Hiroshima 75 Years Ago Today

There is a Buddhist church in my neighborhood. 

 The statue in front of the building is of Shinran Shonin, the founder of the Jodo-Shinsu school of Buddhism;

it was originally located in Hiroshima and survived the atomic bombing.  

It serves as a stark reminder of what humanity is now capable of & not in a good way. 

Yamaguchi, a resident of Nagasaki, was in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15 am, on August 6, 1945. He returned to Nagasaki the following day and, despite his wounds, he returned to work on August 9, the day of the second atomic bombing. That morning, whilst he was being berated by his supervisor as "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.[3] In 1957, he was recognized as a hibakusha (explosion-affected person) of the Nagasaki bombing, but it was not until March 24, 2009, that the government of Japan officially recognized his presence in Hiroshima three days earlier. He died of stomach cancer on January 4, 2010, at the age of 93.

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

Oak ridge Tennessee connection

>>>>Oak ridge Tennessee connection

My great uncle worked on the project at Oak Ridge designing the electrical system for the bomb.  He was with Oppenheimer in New Mexico the night before they tested it and he purportedly told him "I pray that it will not work, but know that it will."

I don't understand why the US didn't just drop the bomb on some remote mountainside or island off the coast just to demonstrate its destructive power without having to level entire cities.   But I guess the US was already in a frenzy destroying Japanese cities with conventional weapons (like the Tokyo firebombings) and probably felt that a couple more wouldn't matter much in the grand scheme of things.

My dad was a young chemistry professor that became a nuclear physicist during WWII. Went to Lawrence Livermore lab, and was recruited  and  also worked on the Manhattan project developing uranium and he relocated to Oak Ridge Tennessee where my brother was born, I was born in Richland Washington  ...in his later years 80- 95 years of age he was an energy economist 

EMK died at over 101 and was an amazing man. Loved art, gardening, music and orchids, And his politically liberal and active family

I don't understand why the US didn't just drop the bomb on some remote mountainside or island off the coast just to demonstrate its destructive power without having to level entire cities.   But I guess the US was already in a frenzy destroying Japanese cities with conventional weapons (like the Tokyo firebombings) and probably felt that a couple more wouldn't matter much in the grand scheme of things.<<<<

I think at that point in the war, all sides had already "doubled down" 1000x over ... the Japanese were also executing American POW's and prepared to take things to the bitter end. 

But yeah, one would think a simple demonstration would've been sufficient for "rational" people to get the message.

Here is an interesting take on that question of why they used the bomb twice.

According to his close examination of the evidence, Japan was not poised to surrender before Hiroshima, as the revisionists argued, nor was it ready to give in immediately after the atomic bomb, as traditionalists have always seen it.…Americans, then and today, have tended to assume that Japan’s leaders were simply blinded by their own fanaticism, forcing a catastrophic showdown for no reason other than their refusal to acknowledge defeat.…But Hasegawa and other historians have shown that Japan’s leaders were in fact quite savvy, well aware of their difficult position, and holding out for strategic reasons.

Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system. The Japanese could still inflict heavy casualties on any invader, and they hoped to convince the Soviet Union, still neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement with the Americans. Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable terms in exchange for territory in Asia. It was a long shot, but it made strategic sense.

More here

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/08/why-did-world-war-ii-end-2/