And not just Zeppelins. The Germans built the first strategic bombers to bomb London after the Brits finally developed a working incendiary round for machine guns and began taking them down.
By the 1920’s, it was an accepted principle of international law that the deliberate targeting of civilians and/or the indiscriminate bombing of population centers was against the law of war, along with unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping. Both things we turned to without much compunction in the Pacific Theater.
The very thing that made the bombing of Guernica so shocking is that it was considered a major transgression of the bounds of decency and international law.
Okay, sure. But why can’t we use them on countries that don’t have them?
The only doubt I have that that’s what he was asking about is the latent doubt about the veracity of something Morning Blow attributed to a single unnamed source. And, frankly I find the assertion inherently credible.
In TMOTAB, Richard Rhodes does describe Eisenhower contemporaneously as being against the use of the atomic bombs in 1945. But your point is the salient one - he seems to have gotten over his objections, in a serious way.
None of it would have happened - we wouldn’t have dropped the bomb and maybe not even produced it if Henry Wallace had gotten the nomination like he should have.
So if we’re going to replay all our moves and mistakes from 90 years ago, let’s start here - Henry Wallace should have been the Democratic nominee, not Harry Truman who had no governmental background and didn’t have the intellect for the job in the first place.
The nuke triad, which Trump doesn’t have a clue about, has been the single greatest contributor to global peace for decades. You heard me
The triad is an accident of history and military politicking. The Army, Navy and Air Force all wanted to be involved in the delivery of nuclear warheads. The Army and Air Force did battle over who would control ballistic missiles. The Air Force ended up with the ICBMs and the Army with the IRBMs. When the IRBMs were phased out following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Army was left with so-called tactical nuclear weapons. During the St. Raygun buildup the Army got back into the business with the Pershing II IRBM.
The Air Force always controlled the bomber leg of the triad.
The Navy initially got involved with nuclear weapons on its carriers. They began introducing cruise missiles in the mid 1950s. As soon as they were able to develop Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles, the Navy lobbied hard to deploy the Polaris system.
The historical record does not support the idea that the United States set out to develop a system that (more-or-less) assured a survivable retaliatory system. The argument that the triad would be a good thing was certainly used, but the real bottom line was that all three of the services wanted in on nuclear funding.
But Noonan is absolutely right that Trump hasn’t a clue about our nuclear forces.
And I love Eisenhower but he was in charge of the ETO and I don’t know how well he really understood the war in the Pacific. As I said elsewhere it was a different kind of war.
We’re talking about different things here. Were there doubts about the morality of using it on our side? Yes. Though somewhat hypocritical given the scale of death we were unleashing in the firebombing raids while telling ourselves that was somehow okay.
But the question is whether the Japanese would have surrendered on terms we were willing to accept. And there’s no evidence of that. They were definitely willing to “surrender” on terms we and Britain and the USSR were not willing to accept. The “unconditional surrender” demand wasn’t simply about rage or vengeance. It was born, rightly or wrongly, of the conviction that the main reason we had a World War II, at least in Europe, was that the Allies accepted an armistice that enabled the Germans to believe they hadn’t really been defeated and had therefore been stabbed in the back.
Truman was not even told about the bomb until he was President. The VP was out of the loop the whole time. The bomb would have been produced no matter who was in charge because fission had been discovered, and it was simply a race to make it work. The idea that the Germans ( and less so the Japanese) might get it first was a major factor.
I really scrambled to try to figure out how far the A bomb project had gotten by that election and I gave up and threw in the whole kitchen sink.
I do think you’re right. But I don’t think Wallace would ever have ok’d dropping it on real people.
Which raises the question that was raised then - how many more lives are lost if we don’t end this definitively? That may be a specious question and it may always have been - it can’t be answered.
The thing I remember the most about that was the literally visceral reaction everyone had to seeing what would be the actual horrors of even a small exchange between the US and the Soviet Union (I had to get parental permission to see it at my High School, and it scared the living hell out of me after watching it). It impressed the devastation so much on even the President, that I remember reading that it was at that point that he was willing to start the serious work of working with the Soviets in making sure that nuclear war wouldn’t happen.
And since then, we’ve actually been keeping to those strides. Until Trump came along and made the asinine argument that if we have them, why aren’t we using them? How can anyone think this man is in any way sane?
The standard reference on that is Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb. That is followed by Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb and finally Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.
Dark Sun is really as much about the Soviet nuclear arms project as the development on the fusion bomb, because the development of the Soviet bomb spurred American development of the fusion bomb. Arsenals of Folly deals more with the political arguments surrounding nuclear deterrents than with the scientific development of the weapons themselves.
Obviously we all project backwards but we can’t really know. Wallace seems most-likely-not-to from this distance but he would have been affected by the same factors as others. Even Leo Szilard, the most vocal of the Los Alamos scientists who were against using the bomb on Japan, someone who had all the right reasons not to, only felt that way because Hitler had been defeated by then.
The whole thing - the bomb and every fact and situation surrounding it was always deeply complex. The world was hanging on the brink at the end of WWII - I don’t know what could have happened if we hadn’t dropped the first nuke. We could very well still be speaking Russian because if Stalin had developed it first, we know what would have happened, or at least we can be pretty damn sure.
The world is not an easy place. Life is full of dangers. Most of us here aren’t used to thinking that way because here in the US a good number of us live lives of unheard-of safety, unprecedented in history.
No I didn’t. Are you in the Adobe Theme Park (a/k/a La Puebla de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis?)
I miss living in The Land of Enchantment. I miss being able to get great New Mexican food on most street corners. I don’t miss Gov Eating-Peeeetza-and-Drinking-Cokes in the least.
