....."I looked at it and it was a B-29"

"Henry Spencer" wrote in message
...
Japan would *not* have surrendered without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
people in charge weren't Westerners in yellow makeup. Surrender simply
*was not an option*... until the destruction wrought by the atom bombs
gave Hirohito the chance to declare that the rules had changed.



Underscoring Henry's comment is the usually ignored true history
of what transpired after Hirohito decided to accept peace terms, after
two A-bombs. Hardline military officers attempted a military coup and
there was a shoot-out at the palace with fatalities.

If the coup had succeeded, the war would have gone on. It was
that close.

Jim Oberg wrote:
The space connection is this -- they built the Proton rocket to carry this
sucker,
then decided not to deploy it -- and they had a big rocket that was
converted
to space missions.


They also had this little item as a potential ICBM:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/n11gr.htm

Pat

On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 07:10:35 -0500, "Jim Oberg"
wrote:

Underscoring Henry's comment is the usually ignored true history
of what transpired after Hirohito decided to accept peace terms, after
two A-bombs. Hardline military officers attempted a military coup and
there was a shoot-out at the palace with fatalities.

....A little correction/clarification. The "coup" attempt was by a
group of junior officers who, upon learning about the Emperor's
recorded surrender address, attempted to storm the radio station and
prevent the record from being broadcast. There was a shootout, and
IIRC, all but two of the officers involved were killed.

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

Thanks -- no shooting at the palace? I recall hearing that officers had
tried to take the emperor into 'protective custody' to save him from
the 'peace faction'.



"OM" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 07:10:35 -0500, "Jim Oberg"
wrote:

Underscoring Henry's comment is the usually ignored true history
of what transpired after Hirohito decided to accept peace terms, after
two A-bombs. Hardline military officers attempted a military coup and
there was a shoot-out at the palace with fatalities.

...A little correction/clarification. The "coup" attempt was by a
group of junior officers who, upon learning about the Emperor's
recorded surrender address, attempted to storm the radio station and
prevent the record from being broadcast. There was a shootout, and
IIRC, all but two of the officers involved were killed.

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

On Aug 8, 6:53 pm, (Henry Spencer) wrote:

Japan would *not* have surrendered without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
people in charge weren't Westerners in yellow makeup. Surrender simply
*was not an option*... until the destruction wrought by the atom bombs
gave Hirohito the chance to declare that the rules had changed.

The next step, if the nukes hadn't ended the war, was going to be non-
nuclear bombing of non-civilian targets. The railroads. Right before
the rice harvest.

There was nearly a famine first year of the occupation even WITH
relatively intact transport and US help. The civilian deaths under the
famine-and-invade option -- leaving aside the US soldiers who'd be
killed invading and the Japanese who'd be killed fighting them --
would have been many more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together.

On Aug 9, 2:05 am, (Henry Spencer) wrote:

If memory serves, the pause would have been a month or so, but after that,
things would have happened faster and faster. By the end of the year,
Groves's empire was slated to be delivering a bomb a week.

The core of the third bomb was prepared on August 13th (in CONUS). Fat
Man assemblies already existed on Tinian- deliver the core and
assemble the bomb and it's ready to go. Carey Sublette believes that
the bomb could have been ready no later than August 20th.[1]

Also, the US was capable of producing (if nothing went wrong) a
staggering 10 bombs in December 1945 (and six by October), should the
Japanese decide to hold out that long. Part of that was K-25 becoming
fully operational, but another part of it was more effective designs-
the first few bombs were intentionally not as sophisticated as Los
Alamos could do. Once people are more comfortable that this damn thing
works, expect the bombs to get rather more efficient with their
fissionable materials (in particular, levitated pits).

[1] http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfa...html#nfaq8.1.5

Chris Manteuffel

On Aug 9, 9:58 am, Christopher Manteuffel wrote:
On Aug 9, 2:05 am, (Henry Spencer) wrote:

If memory serves, the pause would have been a month or so, but after that,
things would have happened faster and faster. By the end of the year,
Groves's empire was slated to be delivering a bomb a week.

The core of the third bomb was prepared on August 13th (in CONUS). Fat
Man assemblies already existed on Tinian- deliver the core and
assemble the bomb and it's ready to go. Carey Sublette believes that
the bomb could have been ready no later than August 20th.[1]


Note much of the material on US policy and options during the War in
the Pacific, including both nuclear options and our intelligence on
Japanese decision processes through our code breaking, has been
recently declassified. A lot of that material, and other interesting
material, is available through the National Security Archives

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/index.html

For this discussion note the number of bombs Groves predicted (on July
31, 1945 to General Marshall) would become available over the next few
months. It is not clear to me whether the number of bombs he mentions
is the number produced after Trinity, or that number minus the one or
two he planned to initially use on Japan, but production is
significantly more than one a month.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/45.pdf

Note he considered using the next bomb which would become available
after August 17.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/67.pdf

Also, the US was capable of producing (if nothing went wrong) a
staggering 10 bombs in December 1945 (and six by October), should the
Japanese decide to hold out that long. Part of that was K-25 becoming
fully operational, but another part of it was more effective designs-
the first few bombs were intentionally not as sophisticated as Los
Alamos could do. Once people are more comfortable that this damn thing
works, expect the bombs to get rather more efficient with their
fissionable materials (in particular, levitated pits).

[1]http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq8.html#nfaq8.1.5

Chris Manteuffel

The production estimates were not achieved, partly because something
went wrong, the Japanese surrendered. As a resullt there was a
temporary reduction in the production of nuclear material as we
converted to cheaper production methods for plutonium, and, more
importantly, conversion of material to weapons was disrupted at Los
Alamos when many of the people were told to prepare to go home. An
addtional problem with achieving those production levels was that a
standardized device design was not settled on until after the 1947
Pacific tests. The The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has published
numbers in the stockpile, and the topic is sometimes raised in
discussions of Operation Crossroads, (the biggest "Admirals Test" in
history). These estimates give six or seven weapons in July 1946, but
it is not clear whether that is before or after two were used in the
test. At any rate a production of a little less than one a month.

Pat Flannery wrote in
:



Jim Oberg wrote:
The space connection is this -- they built the Proton rocket to carry
this sucker,
then decided not to deploy it -- and they had a big rocket that was
converted
to space missions.


They also had this little item as a potential ICBM:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/n11gr.htm

Which, given its actual flight record, apparently wasn't
much of a threat.

--Damon

I wrote:
If memory serves, the pause would have been a month or so...

I have to correct this: no, Groves was expecting to ship another bomb
core within a week or so of Hiroshima, although with a bit more of a pause
following *that*. (In fact, higher authorities ordered that core shipment
delayed a few days because there were signs of action from the Japanese
government.)

The fission-fuel makers had indeed scraped things clean to get enough for
the first three bombs, but that happened considerably before Hiroshima --
it took a while for the first bombs to go from final fuel shipment to
combat readiness. Fuel production resumed meanwhile, and fabrication
delays were much shorter for the fourth bomb.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

at SAC, Thomas Power, made Lemay look sane and reasonable -- a borderline
psychopath in command of the main US nuclear forces! If the Russians
sometimes seemed a bit paranoid, well, they did have some reason for it...

Sounds a bit like the movie "Dr Strangelove"....

I suppose the security devices used on nuke bombs were a good idea. And
that we probably told the Russians in general how to build them, so they
could keep their bombs secure. There are sometimes some things you want
the enemy to know...