Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Fat Man Bomb - Nagasaki

Those two bombs saved millions of lives.

My FIL was a fighter pilot. He was on Okinawa training for the invasion when they dropped them. if the invasion had gone forward, I might not have had a wife to marry.

Less than 6.5 kilograms of plutonium 239 did all that damage.

Cool Picture.

I grew up in Oak Ridge Tn. My dad worked at Y-12 weapons development plant, no idea what he did for a living. It was a surreal place to grow up.
Patrick

My uncle was a P.O.W. of the Japanese....after reading and hearing about the treatment the POWs received I haven't felt a twinge of compassion for those who died under Fat Man and Little Boy.

"Countdown 1945" by Chris Wallace, chronicling the development of the bomb and dropping it on Hiroshima is a good read.

Not a bit

My paternal grandfather had 7 siblings. All 8 of them were Air Force. 4 were pilots. 2 of the pilots died in combat. One Korea and 1 Vietnam. One great uncle( the oldest) was a nuclear engineer. He drafted plans for the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki and was part of the crew that delivered the plans to the president and congress to show them progress/explain it. At his funeral( I was 14 so 20 years ago) were generals and pentagon employees who had worked with him. They spoke highly of him during speeches they gave at his funeral

his cancer was determined to have been caused by heavy metals and radiation( he was old as heck then so who knows what really killed him as he beat cancer 3 times). His wife died of same type cancer 20 years earlier. He lost a son 3 months after birth due to birth defects and leukemia they said were caused by his heavy metal exposures at oak ridge

His two daughters and one grandchild also died from cancer of same type in there mid life determined to be due to his service at oak ridge per the oncologist and researchers.


Talk about sacrifice. His lineage laid a heavy toll

Thanks for sharing that story. Puts sacrifice into a different perspective.

Nice bit of history.

The two atom bombs did nothing more than we had been doing every night to Japan for many weeks. Curtiss LeMay was systematically leveling the nation of Japan, one city at a time. The incendiary bombing campaign of city after city was killing as many Japanese every night as the atom bombs did.

The only difference was that it only took one plane and one bomb to do the job.

Many, many things contributed to the Japanese surrender. The knowledge that Russia was almost knocking on their back door encouraged many of the Japanese to wish to surrender to the USA before the Russians got there.

So, were the atom bombs inhumane? No, no more so than any other part of the bombing campaigns over Japan and Germany.

Were the two atom bombs actually necessary? Yes, I believe they were. They were the straw that broke the camel's back among the hard line Japanese generals who wanted to fight to the last child standing and the last grain of rice.

That story is probably not all that unique to my family in this area unfortunately. Some gave all and then some.

Living in East Tn, and not far from oak ridge, I have known multiple people who have died from heavy metal poisoning/radiation induced cancer who worked at oak ridge facilities. Most were older folks.

My father is a brick mason. Owned a commercial masonry company for longer than I have been alive. He bid a job at oak ridge. Said he showed up with his crew to start the job and there were guys in hazmat suits using g counters at the site. He asked why they were their in suits. Most didn’t say a thing

Said one of the workers walked up to him and said he would leave and not come back if he was them. Told him levels weren’t safe for extended exposure in that area. It was a retaining wall for some kind of retention pond I believe.

Dad said he doesn’t miss the money he left behind there. Lol

What was done by two bombs was horrific.

But actually just thin icing on a big cake.
So much focus on two cities in an agressor nation.
No attention at all to the cities of England, France, Poland....

Never even hear much of Dresden.

War, is horrific.
Period.

Those bombs killed a whole whole whole lot of Innocent people

Women, children, elderly people who did nothing wrong. And killed people from radiation induced cancer and illnesses for years after.

Those bombs though, saved more lives than could be imagined by helping to end the war. I read once that people stopped and looked at the devastation caused by those bombs, and began to realize how brutal war was. They took blinders off after that. I forget the exact number, but it was the largest loss of human life in less than 5 or 7 seconds I believe. Crazy isn’t it

I think all that damage done in one sudden blast...one airplane that was hardly noticed...it would have been one thing to have wave after wave of bombers going over, dropping thousands of bombs...when one plane cruises over, hardly noticed, drops one bomb, hardly noticed, and in an instant levels a whole damn city....there had to be something surreal about that, something that told the Japanese they were through.

It’s still early in the thread.
I will wait for : “my grampie,dad, uncle Pete, etc helped with the surrender terms”


Cmon whoever, you can do it

I’ve read that during the height of the uranium enrichment at the Y-12 plant, Y-12 was using around 15% of the entire electrical output of the entire nation for months.

I’ve lived 5 miles from Oak Ridge my whole life. There are some nasty things in the ground there.