On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 11:46 PM, William Robb <[email protected]> wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "frank theriault" > Subject: Re: OT: Obama just won Nobel Peace Prize. > > >> >> Of course, since Japan didn't surrender immediately after Hiroshima, >> waiting instead until the second bomb flattened Nagasaki, it's >> doubtful that a demonstration of the bomb's capabilities at a desert >> test-site would have persuaded Japan to surrender. > > I recall reading somewhere some time prior to the internet that the Nagasaki > bomb was probably not needed to end the war, but as it was a different > design from the Hiroshima bomb, the military wanted to "test" it to see > which design had the better destructive power, and Nagasaki happened to be > there. > I don't know if there is much, if any truth to this, I don't recall what the > political leaning of the author was. > > William Robb >
The author was a crank, the Hiroshima bomb was the untested gun-type bomb (which is much simpler, so they figured it likely wouldn't need testing), Nagasaki used an implosion-type bomb of the same basic type as the Trinity test and was thus an already proven design at that point. -Adam -- M. Adam Maas http://www.mawz.ca Explorations of the City Around Us. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
