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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that the atomic bomb wasn't scary because it could destroy a city, it was scary because it could do it with just one drop.

America had already flattened 20+ cities before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but instead of bats, they used large non-atomic bombs. The bats sound cool, but actual bombs were a little bit more dependable.

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In the late 1990s I sat in an old house in Yokkaichi City, Mie Prefecture, Japan, talking to an elderly man who had been a part of the civil defense effort during the last year of World War II. He said that he remembered being outside when bombings were starting, and seeing large dust clouds in the distance, making their way toward the city.

One night the city caught fire (it was firebombed in addition to the normal bombings) and he and his wife, both in their 20s, ran outside into the street and covered themselves with their futon mattresses as means of protective cover. The next morning they arose to find their neighborhood severely burned, and the outsides of their mattresses even partially charred.

Later I talked to another man who grew up near Nagoya--he used to love watching the bombings so much that he and his friends would sneak out of their bomb shelters and lay in the rice paddies watching them fly over. They would laugh and shout, "bii ni-jyu kyu!" (B-29!) They'd ooh and ahh as they watched flares drop.

Hearing stories like these really made me realize what a complex and nuanced world we live in.

Edit: I didn't realize this, but apparently "pumpkin bombs" were dropped on Yokkaichi City in preparation for the atomic bombing of Japan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpkin_bomb

By the time of the Hiroshima bombing, the U.S. was out of military targets and running out of civilian targets that hadn't already been thoroughly pulverized by saturation bombing. The impact of the first atomic bomb drops were therefore largely psychological.

Consider the Japanese perspective. Pretty much every military target and major urban center is already in ruins, and suddenly the enemy starts dropping an entirely new kind of bomb? The Japanese weren't scared of the handful of nuclear bombs the U.S. had managed to build. They were scared of the idea that the U.S. would start saturation nuking the entire country, even if the U.S.'s nuclear stockpile was purely symbolic at that stage.

As for bat bombs, given that the conventional bombing of Japan was so successful that nuclear weapons were a purely psychological threat, it's not surprising that "bat bombs" were deemed superfluous.

Interestingly enough, the "bat bomb" idea might be due for renewed consideration. Nuclear weapons are now considered last resort. Cluster bombs are banned by many nations and considered rather despicable to use due to the fact that the duds remain a threat to civilians long after the conflict is over (Note: The U.S. has not signed the ban and still uses cluster bombs). A "bat bomb" full of mini-drones might provide superior coverage and accuracy to cluster bombs. One such bomb could cover a larger area and target specific structures. Drones could fly their payloads directly inside buildings to structural weak-points, greatly multiplying the impact of their munitions. There would still be duds of course, but, by reducing the amount of ordinance needed to hit all targets in a given area, the impact of unexploded duds on civilians would hopefully be reduced.

> they used large non-atomic bombs

America was dropping napalm on Japanese cities filled with civilians[1]. Firebombing was a popular tactic in the 1940's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm#Military_use

Well, USA was using white phosphorus in "cities filled with civilians" in Iraq in 2004 (Fallujah), which is more like "is using".

So when talking about scary stuff like incendiary weapons it's better to not to try and fool yourself with words like "yeah, past was dark, but now it is 2014, we have all these conventions and stuff, and even in times of war people know limits of humanity, so worry not". Humans are wicked animals.

This ties in well with the fact that the US has not ratified the appropriate Geneva convention on destroying civilian supplies ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth )

According to Wikipedia, USA signed part of "Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons" which bans white phosphorus in incendiary weapons in 2009 under Obama administration.

I think the problem is that it's still one of the most effective smokescreen generating compounds out there, so militaries are hesitant to ban it entirely and not have it available for that use.

But, just because it's not marked 'incendiary' on the side of the munition doesn't mean it can be used (both purposefully or accidentally) to horrible effect on people.

"Humans are wicked animals"

Indeed. As Jonathan Swift put it: "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth"

I was going to dispute this but found you are correct - late in the war Napalm was used - 1944/5. I had though that incendiary bombing (just as bad really) was what you were talking about. The bit that is most fascinating for me in that article is the bit about the treaty banning use of napalm on civilian targets. Obama signed it with a provision: "America’s ratification, however, is subject to a diplomatic reservation that says it can disregard the treaty at its discretion if doing so would save civilian lives."

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