Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>I think that if the United States had realized, that far back in time,
>how much the threat of nuclear war - and later, nanotechnological war
>and biological war - would hang over the heads of future generations,
>the correct decision would have been to spend the lives necessary to
>subdue Japan the hard way.
I disagree. First of all politically it would have been impossible, any president who chose
a million more American casualties would have been removed from power either by
impeachment or a military coup. It could even be argued that the terrible damage this new
weapon could do to a city needed to be demonstrated, and I'm sure it would not have
slowed Stalin's desire to get a bomb one bit. Indeed things have turned out far better than
anybody had a right to expect, if I had been alive in September of 1945 I would have said the
chances The Bomb would not be used in anger again for the remainder of the century were
virtually zero. Shows you what I know, but it really does seem very improbable, read the
history of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and you realize how much we owe our existence
to huge amounts of plain dumb luck. Perhaps the many worlds interpretation could explain
our ridiculous good fortune, 99.99999% of the worlds blow themselves up as expected and
we just live in a very rare one that did not. OK, foolish idea, never mind.
Anyway as I said before I do wish the Nagasaki bombing had at least been delayed for a few
days to give time for Hiroshima and the USSR entering the war against Japan to sink in,
and actually it almost happened. Bernard O'Keefe was a technician and he was alone with the
Nagasaki bomb on the day before it was to go, he was doing a final check. He writes in his book
"Nuclear Hostages" that he discovered he had made a terrible mistake. Days before he had put
the firing cable in backward, the male and female plugs were on the wrong ends. The proper way
to deal with this was clear, the bomb would have to be disassembled, the cable reversed and
then the bomb reassembled, this would take about a week. But O'Keefe didn't want to be known
to history as the man who delayed the end of the war by a week. He got a long extension cord
(no AC outlet was near the bomb for safety reasons) plugged in his soldering iron, unsoldered
the connectors, reversed them and then resoldered them. This only took about 15 minutes but
violated every safety rule in the book, once the chemical high explosives were inserted
into the bomb no electrical current or any source of heat was supposed to come anywhere
near the bomb, if caught he would have been imprisoned, assuming he wasn't blown up.
He wasn't blown up, and he told nobody about it until 40 years later when he wrote his book.
I really wish he'd played by the rules, after a week the war might have been over and
60,000 people in Nagasaki might not have died.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:21 MDT