On Mar 3, 10:00 pm, Phil J wrote:

I suppose there is always the "desperate times call for desperate
measures" argument. But the kind of horrible, painful death you get
from poison gas just seems to put it into a different category.

True, yet in the Pacific, there seemed to be no concern about horror
-- flamethrowers weren't very nice.

Except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But as bad as they were, more
Japanese were killed by the incendiary bombs we dropped than by the
atomic bombs.

True, and all the revisionists should remember that.

There were plans being made in the American military to use atomic
bombs to soften up the beaches if it became necessary to invade
Japan. They didn't realize the effects the radiation would have had
on our troops when they came ashore. That would have been a
catastrophe for both sides.

Not by those manufacturing the bombs -- we only had two, and we used
them. The inventory didn't increase until long after the Japanese
surrender.

Surprisingly (to me), the most expensive weapon system America
developed during World War II was not the atomic bomb. It was the
B-29 that dropped it.

Phil

Per unit, or overall? That doesn't seem right -- there were tens of
thousands working at Oak Ridge....

Atomic bombs were dropped on those two Japanese cities, but MAD was
not yet a strategic consideration --- the Japanese couldn't retaliate
in kind.

MAD doctrine evolved as the US and USSR realized the potential within
each arsenal (MAD wasn't formulated as a doctrine until McNamara in
the 60s).

Dan