Atomic Bomb: Decision – Target Committee, May 10-11, 1945
dannen.com
dannen.com
I was struck by a few details I'd never heard before growing up in the US:
1) The center of the detonation was a hospital. It's unlikely they tried to hit the hospital, but the fact remains it was 'ground zero'.
2) A good portion of the hospital's metal frame was still standing and was a focal point of a monument; grass was growing and generally speaking it didn't match up with what I expected to see as 'ground zero' (aka a crater, nothing growing, nothing standing).
3) No active US President has ever visited Hiroshima or the museum there dedicated to the atomic bombings; Carter visited after he was no longer president.
If you have a chance to visit Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum it's well worth a visit. Quite humbling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Peace_Memorial_Museu...
To add to that, Japanese leaders aren't so keen on visiting the Pearl Harbor site either. Though their emperor has now spent a visit there: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/4918516... Neither country has come up with a formal apology.
"The attack took place before any formal declaration of war was made by Japan, but this was not Admiral Yamamoto's intention. He originally stipulated that the attack should not commence until thirty minutes after Japan had informed the United States that peace negotiations were at an end.[citation needed] The Japanese tried to uphold the conventions of war while still achieving surprise, but the attack began before the notice could be delivered."
on the other hand, making the schedule that tight increases the risk that your message doesn't get delivered in time.
"In 1999, however, Takeo Iguchi, a professor of law and international relations at International Christian University in Tokyo, discovered documents that pointed to a vigorous debate inside the government over how, and indeed whether, to notify Washington of Japan's intention to break off negotiations and start a war, including a December 7 entry in the war diary saying, "our deceptive diplomacy is steadily proceeding toward success." Of this, Iguchi said, "The diary shows that the army and navy did not want to give any proper declaration of war, or indeed prior notice even of the termination of negotiations ... and they clearly prevailed."
I don't see how one can conclude that "clearly prevailed". The message apparently wasn't 100% clear, but there was a message.
Wikipedia also says the U.S. had broken the code used to encrypt that message. That makes it unlikely that there was a second super-secret message "make sure the next message arrives late"
(Of course, this is all playing historian from a single Wikipedia page, the occasional TV program, and a tiny bit of other reading over the years)
Even a simple sentences can be translated to have may different meanings. This came up again when the Americans had trouble translating the statements the Japanese made after the Hiroshima bombing.
"Due to crosswind, the bomb missed the aiming point, the Aioi Bridge, by approximately 800 ft (240 m) and detonated directly over Shima Surgical Clinic"
Nice when people are honest enough about their own terrorism. (Like "shock and awe".)
"Shutting the country down would entail both the physical destruction of appropriate infrastructure and the shutdown and control of the flow of all vital information and associated commerce so rapidly as to achieve a level of national shock akin to the effect that dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese. "
"The second example is 'Hiroshima and Nagasaki' noted earlier. The intent here is to impose a regime of Shock and Awe through delivery of instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large, meaning its leadership and public, rather than targeting directly against military or strategic objectives even with relatively few numbers or systems. The employment of this capability against society and its values, called 'counter-value' in the nuclear deterrent jargon, is massively destructive strikes directly at the public will of the adversary to resist and, ideally or theoretically, would instantly or quickly incapacitate that will over the space of a few hours or days."
(Disclaimer: I read those quotes in the original context, to guard against taking them out of context. But I haven't read the whole thing.)
All countries do awful things during war, just some more deliberate and unethical than others.
As William Tecumseh Sherman once said, "War is Hell."
I thought that Feist v. Rural Telephone (1991) established that 'sweat of the brow doctrine' was not grounds for copyright. Should I assume that the person who claimed copyright here was incorrect in making the claim?
To be sure, the requisite level of creativity is
extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice.
The vast majority of works make the grade quite easily,
as they possess some creative spark, "no matter how crude,
humble or obvious" it might be.
Formatting can have sufficient creativity to qualify for copyright. Such copyright will only cover the formatting, not the underlying text. If someone were to take just the text, and format it themselves (by hand or by script), that should be OK.
Taking his exact e-text formatting? I don't know. Without comparing the originals to his version, I have no idea if his formatting was obvious and mechanical, or if it required creativity.
I personally don't think there's creativity in this expression.
If there is, then the flip side is that I change the format even slightly then it's also creative, and the underlying facts are not covered under copyright.
Von Neumann oversaw computations related to the expected size of the bomb blasts,
estimated death tolls, and the distance above the ground at which the bombs
should be detonated for optimum shock wave propagation and thus maximum effect.
The cultural capital Kyoto, which had been spared the firebombing inflicted
upon militarily significant target cities like Tokyo in World War II, was
von Neumann's first choice, a selection seconded by Manhattan Project leader
General Leslie Groves.
http://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Univ...?
As I get older I realize that I don't remember everything he told me about that time very well anymore. A friend suggested that I hire someone to go visit with him every week and and help him record his still quite vivid memories: the great depression, growing up in the dust bowl, traveling around the country with hobos on trains before the war, WWII, the civil rights movement, and more.
On May 30, Stimson asked Groves to remove Kyoto from the target list, but Groves pointed to its military and industrial significance.[73] Stimson then approached President Harry S. Truman about the matter. Truman agreed with Stimson, and Kyoto was temporarily removed from the target list.[74] Groves attempted to restore Kyoto to the target list in July, but Stimson remained adamant.[75][76] On July 25, Nagasaki was put on the target list in place of Kyoto.[76] Orders for the attack were issued to General Carl Spaatz on July 25 under the signature of General Thomas T. Handy, the acting Chief of Staff, since Marshall was at the Potsdam Conference with Truman.[77] That day, Truman noted in his diary that:
"This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.[78]"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
I find this very ironic ..
It's astounding to me that the decision to destroy it would come down to just a few men on a war council. Thank God that Stimson prevailed.
Turns out that the target for the second bomb was Kokura, and they did three bomb runs over it, but they then diverted to Nagasaki.[1]
Reading the report - with the rationale for each of those other targets - and then the story of the Kokura raid (which ended up hitting Nagasaki) makes it very dramatically obvious how "contingent" everthing is.
Edit: In fact Kokura, which I'd never heard of until today, got pretty lucky - as well as being the main target for what became the "Nagasaki bomb", they'd been the backup target for the first bomb
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
It was deliberated extensively, in a time before governments had lawyers at every target committee. One of the generals, LeMay, said there was no way to avoid bombing civilians because the Japanese had "deintegrated" their industry (his comment was that after bombing a civilian area, they noticed every house had a drill press still standing after everything else burnt down).
Nagasaki, by the way, was a last-minute addition due to weather at the planned target for the second bomb.
Also it seems like this was the scariest of the two 'gadgets' to fly with; those emergency procedures (removing gunpowder!) seem like they probably wouldn't have much chance of success in a real flight emergency.
That has to be one of the most true statements ever to be written.
On the other hand, the story of the plane is quite funny in terms of details (see wikipedia). The second gas tank couldn't be refilled, and the armed bomb couldn't be moved to another plane, so they took off with a half functionnng device. As famous, the winds drew the smokes over the first target, so they diverted to another one, and a third one, Nagasaki.
They actually had to save gas while flying. They had to land on another military stripe on an island. For some reason (I think the stripe was too short because they were on the wrong landing place, because of the fuel, because of the disabled tank) they didn't have enough lengh to land, so the pilots had to stand straight on the brakes. Quite circomvoluted for the most important bomb in the XXth century.
BBC also had a documentary series on nuclear weapons and espionage that was pretty good.
Are you asking for a Hollywood movie? I wouldn't want that. When the 2001 film Pearl Harbor came out, one of the quips was something like "World War II disrupts a love triangle". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_%28film%29#Recept...
In the meantime, Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb[1] is both epic and quite readable.
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16884.The_Making_of_the_A...