurasia) in Dec. 1941 [5].

[2] and [5] are thoroughly researched and make compelling arguments.

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-us-really-bombed-h...

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War

[4] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/effects-nomonh...

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Nomonhan-1939-Armys-Victory-Shaped/dp...

Seaborg called it the first nuclear disaster. The test yield was off by a factor of 1000 and disasters are never smart.

Eisenhower himself advocated for the Pacific Proving Grounds site when he was Army Chief of Staff [1]. It had 105 tests, atmospheric and underwater. It really was a military decision; you are just supposing it to be political. American Exceptionalism doesn't make stupidity smart.

[1] https://www.raabcollection.com/presidential-autographs/eisen...

> Seaborg called it the first nuclear disaster.

He may have called it that, but it certainly wasn't. There were numerous nuclear accidents at Los Alamos predating that test. There were also numerous civilian incidents, particularly the famous 'Radium Girls'.

Assuming you are talking about the Castle Bravo test, it was 2.7 times larger than predicted not 1000. I can't think of any test offhand that was 1000x off the predicted yield, unless you count the fizzles that might have been 1/1000th predicted yield. Castle Bravo was a terrible disaster, but more from the fallout than the actual explosion. The models of fallout and its propagation were much more inaccurate than the problems with the yield calculations, and the source of the tragic consequences.

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