Sadly, that’s pretty common. My wife’s opinion on the matter pretty much boils down to, “See, when all is said and done, all of our countries did pretty horrible things in the war.”
I honestly still don’t know how to feel about it, especially now that I’m a naturalized Japanese citizen. There was never going to be a happy end to that war. I’ve seen hypothetical “peaceful solutions” and I’ve seen war plans from both sides for what was going to happen from November 1945 through the spring of 1946. There could have been better endings, but there could have been much, much worse endings as well.
The point isn’t how we should have ended the war. It’s how to stop such wars from starting.
It was designed to provide precision targeting for a bomber travelling at low speed at low altitude. It didnt scale at all well to high speed, high altitude bombing. The Enola Gay used the Norden to drop its nuclear payload, a device that required no precision, over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. It missed its aim point by 700 feet (more than two football fields)
In fact I think if they had tried to include Japanese representation here, it would have been done poorly. Take the Michael Bay Pearl Harbour, for example. The token scene with the Japanese generals there was an attempt to make the Japanese not seem like faceless aggressors, I suppose, but holy shit is it mega-cringe bad. The entire scene is basically one general saying to another “We awoke a dragon,” the subtext being we deserve everything that the audience knows happened to them after that. Jingoistic tripe of the worst stripe.
This, however, I disagree strongly with. The absence of women from historical films has always been written off as “well there were no women around during this event”. They were, though, and that’s why films like this don’t just ignore women in history, they erase them. Women typed all the correspondence and answered all the phones. Women took care of the kids while the Important Men were doing all these Important Things. I hate to break it to Nolan, but there would be no war-winning bomb if Oppenheimer had to do his own laundry and grocery shopping.
In fact Canada was intimately involved all along. When it became clear the UK didn’t have the industrial base to finish the research, the US and UK merged their programs and much of the work happened in Canada. It was a summit in Quebec where the merged program became The Manhattan Project. Canada also supplied most of the uranium and most of the heavy water. About a dozen of the scientists on the team were Canadian. Oppenheimer even studied the Halifax Explosion (believed to be the largest explosion on earth up to that point) to predict the effects of the bomb.
After the war the knowledge gained by the Canadians on the team set up Canada as a world leader in nuclear power research. This has ultimately led to the very successful CANDU reactor design, and modern research on small modular reactors, which Canada is leading to combat climate change.
See also almost every dissertation written by a man in the 19th-20th century (how many wives typed up their husbands work and studiously helped them make corrections?), many in the 21st century, not to mention any number of academic tomes across numerous fields of study (ie, all of them).
Richard Rhodes’s book The Making of the Atomic Bomb does go into it a bit. Seems to make more of an argument for not dropping the second one, at least not as quickly. It’s been 20+ years since I’ve read it so I don’t remember details about who was making what arguments, but that piece did stick with me.
And, it’s an absolutely amazing history of physics. Well worth the read.
Thank you! I know there are various books, but I guess we were discussing movies, and how Hollywood could defuse (or question) this belief that “it was the bombs that truly ended the war.”
It seems like the idea grew in American minds over the decades, but it doesn’t necessarily appear in news accounts at the time. There were a lot of factors in play, and the influence of the bombs was not as definitive as we think.
Oppenheimer’s martinis are often described as strong, with one witness to his ministrations claiming he used only a “droplet” of vermouth. If we take the “dash” stipulated in the Los Alamos recipe to be about a quarter of an ounce, the “Oppie” martini has an eye-popping 16-to-1 ratio of gin to vermouth.
Our cocktail columnist, M. Carrie Allan, notes that drinkers should adjust the split as they like, but recommends a “classic” 5-to-1 ratio
The correct answer is 8-1, and it depends on the gin.
Oppenheimer was on Team Shaker in the shake-versus-stir debate that has long dogged the martini.
The correct answer is “neither.” If the gin is not stored in a freezer, put ice in the shaker. Immediately pour the gin into the shaker, followed immediately by the vermouth. Without any further agitation, strain the mixture into the glass. Two olives, two onions.
It was no more accurate in its actual use than the alternatives. It’s supposed accuracy was used to justify profoundly unsuccessful
Just back from it, it’s kind of a major point in the first half of the movie. That Oppenheimer’s solution to having families at los Álamos was ro have PhD wives doing jobs around the base was also a point.
For me the only hero in it is his wife. And obviously she’s flawed, but in one of the ways Oppenheimer knows he is flawed himself, as a parent. His character in the film recognises that his failure to do it instead is a moral failing. A male friend explains that people in his position get away with it.
That was what was originally promised. It’s not clear whether the promise was fulfilled, or whether it would have been militarily useful, had that promise been fulfilled.
When a soldier is killed on the battlefield, that’s legitimate. Battlefields are both spatially and temporally limited.
If a civilian is killed because he enters the battlefield, that’s unfortunate. If the battlefield is spatially so vast that civilians cannot flee, that’s a warcrime.
If a soldier suffers wounds long after the battle is over, that is equally unfortunate. If weapons are designed so as to cause these chronic injuries long after the battle is over that’s also a warcrime.
An interesting perspective indeed. What is her perspective on The Rape of Nanjing, the Burma Railway and Japan’s deplorable treatment of POWs in general, comfort women, etc?
i mean what are most american’s views on the legacy of slavery, reconstruction, segregation, lynchings, race riots, the fact black veterans didn’t receive the benefits of the gi bill, redlining, the war on drugs, police violence, and systemic racism?
( or heck, our war on iraq, the torture of prisoners, ongoing detentions at guantanamo, etc )
every country tries to explain away their misdeeds. do you expect japan to be different? and if so, why?
