[HN Gopher] What John von Neumann Did at Los Alamos
___________________________________________________________________
What John von Neumann Did at Los Alamos
Author : paulpauper
Score : 161 points
Date : 2021-09-27 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (3quarksdaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (3quarksdaily.com)
| not2b wrote:
| The repeated use of "Johnny" on almost every reference is really
| jarring and inappropriate.
| stagger87 wrote:
| That's what he went by.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| He went by "Johnny" ("Jancsi" in Hungarian) his entire life.
|
| Here's Freeman Dyson calling him "Johnny" throughout a talk
| Dyson gave at Brown University:
| https://www.ams.org/notices/201302/rnoti-p154.pdf
| not2b wrote:
| I know that. Freeman Dyson was his friend. The author of this
| article was not his friend, so it would be cool to use
| "Johnny" in a quote. Using it in every reference is weird,
| false familiarity, kind of disrespectful.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Funny they list Feynman in the familiar 'cast of characters'
| responsible for the Los Alamos effort. He was a lowly graduate
| student at the time, responsible for organizing others in the
| compute lab using mechanical calculators (if I remember his
| biography right). Not a shining star. More of a pain in the side
| - he messed with security protocols and made life hard for
| everybody.
|
| But its fun to put famous names in the article I guess.
| psanford wrote:
| Feynman was the youngest group leader at Los Alamos. He was
| also fairly instrumental in ensuring Oak Ridge didn't have an
| accidental criticality incident due to the way they were
| storing uranium oxide.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Sure but it didn't require a Nobel Prize to do that. He was
| definitely on the administration side there, don't you think?
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| Wasn't that where he invented (or adopted) pipelining for
| improving the mechanical calculators throughput?
| ndr wrote:
| The people he was leading definitely used it (against
| original instructions), and most likely invented, to his
| surprise. But he does not credit himself for it in Surely
| You're Joking Mr Feynman.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| > More of a pain in the side - he messed with security
| protocols and made life hard for everybody.
|
| Messing with security protocols is actually a good thing to
| ensure they keep getting followed
| bryan0 wrote:
| Anyone have recommendations for a good biography of von Neumann?
| e4325f wrote:
| Prisoner's Dilemma
| kryptiskt wrote:
| There's a fairly old book by William Poundstone "Prisoner's
| Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the
| Bomb". I can't vouch for it, as I read it long ago and don't
| remember just how much of a biography it was. It's very
| readable though.
| bobcostas55 wrote:
| There aren't any, though there's a new one coming out very soon
| which might be good.
| biofox wrote:
| I can recommend the one published by the AMS.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| I found "John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics
| to the Technologies of Life and Death" excellent, if you don't
| mind learning about Norbert Wiener as well :).
| csbartus wrote:
| A short one can be found in The Computer And The Brain written
| by his wife as foreword.
| https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300181111/computer-and-b...
| clint wrote:
| Turing's Cathedral has a lot about Neumann
| inasio wrote:
| The buried lede for me was that the slopes in the Pajarito ski
| mountain were created by one of the scientists just grabbing a
| bunch of explosives and blowing up trees:
|
| - Oppenheimer invited George Kistiakowsky from Harvard who was a
| world-class expert in explosives; in his spare time Kistiakowsky
| would use his explosives knowledge to raze trees and create ski
| slopes on the mesa for recreation for the scientists.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| That's super interesting. My local ski pass includes
| pajarito... it's hard to get me to want to ski in New Mexico
| but I might have to make a trip down this season
| inasio wrote:
| It's a nice little mountain, but depending on the year it
| might not have enough snow to open. People at Los Alamos
| sometimes do laps over the lunch break...
| dogman144 wrote:
| Taos is worth a visit
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The more I read about the Manhattan Project, the more I become
| convinced that if it were not for the Manhattan Project, we might
| not have nuclear weapons even now.
|
| There were a bunch of things that came together perfectly.
|
| 1) A bunch of intellectuals of the higher caliber that could be
| brought into a single location. A lot of this had to do with the
| rise of Nazism which led to a lot of these high powered
| intellectuals fleeing Germany and Eastern Europe for the US.
|
| 2) A bunch of money that could be poured into the project. At
| that time, the USA was completely committed to using every
| resource it had to win WWII.
|
| 3) Convince all those intellectuals that working on creating the
| most destructive weapon ever was a good thing. If there was ever
| a "good war" in the history of the world, it was the war against
| Hitler. I think almost everyone in the West understood at that
| time that stopping Hitler was of the highest moral imperative and
| that massive amounts of violence was the only way to stop him.
| Even with all this, people like Oppenheimer had their doubts. (Of
| course this would end up being used, not against Hitler and the
| Germans but against the Japanese).
|
| 4) The theoretic foundations for all this work were just laid a
| few decades before. This could not have happened before then.
|
| I don't see such a convergence of factors happening afterward. I
| don't think you could get the top 100 leading scientists together
| to build a superweapon now.
|
| If it were not for the Manhattan Project, I think it is likely
| that we would still be living in a nuclear weapon free world.
| Though, if that is a good thing or a bad thing with respect to
| great power wars, I am uncertain.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > A lot of this had to do with the rise of Nazism which led to
| a lot of these high powered intellectuals fleeing Germany and
| Eastern Europe for the US.
|
| The Nazis managed to drive out a large portion of Europe's best
| scientists & mathematicians (Von Neumann, Einstein, Godel
| [eventually... it took him a while to realize how bad things
| were] just to name a few). Most of which ended up in the US or
| the UK. Which in turn meant that in WWII Nazi Germany was at
| something of a scientific disadvantage without realizing it was
| of their own making. Add to this the Nazi critique of of what
| they called "Jewish science" - things like relativity, quantum
| mechanics, even Godel incompleteness theorem got this label -
| did not allow them free inquiry into many of these areas.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I don't see such a convergence of factors happening
| afterward. I don't think you could get the top 100 leading
| scientists together to build a superweapon now.
|
| It wouldn't have taken the top scientists a generation later,
| with advancements in all the related fields diffusing through
| the scientific community, even without those strictly depend on
| thr Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons, abd without the
| political context created by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first
| use might well have been by a nation with dozens of devices
| available, and no reason for restraint in using them.
| CheezeIt wrote:
| The Soviets were going to do it in a few years anyway. Maybe it
| would not be as quickly as they got it done. Japan even had a
| wisp of a program. Everybody knew that an atom bomb program was
| a thing to do.
|
| At the barest minimum, we would still develop nuclear reactors,
| and then plutonium would get discovered, and it's easy to
| manufacture and purify (compared to U-235), and the bomb is
| just a matter of time.
| foobarian wrote:
| > 1) A bunch of intellectuals of the higher caliber that could
| be brought into a single location. A lot of this had to do with
| the rise of Nazism which led to a lot of these high powered
| intellectuals fleeing Germany and Eastern Europe for the US.
|
| It's amusing that this is very much like how the bomb worked.
| Take fissile material and bring it all together into the same
| place at the exact same moment so that a chain reaction can
| occur :-)
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| It's almost a certainty that at least enriched U-235 gun-type
| weapons would be made regardless of the Manhattan Project as
| the relatively simple technology of uranium enrichment came
| online. It's almost literally a cannon shooting a U-235 bullet
| into a U-235 sphere welded to the end of the cannon. Given the
| pure material (which you can make by spinning natural uranium
| in a tube), it's basically easy. Heck, the Manhattan Project
| people didn't even bother testing it like they did with the far
| more complex plutonium implosion device (Trinity).
| stan_rogers wrote:
| The outer part was the projectile; the slug was the target.
| Making it the other way around - the way most of us always
| assumed it would have worked - would have forced the ring
| into criticality. So it _is_ an easy concept, but the first
| guess is almost bound to be the wrong one.
| [deleted]
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Interesting: citation?
| int0x2e wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon
| Look at the diagram on the right - it's the cylinder
| that's the target.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Where did you hear that? It seems to me that the only thing
| that matters is the relative speed of the two components.
| Was the ring much lower mass than the core?
|
| Edit: it was more. Nonetheless, accelerating the ring had
| advantages, according to WP! I didn't know that.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| It's not the mass _per se_ , but the need for the thing
| to be contained at the target end. If the ring is already
| at the target end, you have a relatively large mass of
| enriched uranium surrounded by a neutron reflector.
| That's not going to make things go bang, but it _is_
| enough to be rather exciting. By sitting the core
| cylinder in the middle of the containment vessel with a
| gap around it and filling that gap with the ring on
| firing, nothing goes critical until it 's supposed to go
| supercritical. (The ring is carried on a sort of sabot.)
| supperburg wrote:
| Is it easy? You have to spin the tube at 50k rpm and flow a
| gaseous form of uranium through it. It's dangerous and
| expensive and certainly hard if you've never built a
| centrifuge before.
| int0x2e wrote:
| I hope you understand that enriching Uranium isn't as simple
| as "spinning natural uranium in a tube". The Manhattan
| project used multiple different processes at the time, simply
| because time was of the essence and they didn't know which
| would work and which would be most efficient when they
| started. At peak, they used 10-15% of total US electrical
| power, as well as quite a bit of important material (mostly
| metals for particle accelerators). They didn't have access to
| centrifuge or laser based enrichment processes, which are
| significantly more power efficient, but neither of these are
| simple plants to build. Centrifuges in particular are very
| delicate pieces of machinery, constructed of special
| materials and balanced in an extremely delicate way. Oils
| from your hands would be enough to destroy a unit due to the
| crazy speeds involved. Not to mention you're still working
| with gaseous uranium hexafluoride which isn't OSHA approved
| :-).
|
| TL;DR - even if bomb design is trivial for a gun type bomb,
| generating enough enriched U235 for a proper bomb requires a
| significant, prolonged, well funded effort. I agree we would
| probably have nukes at some point, but I'm not sure when.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Centrifuges are delicate but they're not especially
| difficult for an industrial society to produce. They are
| comparable to jet engine shafts in terms of both loading
| and components. The manhattan project didn't utilize them
| because a single individual overlooked a simple method of
| making them more stable - you add a flexible section so any
| vibrations damp themselves out. German scientists claimed
| to have figured out this trick during the war, and the
| soviets implemented it shortly thereafter in their nuclear
| program, allowing them to enrich enough material for their
| weapons with only a fraction of industrial effort of the
| American project. Gas centrifuges for enrichment of
| chlorine isotopes had already been in use since 1934.
|
| Much smaller nation states have since been able to
| effectively generate enough uranium for nuclear weapons
| programs in short periods of time using centrifuges. The
| main challenge for them has not been production itself, but
| hiding the activity from international scrutiny. Tracking
| shipments of materials and parts necessary for centrifuge
| construction has been one of the leading methods of
| avoiding nuclear proliferation, but still centrifuges are
| so effective that even a small number is enough. North
| Korea, for example, is believed to have two buildings worth
| of centrifuges, but we only know where one of them is, and
| only because they have given international inspectors a
| tour of that location. For context, North Korea's current
| GDP is about 1/64th of the US's GDP in 1939.
| pdm55 wrote:
| "Gernot Zippe, an Austrian physicist, .. in the early
| 1950s figured out (with others) how to fix the problems
| that Beams had with his centrifuges. Amazingly, he did
| this while being a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union."
| http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/05/28/zippes-
| centrifuges...
| abraae wrote:
| It's also possible that if it wasn't for the Manhattan project,
| there would have been nuclear armageddon in the 50s or 60s.
|
| The bomb arrived at a time when the US and Russia were allies.
| They were focused on winning the war. By the time they started
| snarling at each other in earnest, the Russians had the bomb
| (1949) and detente had been established. WWII gave us a smooth
| glide path to both superpowers having the bomb and MAD doctrine
| was established.
|
| If instead the bomb had arrived say in the 60s, there would
| have been an entirely different political landscape. Perhaps
| even more bitter than the cold war. If one side had then got
| the bomb, just when they were at each other's throats, they
| could well have used it.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Then you'd probably have had the US and USSR go to war sometime
| in the 50s or 60s, and we'd probably have built the A bomb
| then.
| netless wrote:
| Lack of geniuses of this caliber today is reason why we don't
| have to fear AI dominance (or hope for fully autonomous vehicles
| 99,99999%). There is nobody capable of creating it.
| phkahler wrote:
| I'm not sure its lack of geniuses. It might be an inability to
| utilize them effectively.
|
| The book "Influx" presents another possibility which both
| interesting and depressing.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I recently read the new Godel biography _Journey to the Edge of
| Reason: The Life of Kurt Godel_ and it was pretty clear that Von
| Neumann played a key role in getting Godel out of Austria just
| prior to WWII. Godel had been a visiting lecturer at the IAS at
| Princeton off and on in the 30s but probably due to his mental
| illness he would go back to Austria often with little notice -
| which didn 't put him in good stead with IAS administration. In
| 1938 Godel applied to teach at the University of Vienna but was
| turned down (Though not Jewish, he was considered to be too tied
| to what was labelled "Jewish science"). He was about to be
| conscripted into the German army which would have been a disaster
| given his many health problems. When Von Neumann became aware of
| Godel's dire situation he lobbied his many powerful contacts in
| DC to come to Godel's aid. Through diplomacy the Germans
| eventually allowed Godel to leave under the condition that he
| would have to come back to serve in the army. He barely made it
| out in late '39 and probably wouldn't have without Von Neumann's
| intervention.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| "Turing's Cathedral" by George Dyson has a nice history of von
| Neumann, among others.
| Radim wrote:
| There's a story by George Dyson that gave me chills. He's
| playing in a barn as a kid and finds an ancient (clunky, weird)
| computer abandoned there. (George's dad, Freeman Dyson, was a
| heavyweight close to von Neumann & co)
|
| George then realizes that computer was a prototype built by von
| Neumann - one of the first "modern design" computers, _ever_.
|
| That's like coming into contact with the first life, directly,
| physically, in a barn.
|
| There's something magical about these origin stories. What's it
| like to face such a sharp historic discontinuity, to hold it in
| your fingers, knowing what comes next?
| csbartus wrote:
| Neumann is underrated. Everything might be relative, but one
| thing is sure: we are all reading this on a computer running on
| the von Neumann architecture.
| wmf wrote:
| Although there are stories that von Neumann architecture was
| invented by Eckert and Mauchly.
| [deleted]
| jtsiskin wrote:
| I'm not sure he's "underrated", almost everything I've heard
| about him describes him as one of the most intelligent people
| to have ever lived. I have seen more than one article proposing
| cloning his DNA as the best way to save humanity
| csbartus wrote:
| I mean, underrated in popular culture compared to Einstein,
| let's say.
|
| But, I've just learnt an anecdote about Neumann, Einstein and
| Godel.
|
| When Neumann signed for Princeton, he had two conditions: a
| 16k annual salary (others earned ~2k at that time) and to
| bring in that two people who are smarter than he.
|
| (Source, in Hungarian, someday we will have the subtitles
| from the AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu6xoHlr0zk)
|
| UPDATE: The talk is about miracles and geniuses. According to
| the speaker, a genius is somebody who sees something which
| wasn't in the air, up until that time. Neumann wasn't a
| genius, rather a polymath who saw all what was in the air at
| that time
| foobiekr wrote:
| Is his dna even available? It would be interesting to
| analyze.
| Koshkin wrote:
| They'd be all men.
| hervature wrote:
| You are probably making a comment on diversity, but men's
| DNA encodes everything needed for a women simply by
| duplicating the X chromosome. Of course, more likelihood of
| genetic defects due to a single copy of an X as men are.
| effie wrote:
| Von Neumann wasn't _that_ important in development of the
| present-day computers. He just wrote a paper where he
| formalized the designs that were already appearing in real life
| due to other people - computer pioneers like Konrad Zuse and
| Eckert & Mauchly (ENIAC). Then other people started calling
| standard computers "von Neumann architecture". Pretty sure we
| would have similar to present-day computers without John von
| Neumann.
| davidw wrote:
| > He was convinced that the Soviet Union posed an existential
| danger to the security of the United States and advocated not
| just a preemptive but a preventive strike on that country;
| thankfully that part of his advice was not taken.
|
| Yikes!
|
| I'm reading a biography of Eisenhower, and it's remarkable what a
| 'steady hand' he was in some ways in terms of hot-headed notions
| like those. Also very much in favor of curtailing defense
| spending to what was strictly necessary. He had some misses, too,
| but I found it interesting to contemplate.
| generationP wrote:
| This was probably back in Stalin's days, where an attack by the
| Soviet Union on the West was reasonably viewed as a matter of
| time. The whole idea of separate spheres of influence and
| mutual deterrents wouldn't become believable until Khrushtchov.
| cbHXBY1D wrote:
| Citation needed for "reasonably viewed". For example, Stalin
| said this to Mao in 1949:
|
| "In China a war for peace, as it were, is taking place. The
| question of peace greatly preoccupies the Soviet Union as
| well, though we have already had peace for the past four
| years. With regards to China, there is no immediate threat at
| the present time: Japan has yet to stand up on its feet and
| is thus not ready for war; America, though it screams war, is
| actually afraid of war more than anything; Europe is afraid
| of war; in essence, there is no one to fight with China, not
| unless Kim Il Sung decides to invade China? Peace will depend
| on our efforts. If we continue to be friendly, peace can last
| not only 5-10 years, but 20-25 years and perhaps even
| longer."
|
| https://china.usc.edu/conversation-between-soviet-unions-
| jos...
| philwelch wrote:
| Von Neumann once said of the Soviets: "If you say why not bomb
| them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'
| clock, I say why not one o' clock?"
| Koshkin wrote:
| This almost sounds like sarcasm.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| He also described himself as "violently anti-communist, and
| much more militaristic than the norm".
|
| In that context it doesn't sound as sarcastic.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Well, he did get himself a crater (on the far side of the Moon,
| mind you) named after him.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Better than getting a crater in Moscow named after you.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It would be hard to sell the attack on the USSR to the american
| public, after years building them as good allies in their fight
| against Hitler. Such things take 2-3 years of concentrated
| efforts by state propaganda.
|
| Even in USSR it was a problem to explain why our trustworthy
| allies have suddenly became evil and took a couple of years.
| nickff wrote:
| To be fair to Von Neumann, you're displaying hindsight bias. It
| is possible that with the knowledge they had at the time, a
| preventative or pre-emptive attack would have been rational,
| maybe even with the best 'expected outcome'.
| waffle_ss wrote:
| Bertrand Russell, famous logician, made essentially that
| argument at the time.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Sounds like a pretty flippant way to think about war crimes.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| GDC7 wrote:
| How is that possible?
|
| Even if the US bombed the USSR and prevented a counterstrike
| the US would have been worse off.
|
| You don't get to subtract 100M people out of 2.7B , the 2nd
| country in GDP and expect things to remain as they were
| before.
|
| Also the entire world would have reacted, anticipating that
| they too were going to be nuked as soon as they did something
| which would have even remotely alerted paranoid Uncle Sam.
| qersist3nce wrote:
| > Also the entire world would have reacted
|
| Hard no. No one "reacted" after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
| glassed.
| GDC7 wrote:
| In fact they reacted before.
|
| With spies inside Project Manhattan. Both the UK and USSR
| reacted with what they could, meaning their intelligence
| and espionage.
|
| It's kind of a selection bias considering that the only
| country capable of building the Atomic Bomb was the US.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| The UK provided key expertise to the Manhattan Project,
| so to say that they were "spying" is not fair. The UK
| bomb project had been going on for longer, and making it
| a joint US/UK project sped up development.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" Even if the US bombed the USSR and prevented a
| counterstrike the US would have been worse off."_
|
| Von Neumann may have been advocating for a strike before
| the Soviets had operational nuclear capabilities.
|
| > _" You don't get to subtract 100M people out of 2.7B ,
| the 2nd country in GDP and expect things to remain as they
| were before."_
|
| It is unlikely that an American nuclear strike would have
| wiped out the entire population of the Soviet Union; one
| would expect a targeted strike on critical government and
| army facilities, or something like what happened against
| the Japanese.
|
| > _" Also the entire world would have reacted, anticipating
| that they too were going to be nuked as soon as they did
| something which would have even remotely alerted paranoid
| Uncle Sam. "_
|
| The rest of the world didn't conquer and subjugate all of
| Eastern Europe, then steal from them and kidnap people in
| large numbers.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > or something like what happened against the Japanese.
|
| By the time the nukes were dropped, the 60 or so largest
| cities in Japan had been decimated by bombing (Kyoto was
| famously spared largely because of the sympathies of a
| single officer). When Tokyo was firebombed over 100k
| civilians were burned alive in a single night, the
| overwhelming majority of them women, children, and old
| men.
|
| Justified as it may have been, we shouldn't promote a
| mythology that WW2 was a clean and narrowly targeted
| campaign by the allies.
|
| There's an excellent documentary by Errol Morris named
| The Fog of War that has McNamara's very frank commentary
| on these issues. You also can find some letters Churchill
| wrote where he was engaging with these questions, such as
| asking himself if the fire bombing was morally much
| different from the use of chemical agents during WW1.
|
| Any sort of pre-emptive strike by the US vs the USSR
| would have been similarly ugly, with very real human cost
| to ordinary people with no agency in the situation.
| WitCanStain wrote:
| It's interesting to appeal to the plight of Eastern
| Europeans given that they were also on the list of
| targets. The Soviets are harming Eastern Europeans, we
| must nuke the Eastern Europeans!
| GDC7 wrote:
| > It is unlikely that an American nuclear strike would
| have wiped out the entire population of the Soviet Union;
| one would expect a targeted strike on critical government
| and army facilities, or something like what happened
| against the Japanese.
|
| USSR lion share of the population is/was in Moscow and
| St. Petersburg. A decapitation strike would have killed
| many in those 2 cities for sure. Add the fires, the
| confusion, the famine and the fact that you must followup
| with an invasion because nukes radiations dissipate fast
| and other countries around would see it as a huge
| opportunity to expand. It's easy to imagine the countries
| of the Marshall plan abandon said plan and saying "screw
| it! We'll get the eastward land instead"
|
| 100M is not far fetched.
|
| > The rest of the world didn't conquer and subjugate all
| of Eastern Europe, then steal from them and kidnap people
| in large numbers.
|
| The US is magnanimous . Meaning like some guy who got out
| of the hood and lets it slide when somebody dents his
| Ferrari. Had that person missed on a lucky break and
| still be in the hood, his reaction would be very
| different and much more violent , and it doesn't even
| need to be a Ferrari, just a light fender bender on a
| Civic will cause trouble.
|
| The US is magnanimous because of its standards of living
| , not the other way around.
| tashoecraft wrote:
| You have to understand where Von Nuemann came from to see
| why he wanted to initiate a first strike prior to the USSR
| developing nuclear weapons.
|
| He lost lots of family and friends due to the nazis. He saw
| his people get slaughtered due to a nation with crazy
| ideology being technically superior. He never wanted to be
| put in that situation again and worked on the Manhattan
| project because he believed in the USA.
|
| He viewed the USSR as another threat just like the nazis.
| For many it seemed like a guarantee that war would happen.
| Many also claimed that early attack could save lives.
|
| I'm not here to claim what he felt was right, but given the
| environment and conditions he lived through, I don't
| pretend that I wouldn't hold similar views given the
| circumstances.
| trhway wrote:
| that is the difference between theory and practice. Von
| Neuman is a genius of theory, and the idea of atomic bombing
| of USSR into oblivion has significant theoretical appeal even
| with hindsight of today. Eisenhower was battle experienced
| military general, not far from [if not the] pinnacle of
| practice. Eisenhower saw USSR soldiers, and the history of
| the guerilla war on Nazi occupied territory was well known.
| As long as few Soviet soldiers or even just some general
| population survive the atomic bombing ...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Dead_Men:
|
| "Over twelve battalions of the 11th Landwehr Division, making
| up more than 7000 men, advanced after the bombardment
| expecting little resistance. They were met at the first
| defense line by a counter-charge made up of the surviving
| soldiers of the 13th Company of the 226th Infantry Regiment.
| The Germans became panicked by the appearance of the
| Russians, who were coughing up blood and bits of their own
| lungs, as the hydrochloric acid formed by the mix of the
| chlorine gas and the moisture in their lungs had begun to
| dissolve their flesh. The Germans retreated, running so fast
| they were caught up in their own c-wire traps.[1]"
| Koshkin wrote:
| However impressive, this would only work in the case of
| occupation following the bombing. (I am not sure if there
| were such plans.)
| trhway wrote:
| that would open the game for China who was quickly coming
| online - until of course China is bombed too. Though no
| occupation could cover the territories beyond Ural
| Mountains, so China would become the main player either
| way, and much larger than it is today. Basically USSR
| would be like US in the "Man in the High Castle" - the
| part close to Europe occupied by US/NATO, large
| unoccupied wild middle and the huge East by China. Such
| configuration had already happened centuries ago -
| Crusading European Knights on West and Mongols on the
| East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kyivan_Rus%27_122
| 0-1240.p...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| As long as there are survivors, there are enemies. With
| hindsight it's clear it would have been a poor choice.
| wonnage wrote:
| You can justify any decision with "with the knowledge at the
| time", it's the same as "just following orders".
| qersist3nce wrote:
| Yeah, these are the parts conveniently ignored in almost all
| documentaries on this subject. There was also a legal dispute
| between Eckert-Mauchly and von Neumann about precedence of
| invention of early computer architectures.
|
| Good thing there was a "steady hand" Eisenhower that green lit
| dropping of the bombs on general population, otherwise who
| could have known what kinds of justifications the japs
| academics would have come up with to wash out the atrocities of
| their imperial administration?
|
| As always, history is written by the winners.
|
| [Edit]: Confused Eisenhower with Truman
| caned wrote:
| > Good thing there was a "steady hand" Eisenhower that green
| lit dropping of the bombs on general population
|
| "... in formulating policies regarding the atomic bomb and
| relations with the Soviets, Truman was guided by the U.S.
| State Department and ignored Eisenhower and the Pentagon.
| Indeed, Eisenhower had opposed the use of the atomic bomb
| against the Japanese, writing, 'First, the Japanese were
| ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with
| that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the
| first to use such a weapon.'"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower
| qersist3nce wrote:
| Sorry, I confused Truman with Eisenhower. Still, I have a
| feeling I can find similar views even from him:
|
| > In 1953, he considered using nuclear weapons to end the
| Korean War, and may have threatened China with nuclear
| attack if an armistice was not reached quickly.
|
| > He supported regime-changing military coups in Iran and
| Guatemala orchestrated by his own administration
|
| > He approved the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was left to
| John F. Kennedy to carry out.
| davidw wrote:
| The biography was interesting. Other big misses were
| essentially keeping in place the health care system we
| have today, and not being much of a leader on civil
| rights issues.
| simonh wrote:
| I'll settle for history being written by people who know what
| they're talking about. Eisenhower opposed use of the bomb on
| Japan.
| [deleted]
| rodarmor wrote:
| Misread the title as "Which John von Neumann Died at Los Alamos?"
| and now I really want to read that article.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-27 23:00 UTC)