Hiroshima after 75 years

[HitRed]

Apollo 11 demonstrates what humans can accomplish with the will, desire, and commitment of many people and lots of money.

What are the goals worthy of those things NOW? Can there be such a consensus? In the USA? in the world?

JP

I would like to the the Sahara green again.

[Bernie Sanders]

Apollo 11 demonstrates what humans can accomplish with the will, desire, and commitment of many people and lots of money.

What are the goals worthy of those things NOW? Can there be such a consensus? In the USA? in the world?

JP

I would like to the the Sahara green again.

Only a few of us can actually post drunk

[cannon_gray]

During that Moon landing, they made a few steps, and how ambitious the plans are in the Artemis mission now and Japan is going to make an enterprise for hydrogen production. And this only 50 years later, as for me, this is enormous progress.

[jusplay4fun]

We also note that this is the 75th year of the Atomic Age. The picture of mushroom clouds, illustrating the destructive nature of the Atomic Bomb is still very frightening.

To quote J. Robert Oppenheimer, the the "father of the atomic bomb", words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

{I will note here that I have been reading a biography of Oppenheimer:
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer Paperback – Illustrated, May 1, 2006
by Kai Bird (Author), Martin J. Sherwin (Author) }
https://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-Oppenheimer/dp/0375726268



https://www.history.com/specials/hiroshima-75-years-later

Hiroshima: 75 Years Later is a landmark 2-hour documentary to mark the anniversary of the first explosion of a nuclear weapon in wartime. Using never-before-seen archival footage, long-suppressed color film from the immediate aftermath of the bomb, and overlooked audio testimony from core protagonists and victims, the film provides a unique and highly personal understanding of the most devastating experiment in human history. Told entirely from the first-person perspective of leaders, physicists, soldiers, and survivors, Hiroshima: 75 Years Later presents the moral, scientific and military conundrums of the atomic bomb, as felt by those closest to it.

During that Moon landing, they made a few steps, and how ambitious the plans are in the Artemis mission now and Japan is going to make an enterprise for hydrogen production. And this only 50 years later, as for me, this is enormous progress.

[jusplay4fun]

Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

UPDATED:AUG 5, 2020 ORIGINAL:NOV 18, 2009

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki

On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”

The Manhattan Project
Even before the outbreak of war in 1939, a group of American scientists—many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe—became concerned with nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany. In 1940, the U.S. government began funding its own atomic weapons development program, which came under the joint responsibility of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department after the U.S. entry into World War II. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with spearheading the construction of the vast facilities necessary for the top-secret program, codenamed “The Manhattan Project” (for the engineering corps’ Manhattan district).

Over the next several years, the program’s scientists worked on producing the key materials for nuclear fission—uranium-235 and plutonium (Pu-239). They sent them to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where a team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer worked to turn these materials into a workable atomic bomb. Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device—a plutonium bomb—at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

READ MORE: “Father of the Atomic Bomb” Was Blacklisted for Opposing H-Bomb

No Surrender for the Japanese
By the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused.

READ MORE: The Inside Story of Harry Truman and Hiroshima

General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. casualties of up to 1 million. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided–over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. Proponents of the A-bomb—such as James Byrnes, Truman’s secretary of state—believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world.

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'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man' Are Dropped
Hiroshima, a manufacturing center of some 350,000 people located about 500 miles from Tokyo, was selected as the first target. After arriving at the U.S. base on the Pacific island of Tinian, the more than 9,000-pound uranium-235 bomb was loaded aboard a modified B-29 bomber christened Enola Gay (after the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets). The plane dropped the bomb—known as “Little Boy”—by parachute at 8:15 in the morning, and it exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city.

Hiroshima’s devastation failed to elicit immediate Japanese surrender, however, and on August 9 Major Charles Sweeney flew another B-29 bomber, Bockscar, from Tinian. Thick clouds over the primary target, the city of Kokura, drove Sweeney to a secondary target, Nagasaki, where the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped at 11:02 that morning. More powerful than the one used at Hiroshima, the bomb weighed nearly 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22-kiloton blast. The topography of Nagasaki, which was nestled in narrow valleys between mountains, reduced the bomb’s effect, limiting the destruction to 2.6 square miles.

READ MORE: The Hiroshima Bombing Didn't Just End WWII. It Kick-Started the Cold War

Aftermath of the Bombing
At noon on August 15, 1945 (Japanese time), Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender in a radio broadcast. The news spread quickly, and “Victory in Japan” or “V-J Day” celebrations broke out across the United States and other Allied nations. The formal surrender agreement was signed on September 2, aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.

Because of the extent of the devastation and chaos—including the fact that much of the two cities' infrastructure was wiped out—exact death tolls from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain unknown. However, it's estimated roughly 70,000 to 135,000 people died in Hiroshima and 60,000 to 80,000 people died in Nagasaki, both from acute exposure to the blasts and from long-term side effects of radiation.

READ MORE: Photos: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Before and After the Bombs

[Dukasaur]

Still scary after all these years.

One of the very possible answers to the Fermi Paradox, which makes me cry.

[jusplay4fun]

Duk,

Your comment makes sense to me now that I understand the proper context of your statement.

At first I thought you referred to the Fermi Problem or Fermi estimate, so I read up on the Fermi Paradox:

Fermi paradox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the argument that technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or spaceflight technology. The astrophysicist Sebastian von Hoerner stated that the progress of science and technology on Earth was driven by two factors—the struggle for domination and the desire for an easy life. The former potentially leads to complete destruction, while the latter may lead to biological or mental degeneration.[75] Possible means of annihilation via major global issues, where global interconnectedness actually makes humanity more vulnerable than resilient,[76] are many,[77] including war, accidental environmental contamination or damage, the development of biotechnology,[78] synthetic life like mirror life,[79] resource depletion, climate change,[80] or poorly designed artificial intelligence. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in scientific hypothesizing.[81] In 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii speculated that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales.[82] Self-annihilation may also be viewed in terms of thermodynamics: insofar as life is an ordered system that can sustain itself against the tendency to disorder, Stephen Hawking's "external transmission" or interstellar communicative phase, where knowledge production and knowledge management is more important than transmission of information via evolution, may be the point at which the system becomes unstable and self-destructs.[83][84] Here, Hawking emphasizes self-design of the human genome (transhumanism) or enhancement via machines (e.g., brain-computer interface) to enhance human intelligence and reduce aggression, without which he implies human civilization may be too stupid collectively to survive an increasingly unstable system. For instance, the development of technologies during the "external transmission" phase, such as weaponization of artificial general intelligence or antimatter, may not be met by concomitant increases in human ability to manage its own inventions. Consequently, disorder increases in the system: global governance may become increasingly destabilized, so worsening humanity's ability to manage the possible means of annihilation listed above, resulting in global societal collapse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

versus:

In physics or engineering education, a Fermi problem, Fermi quiz, Fermi question, Fermi estimate, order-of-magnitude problem, order-of-magnitude estimate, or order estimation is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis or approximation of extreme scientific calculations, and such a problem is usually a back-of-the-envelope calculation. The estimation technique is named after physicist Enrico Fermi as he was known for his ability to make good approximate calculations with little or no actual data. Fermi problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities and their variance or lower and upper bounds. In some cases, order-of-magnitude estimates can also be derived using dimensional analysis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

Fermi (and the rest of those physicists) were some rather intelligent thinkers.

Still scary after all these years.

One of the very possible answers to the Fermi Paradox, which makes me cry.

[Dukasaur]

Exactly.

[jusplay4fun]

Back to Space, 50 years ago:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nfl/50th-anniversary-of-shepards-moon-golfing/vi-BB1dpgJG?ocid=msedgntp

We need to lighten the mood here, a bit.