Mailbox was shut down on February 26, 2016. For more information, visit our blog. We’re deeply grateful to everyone who helped bring Mailbox to life, whether by spreading the word, letting us know what you liked (and didn’t like), or just by using the product and.![]() Een kernwapen (ook wel kernbom, atoombom of atoomwapen) is een type wapen dat gebruikmaakt van de energie die is opgeslagen in de kernen van atomen om een ontploffing te veroorzaken. Conventionele explosieven ontploffen door chemische reacties, waarbij. The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan . Initially, few questioned President Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, in 1. 96. 5, historian Gar Alperovitz argued that. Obviously, if the bombings weren’t necessary to win the war, then bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong. In the 4. 8 years since, many others have joined the fray: some echoing Alperovitz and denouncing the bombings, others rejoining hotly that the bombings were moral, necessary, and life- saving. Both schools of thought, however, assume that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with new, more powerful weapons did coerce Japan into surrendering on Aug. They fail to question the utility of the bombing in the first place — to ask, in essence, did it work? The United States bombed Hiroshima on Aug. Nagasaki on Aug. The support for this narrative runs deep. Free Game Free mmorpg's and online rpg games? Play this funny game or just right click to download the full game. John Hersey's 1946 piece exploring how six survivors experienced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, and its aftermath. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb. Survivors wonder why they lived when so many others died. Credit Photograph from Rolls Press / Popperfoto via Getty. GBU-53/B (Small Diameter Bomb II) Type Bomb Place of origin United States Service history In service 2017 (planned) Used by United States Production history Manufacturer Raytheon Unit cost US$128,771 (FY15) US$227,146 inc R&D (FY15) Produced January. The largest video game database online, Giant Bomb features Game Reviews, News, Videos, and Forums for the latest in PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PSP, DS, 3DS. Suicide attacks make up an increasing share of the operations financed by this money stream. At a congressional hearing last week, Brett McGurk, a senior State Department official, said 50 suicide attacks occurred in Iraq in November, compared with three in. But there are three major problems with it, and, taken together, they significantly undermine the traditional interpretation of the Japanese surrender. Timing. The first problem with the traditional interpretation is timing. And it is a serious problem. The traditional interpretation has a simple timeline: The U. S. Army Air Force bombs Hiroshima with a nuclear weapon on Aug. Nagasaki with another, and on the next day the Japanese signal their intention to surrender.* One can hardly blame American newspapers for running headlines like: “Peace in the Pacific: Our Bomb Did It!”When the story of Hiroshima is told in most American histories, the day of the bombing — Aug. All the elements of the story point forward to that moment: the decision to build a bomb, the secret research at Los Alamos, the first impressive test, and the final culmination at Hiroshima. It is told, in other words, as a story about the Bomb. But you can’t analyze Japan’s decision to surrender objectively in the context of the story of the Bomb. Casting it as “the story of the Bomb” already presumes that the Bomb’s role is central. Viewed from the Japanese perspective, the most important day in that second week of August wasn’t Aug. That was the day that the Supreme Council met — for the first time in the war — to discuss unconditional surrender. The Supreme Council was a group of six top members of the government — a sort of inner cabinet — that effectively ruled Japan in 1. Japan’s leaders had not seriously considered surrendering prior to that day. Unconditional surrender (what the Allies were demanding) was a bitter pill to swallow. The United States and Great Britain were already convening war crimes trials in Europe. What if they decided to put the emperor — who was believed to be divine — on trial? What if they got rid of the emperor and changed the form of government entirely? Even though the situation was bad in the summer of 1. Japan were not willing to consider giving up their traditions, their beliefs, or their way of life. What could have happened that caused them to so suddenly and decisively change their minds? What made them sit down to seriously discuss surrender for the first time after 1. It could not have been Nagasaki. The bombing of Nagasaki occurred in the late morning of Aug. Supreme Council had already begun meeting to discuss surrender, and word of the bombing only reached Japan’s leaders in the early afternoon — after the meeting of the Supreme Council had been adjourned in deadlock and the full cabinet had been called to take up the discussion. Based on timing alone, Nagasaki can’t have been what motivated them. Hiroshima isn’t a very good candidate either. It came 7. 4 hours — more than three days — earlier. What kind of crisis takes three days to unfold? The hallmark of a crisis is a sense of impending disaster and the overwhelming desire to take action now. How could Japan’s leaders have felt that Hiroshima touched off a crisis and yet not meet to talk about the problem for three days? President John F. Kennedy was sitting up in bed reading the morning papers at about 8: 4. Within two hours and forty- five minutes a special committee had been created, its members selected, contacted, brought to the White House, and were seated around the cabinet table to discuss what should be done. President Harry Truman was vacationing in Independence, Missouri, on June 2. North Korea sent its troops across the 3. South Korea. Secretary of State Acheson called Truman that Saturday morning to give him the news. Within 2. 4 hours, Truman had flown halfway across the United States and was seated at Blair House (the White House was undergoing renovations) with his top military and political advisors talking about what to do. Even Gen. George Brinton Mc. Clellan — the Union commander of the Army of the Potomac in 1. American Civil War, of whom President Lincoln said sadly, “He’s got the slows” — wasted only 1. Gen. Lee’s orders for the invasion of Maryland. These leaders responded — as leaders in any country would — to the imperative call that a crisis creates. They each took decisive steps in a short period of time. How can we square this sort of behavior with the actions of Japan’s leaders? If Hiroshima really touched off a crisis that eventually forced the Japanese to surrender after fighting for 1. One might argue that the delay is perfectly logical. Perhaps they only came to realize the importance of the bombing slowly. Perhaps they didn’t know it was a nuclear weapon and when they did realize it and understood the terrible effects such a weapon could have, they naturally concluded they had to surrender. Unfortunately, this explanation doesn’t square with the evidence. First, Hiroshima’s governor reported to Tokyo on the very day Hiroshima was bombed that about a third of the population had been killed in the attack and that two thirds of the city had been destroyed. This information didn’t change over the next several days. So the outcome — the end result of the bombing — was clear from the beginning. Japan’s leaders knew roughly the outcome of the attack on the first day, yet they still did not act. Second, the preliminary report prepared by the Army team that investigated the Hiroshima bombing, the one that gave details about what had happened there, was not delivered until Aug. It didn’t reach Tokyo, in other words, until after the decision to surrender had already been taken. Although their verbal report was delivered (to the military) on Aug. The decision to surrender was therefore not based on a deep appreciation of the horror at Hiroshima. Third, the Japanese military understood, at least in a rough way, what nuclear weapons were. Japan had a nuclear weapons program. Several of the military men mention the fact that it was a nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in their diaries. Anami Korechika, minster of war, even went to consult with the head of the Japanese nuclear weapons program on the night of Aug. The idea that Japan’s leaders didn’t. Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori went to Premier Suzuki Kantaro and asked that the Supreme Council be convened to discuss the bombing of Hiroshima, but its members declined. So the crisis didn’t grow day by day until it finally burst into full bloom on Aug. Any explanation of the actions of Japan’s leaders that relies on the “shock” of the bombing of Hiroshima has to account for the fact that they considered a meeting to discuss the bombing on Aug. Either they succumbed to some sort of group schizophrenia, or some other event was the real motivation to discuss surrender. Scale. Historically, the use of the Bomb may seem like the most important discrete event of the war. From the contemporary Japanese perspective, however, it might not have been so easy to distinguish the Bomb from other events. It is, after all, difficult to distinguish a single drop of rain in the midst of a hurricane. In the summer of 1. U. S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world. Sixty- eight cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed. An estimated 1. 7 million people were made homeless, 3. Sixty- six of these raids were carried out with conventional bombs, two with atomic bombs. The destruction caused by conventional attacks was huge. Night after night, all summer long, cities would go up in smoke. In the midst of this cascade of destruction, it would not be surprising if this or that individual attack failed to make much of an impression — even if it was carried out with a remarkable new type of weapon. A B- 2. 9 bomber flying from the Mariana Islands could carry — depending on the location of the target and the altitude of attack — somewhere between 1. A typical raid consisted of 5. This means that the typical conventional raid was dropping 4 to 5 kilotons of bombs on each city. The Hiroshima bomb measured 1. Nagasaki bomb 2. 0 kilotons.) Given that many bombs spread the destruction evenly (and therefore more effectively), while a single, more powerful bomb wastes much of its power at the center of the explosion — re- bouncing the rubble, as it were — it could be argued that some of the conventional raids approached the destruction of the two atomic bombings. The first of the conventional raids, a night attack on Tokyo on March 9- 1. Something like 1. An estimated 1. 20,0. Japanese lost their lives — the single highest death toll of any bombing attack on a city. We often imagine, because of the way the story is told, that the bombing of Hiroshima was far worse. We imagine that the number of people killed was off the charts. But if you graph the number of people killed in all 6. Hiroshima was second in terms of civilian deaths. If you chart the number of square miles destroyed, you find that Hiroshima was fourth. If you chart the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima was 1. Hiroshima was clearly within the parameters of the conventional attacks carried out that summer. From our perspective, Hiroshima seems singular, extraordinary.
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