Let’s say the research was poor and Atoms are impossible to spilt how would WW2 have continued with the invasion of Japan
What if The Manhattan Project Failed? Would the world have been spared from the horrors of nuclear weapons?
r/whatif
Let’s say the research was poor and Atoms are impossible to spilt how would WW2 have continued with the invasion of Japan
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The Manhattan Project was fast-tracked because Germany was also researching the Atomic Bomb.
If the USA did not bomb Japan first, Germany might have used one on London or Moscow.
Nah. They would have tried the uranium bomb next if the Trinity test failed with plutonium.
It was always going to succeed. Question was how quickly.
No. Several countries were working on them. The USA got lucky and got there first.
The other side of this, is if the test had failed ‘the other way’ and incinerated the whole planet. No school shootings, no horrors period.
Presuming that explosive levels Nuclear Fission is impossible to set off on earth, requiring things mankind cannot manufacture to achieve, and none of the various research teams attempting to create a nuclear explosive device were successful, ever.
The assault on Japan would have begun with Luftwaffe style air raids. American bombers would have dropped traditional explosives and possibly fuel air bombs on selected targets. The overall destruction of Japan may have been more extensive and drawn out, though that would also depend on target selection and intelligence. The lingering effects of fallout would have been eliminated and the overall levels of cancer of all types in humans would likely be far lower today than they are globally.
You know, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were awful, no question about it.
You know what would have been worse? Had the United States not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because, combined with the Russian invasion of Manchuria, those were the twin shocks that finally forced the Japanese surrender.
What would have been the alternative?
Invading the Japanese home islands? The butcher’s bill would have been stratospheric among Japanese civilians, the Japanese military, and the Allied invasion forces.
Blockade? Given the Japanese reliance on food imports, mass starvation would have been a certainty.
Both those options would have resulted in far more deaths.
And, let’s get real. The people who complain about the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to ignore the enormous civilian toll in countries occupied by the Japanese. The Japanese army made the Waffen SS look positively benign in comparison, with an estimated 100,000 civilians dying each month.
Heck, in the Battle for Manila alone, Japanese troops massacred that many civilians. Now imagine the toll in Burma, Taiwan, China, Thailand, Korea, Indochina, Indonesia, et al, had the war not come to a speedy end. It’s almost as if those populations do not matter to those people.
WWII would have lasted longer and we would have had more casualties tens of thousands more
No
We would have had a number of different horrors. The first would have been a land invasion of Japan which would have likely seen more than a million deaths. After WWII, we would have almost certainly transitioned into a hot war with Russia rather than a cold one. That would have led to 100 million deaths. Then, God willing, we would have accomplished what we set out to accomplish in WWI which was a war so disastrous that we wouldn’t want another one.
Yes. The atomic bomb was far from certain.
There was already an article in Scientific American claiming that the atomic bomb was impossible, and citing the decreasing neutron absorption interaction cross section with increasing energy. The article is correct, so far as it goes. It just didn’t predict an increase in cross section at much higher energies.
The article in Scientific American is titled “Don’t worry, it can’t happen”.
No
Downfall/Olympic/Coronet.
Estimated 500,000 us casualties 100,000 dead (estimates all over the place, this is one from the middle).
From experience Japanese casualties would be about 20x us or 10,000,000. 3,500,000 dead due to inferior casualty care. In that the Japanese were planning on sending women old men and boys armed with bamboo spears against fully equipped veteran us Marines that is a low estimate…
Bombs killed about 250,000 combined.
Invasion not scheduled until November.
Low estimate of deaths in Japanese occupied areas is 20,000/week. 20,000/week x 13 weeks = 260,000.
If atoms were unsplittable, that would have larger implications on the universe as a whole.
If there were no nuclear weapons, the world would have experienced the horrors of the invasion of Japan for openers. Then WW III as the Soviet Union invaded Europe. And then at some later date Korea or Vietnam would have turned into WW IV against China.
Be careful what you wish for.
We would have just developed bunker-buster bombs earlier and carpet-bombed Japan. The end result would be the same.
If the Manhattan Project failed, it would not have spared us the horrors of nuclear weapons. It would have only meant that they probably would not have been used in WWII. But, as the Manhattan Project did show, splitting the atom is possible, and someone else would have developed the technology to use that in a bomb design. It might have been the US, or some other country. And it likely would have still been used against another country, depending on who first creates it and if they were at war with someone. The two cities in Japan chosen for the bombs were selected because they were not bombed to hell by conventional bombs, and we could see just what the destructive power of them actually were. If they would have dropped one on Tokyo, for example, it would have been harder to see what the damage from the bomb was as Tokyo had already been bombed a lot before that point.
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It was inevitable. The Americans started the project because the Germans had figured out the basics of how they could build this world ending device and the Americans just felt like they had to get to it first not just for ending the war but also to solidify American dominance in the world.
But as soon as the Russians heard about this they began dumping stupid amounts of money into their own nuclear program. Without a Manhatten project the US and Russia would have developed nuclear weapons around the same time. But then America would have still been behind in ICBMs.
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A hell of a lot more American soldiers and Japanese would’ve died during the invasion of the Japanese mainland. And then the USSR would’ve probably been the one to develop nukes, and would’ve used them to expand their empire (and probably would’ve used them to destroy the US, leaving them as the sole superpower in the world).
Atoms are not impossible to split.
The only way the Manhattan project fails is because of poor research or engineering.
Japanese and Germans were already doing some work on it before defeat, and the USSR had spies in our atomic weapons programs.
SOMEONE would make one eventually.
If atoms were impossible to split by artificial means, then would radioactivity still exist in this scenario? Because if so, a dirty bomb is still a possibility. No fission, but you spread radioactive material over a wide area and make things very bad for the victims.
100% some other country would’ve dropped a nuke on people at some point later in history if it wasn’t the US that dropped the first nuke first.
Only way it would have failed is if they misunderstood he physics or if laws of physics were different.
Science is fun, we could go back to stone age and society would find nukes again by followingh math to its natural conclusion.
Considering Japan had been suing for peace for months before we dropped the bombs, I think not much would have changed as far as WWII goes. We probably would have been stupid and invaded instead of just accepting their one condition, that we granted anyway after they unconditionally surrendered, the the Emperor not be executed. This would have cost a lot of lives on both sides, and probably slowed reconstruction.
Nukes would still have been developed though. They are actually pretty easy to make.
Sooooo….by the time the first atomic weapon was released, the US was already wiping out two or three Japanese cites a week. At the time, the US government was hoping that the bomb would stop the fire bombing….imagine how bad those must of been to think a nuke would stop the fire raids. Between the first and second atomic bombs, fire bombing wiped out a couple cities.
By the time nukes were invented, we already knew how to wipe entire cities off the map. The bomb just makes it easier.
>the horrors of nuclear weapons
Nukes were used twice in 1945 and since that time, have prevented the horrors of repeated world wars.
Nah, the Nazis were close. Still far behind the Allies, but they would have gotten there eventually.
The invasion of mainland Japan would have been 10x more horrific
Nope. There was atomic weapons research during WWII by the Soviet Union, Germany, England, and, to a lesser degree, Japan. Had the U.S. not been first, either England, Germany, or the Soviet Union would have made one.
Also, what if the Germans had been faster? Here are some ideas:
No, nukes would still have been built we just wouldn’t have gotten them as quickly
Nah, other countries would have gotten there. Nuke proliferation was inevitable, I just hope we don’t discover an even worse weapon, but judging from the history of humanity, I wouldn’t be too sure.
Others were trying it too. If they’d failed, someone else would’ve succeeded likely and then things’d be so much worse.
If the Manhattan Project failed then they would simply try again until they succeed.
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People are going to tunnel on invading Japan but I don’t think they would have lasted until November. They wouldn’t have had a single city left by then.
Seeing as we weren’t the only ones trying to do it, probably not. We would have stolen whoever successfully did it first instead.
It’s hard to figure that it could have failed.
They were working with physics on their side. The labs were in the United States, fully insulated from the war. The nation was willing to sacrifice for its success (silver bullion was taken from Fort Knox and melted down for wire to wind into electromagnets for Oak Ridge). The cream of the century’s genius, grateful for the refuge against the Nazis, were concentrated here to work on it. They were literally the ones who invented the idea of atomic fission. Hell, Leo Szilard, one of the men who persuaded Einstein to write to FDR, came up with the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Before his idea, there was no concept of extracting usable energy of any kind from radioactive materials. Uranium was just a metal that gave off alpha radiation in measurable output. It didn’t even get warm!
The Manhattan Project had safety, resources, and talent. If an atomic bomb could be made, it would.
Now if nuclear energy were totally off the table then the U.S. would have eventually invaded Japan’s main land and conquered it. And probably would have remained there and made the Japanese second class citizens like the Europeans did to the American Indians.
More ppl would have been killed because Japan wouldn’t surrender. They were training and arming children to fight and die with honor meaning never surrendering leading to massive death on both sides. Nuclear weapons are horrible. It’s a threat to humanity and civilization but in this case it saved more lives than the alternative. Even after the emporer told the citizens it was over there was an attempted coup on the government with the plan to keep fighting to the end despite no longer having a functional navy and being cut off from resources. Choosing death because it was better to die with honor than to surrender and live with cowardice. The evidence for this was bonsai charges into machine gun fire basically committing suicide.
Nuclear weapons would have been developed in time anyway. Dropping the bomb saved probably millions if lives overall and at the same time opened the world’s eyes to the danger. I served on a ballistic missile submarine and even though there have been wars since nothing approaches what we saw in WW2. We probably are better off with most sides fearing the possibility of all out war. Mu honest concern are rogue actors or fundamentists who want to die for their beliefs.
Interesting read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
If the Manhattan project had failed someone else would have built the bomb. It was inevitable. It is just science and engineering. It was going to happen.
Instead the world would be forced to endure even deadlier wars between world powers.
The land Invasion of the Japanese home islands was estimated to result in the deaths of between 5-7 million Japanese and 500k-1.5M US soldiers.
And the eventual WW3 between the Western Powers and the USSR would have resulted in an ungodly amount of deaths.
Yeah i can’t imagine the death toll if America had been forced to invade mainland Japan. Everyone older than three would have been given a weapon and told to fight ambush style. And they very much would have. Down to the very last baby.
In that moment, yes. Not to say we couldn’t try again later, but, yes.
HOWEVER
When you say horrors, the ones that would have resulted from not bombing Japan would have been worse. Just to give examples of Japan’s “nationalism” and mentality they:
Sent an entire girls school to the front lines of one of the worse battles in the Pacific….for “moral”. Many killed themselves before surrendering to the monsters (us) that came for them. As if being raped by their countrymen was any better. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himeyuri_students
Rounded up Chinese civilians for disease/bio warfare testing. Which led to the rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Attack, killed, and rapped many mainland towns. Including the Nanjing Massacre in China. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
Brutally treated pows. https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196673/aaf-prisoners-of-the-japanese/
Used honor based systems to force pilots into suicide runs. With one pilot legitimately sorry he dishonored his family so greatly for failing and begged to try again, like 3 times. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
Don’t forget about the banzai charges. Literally translating to a form of “hurray” or “ten thousand years of life to you”, the Japanese soldiers would run towards American troops in mass to overwhelm and stab them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banzai_charge
I write this not to say Japan deserved to be nuked. I write this to say “this is the people and their mentality we faced”. The nuke was bad ….but the loss of life and horrors that would come from a us/Russian invasion would have been worse by far. The nukes were the best decision in a shitty situation where the enemy wouldn’t back down. Horrific? Yes. But the horrors faced were greater. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Japan drove themselves to extinction if they hadn’t been nuked, it’s that bad.
Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq would have all kicked off world wars without the threat of MAD.
Then we would have unending war.
No. It would have prolonged the war & cost even more American & Japanese lives; as their honour would never allow them to surrender.
We still would have fire bombed all the cities.
If the dog hadn’t stopped to take a shit, he’d caught the rabbit.
Maybe WWIII would have happened by the mid ‘60s.
That’s like saying “what if the strong nuclear force wasn’t a thing?” OK the universe just ended.
Or, what if water doesn’t expand into steam when heated, so the industrial revolution never happened.
The funding and resources were there and it was within the technical state of the art. There’s no “what if” about it.
They were certain the gun-type bomb was going to work, which is why they didn’t test it. They were less sure of the plutonium implosion bomb, because it was significanly more technically challenging.
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The Kapanese would have fought to the very last man, woman, or child. It would have been awful. Tactically, Japan lost long before the bombs were dropped.
The conventional invasion of Japan would have been like Normandy every day. The estimated death toll was astronomical and the damage done to Japanese infastructure would have continued. The sheer shock value of the nuclear bombs would be lost and the leadership would have continued to resist untill the entire country was subjugated by force. Without the emporers willing surrender pockets of resistance would have continued being fueled by the soviets once the cold war kicks off.
Basically, east Asian Afghanistan
I don’t think people appreciate how deserving imperial Japan was of a couple nuclear bombs. The Nazis and the Holocaust was really bad but Japan didn’t give two shits about if it was public or not to massacre civilians, throw babies off of cliffs and mass rape any woman or girl that they got their hands on.
Japan 1000% deserved being bombed if it meant the war and carnage would stop.
Then Operation Downfall would commence, and the world would be treated to the horrors that will come from Allied invasion of mainland Japan. The Japanese will not surrender an inch of land without spilling blood; Either theirs or the Allies. And if the United States deems the invasion to be too costly, then they’ll just starve out the Japanese archipelago, extending the duration of the war and thus causing many more thousands of deaths of civilians by Japanese hands in their collapsing empire.
The end result is a worse-off Japan, with many more dead than if the Manhattan succeeded.
Japan was trying to negotiate a surrender. The U.S. would simply have to make a slightly less advantageous offer.