Chitchat American Nuke @WW2 FAILED, taken by USSR!

http://mt.sohu.com/history/d20170210/125902671_442608.shtml


揭秘：二战美国投向日本第三颗原子弹失踪之谜

　　1945年8月6日和9日，美国为迫使日本投降，分别向广岛和长崎各投下了一颗原子弹。可事后有人发现，其实美国向日本投了三颗原子弹，光长崎就两颗，一颗没有爆炸，最后神秘失踪。

　　半个世纪后，美国原子弹研制和生产的组织者，美国退役陆军中将格罗夫斯的回忆录为我们揭开了事实的真相。

　　1945年7月24日，格罗夫斯在给马歇尔的报告中，就提出了对日本进行原子弹轰炸的4个目标：广岛、长崎、小仓和新泻。到7月底确定了其中的3个目标，格罗夫斯在他的回忆录中明确写道：“广岛是第一目标，小仓是第二目标，长崎是第三目标”。为此，美国从一开始就准备了三颗原子弹。

　　在用一颗原子弹轰炸广岛之后，美国又积极地进行了轰炸另外两个目标的准备工作。格罗夫斯在其工作安排中写道：“在洛斯阿拉莫斯‘胖子’（美国内爆式原子弹的代号）所用的钚最后处置完毕后，就用 c—54 型专机运到提尼安，另外两个‘胖子’所需要的一些其他重要零件，则由两架 b—29 型飞机运送。”由此可以肯定，美国在对小仓和长崎轰炸之前，运到提尼安空军基地的是两颗原子弹。

　　这两颗原子弹是如何投下的呢？

　　据一些史料记载，8月9日凌晨3点49分，两架 b—29 轰炸机和两架侦察机从美国提尼安空军基地的跑道上飞快地掠过，向轰炸目的地飞去，当它们到达小仓上空时，天空中阴云翻滚，用肉眼根本看不到目标，结果机长威内斯驾驶飞机，用了45分钟时间在小仓上空来回飞了三次，最终决定放弃轰炸小仓而飞向第二目标长崎，长崎上空同样是云雾重重，但是这一次飞机是不可能带着核弹返回的，于是临时决定采用雷达轰炸，当飞机做好了投弹准备的时候，空中的云雾突然散开了，天空中出现了一个清朗的大洞，轰炸员比汉透过这个大洞，看到了山谷中的一条跑道时，就果断地把两颗核弹投了下去……

　　事后美国战略轰炸统计局估计，约有3.5万人死亡，6万人受伤。对于这次轰炸，美国方面一直保持沉默，没有做过任何说明和解释，只有格罗夫斯在事后听到伤亡人数时说：“这个数字比我们原来估计的要少得多。”这就证明了美国方面原来估计的数字，是两颗原子弹同时爆炸的死亡数字，而事实上只爆炸了一颗。

　　由于爆炸的这颗原子弹，偏离目标约2000米，所以较之广岛被伤害程度极轻，很少发生死亡与倒塌房屋事情。另一颗未爆炸的原子弹，并没有受到损害，接到报告后，日军大本营立即派人将这颗没有爆炸的原子弹严密看管起来。

　　据说当时日本将那颗没有爆炸的原子弹交给苏联时，苏联还对日本作出过某些承诺。

　　由于苏联已经从参加过美国原子弹试验的英国科学家法拉奇那里得到了美国原子弹试验过程中重要的科技情报，又从日本人手里得到了这颗没有爆炸的原子弹的实物，加上苏联人的聪明才智，很快就在1949年8月29日4时，首爆炸成功了苏联第一颗原子弹。

　　听到这一消息，美国总统杜鲁门被惊呆了，连连自语：“这是真的吗？是真的吗？”因为他知道要成功研制原子弹有多困难，自从1938年底，德国科学家哈恩和斯特拉曼用中子轰击铀，发生了裂变之后，美国、英国、法国和逃到美国的德国科学家们，经过了7年的艰苦努力，才造出了第一颗原子弹，为此美国动用了50万人，花费了23亿美元，这样巨大的开支对于刚刚在战争中恢复过来的苏联，显然是难以承受的。正因为如此，格罗夫斯将军曾预言过，苏联要造出原子弹至少需要 20 年。

　　至此美国才知道，为什么当初在长崎死于原子弹爆炸的人数与他们预先估计的有如此大的出入，为什么苏联这么快就可以研制出原子弹与他们抗衡……

　　历史是很残酷的，且优劣势在互相转化。当年美、苏两国的核对抗，使日本有了发展的空间，因战败国不准其发展国防力量，却节省了上万亿元的军费开支，用于国民经济发展，使之一跃而成为世界经济大国，而苏联则因庞大的军费开支，使其经济崩溃，最后导致了联盟的解体。
声明：本文由入驻搜狐公众平台的作者撰写，除搜狐官方账号外，观点仅代表作者本人，不代表搜狐立场。

https://www.warbirdforum.com/third.htm

The third bomb
[Hyperlinks will take you to the cited book at Amazon, to a review on this site, or to another site with related information.]

The question often arises: did the United States have a third bomb ready to drop on Japan, following the Little Boy uranium device that destroyed Hiroshima on August 6 and the Fat Man plutonimium bomb that destroyed Nagasaki three days later?

In the Spaatz Papers at the Library of Congress manuscript section, there is much radio traffic generated on Tinian in the second week of August. The U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces wanted the third bomb to be dropped on Tokyo as a wakeup call for the Japanese government, which was stalling on agreeing to the United Nations surrender terms. (That this could have been seriously proposed is an indication of how woefully uninformed USASTAF was about the destructive power of the weapons it had delivered to the Empire.) Back came a message, presumably from Hap Arnold, saying that the decision had already been made that the target would be Sapporo in the northern island of Hokkaido. (I read this material while researching a magazine article in 1995.)

In Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May-June 1998, Stanley Goldberg notes that on the morning of August 10, 1945, Robert Bacher of the Environmental Physics Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory was supervising the loading of a plutonium core onto a truck. The core (presumably the casing and other "works" were already on Tinian or en route) was to be flown to San Francisco, thence to Tinian, to finish its journey over the city of Kokura about August 20. Robert Oppenheimer then appeared and told Balcher to stop loading the core. No further shipments were to be made, Oppenheimer said, without an explicit order from President Truman.

(In what seems to me to be a logical leap, Goldberg concludes: "Since Truman could have given such an order at any time between July 24 and August 9, it strongly suggests that the bombing of Nagasaki came as a surprise to him." Goldberg suggests that Major General Leslie Groves alone had directed the bomb's use on Nagasaki, as a bureaucrat anxious to justify the money that gone gone into its development, and also as a military man who wanted to hasten the end of the war.)

Al Christman's book, Target Hiroshima: Deak Parsons and the Creation of the Atomic Bomb (Naval Institute 1998), notes that the operational plan in February 1945 "called for the military use in the summer [of 1945] of Little Boy and one or two Fat Man bombs, followed by more if necessary." In July, following the Trinity test of the plutonium bomb, General Groves remarked: "The war is over as soon as we drop two of these on Japan." The cruiser Indianapolis brought Little Boy to Tinian on July 26; Christman makes no mention of Fat Man. On July 28 and 29, four "Green Hornet" transports flew in from the U.S. with the plutonium pieces for Fat Man and the uranium inserts for Little Boy.

Elsewhere, Christman notes that "Parsons had planned and organized the Tinian assembly facilities to handle a steady stream of bombs [after Little Boy devastated Hiroshima]. The plutonium production facilities at Hanford continued to work at capacity ... everything needed for the second bomb was present at Tinian, and essential materials for a third bomb would soon be on their way." When the B-29 stand-down went into place, Parsons was about to go home, but Groves stopped him "in order to assure complete readiness to assemble and deliver additional atomic bombs in the event that negotiations with the Japanese broke down."

Tales of the Flying Tigers

Charles Sweeney published his memoirs as War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission (Avon, 1997). During the party following the successful Hiroshima drop, he recalled that Paul Tibbets took him aside and told him that he was to command the second atomic mission, with Kokura as the primary and Nagasaki as the secondary target. Timing was important, Tibbets said: "It was vital that [the Japanese] believed we had an unlimited supply of atomic bombs and that we would continue to use them. Of course, the truth was that we only had one more bomb on Tinian. Delivery of the third bomb was several weeks away."

Major Sweeney flew one of eight 509th Composite Group B-29s that took part in the war's final mission, the "thousand-plane raid" of August 14-15. Enola Gay and Bock's Car were excused "for obvious reasons," as was The Great Artiste, which because it contained the scientific instruments that would be needed if there were a third atomic mission. The group's two remaining B-29s, he noted, were Spook and Jabett III--and they "were on route to the United States to take delivery of components for more Fat Man bombs."

In an August 2002 interview with Studs Terkel published in the British Guardian newspaper, Paul Tibbetts recalled something similar: "Unknown to anybody else--I knew it, but nobody else knew--there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay. He said, 'You got another one of those damn things?' I said, 'Yessir.' He said, 'Where is it?' I said, 'Over in Utah.' He said, 'Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it.' I said, 'Yessir.' I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over."

In Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, Richard Frank says it was General Marshall and General Grove who delayed the transport of the third bomb, sufficient that it couldn't have been deployed until August 21 or thereabouts.

Chuck Hansen's great book U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History doesn't explicitly go into this question, but it does note that at the end of 1945 the U.S. owned a total of two atomic bombs, both Fat Man plutonium bombs. (This design became the standard U.S. nuclear weapon until into the 1950s.) He also notes that the weapons were short-lived, so it is possible that a) there were more than two bombs in the inventory when the war ended and even that b) the bombs on hand on December 31 had been assembled after August 15.
Timeline
There was a timeline at www.ask.ne.jp (no longer available, alas). Here are some of the highlights it provided that touch on the "third bomb":

May 10: 2nd Target Committee meeting priotizes targets as 1) Kyoto, 2) Hiroshima, 3) Yokohama, and 4) Kokura

May 30: Kyoto removed from target list by order of Henry Stimson, secretary of war

June 10: 509th Composite Group arrives on Tinian, the Marshall Islands, with 11 B-29s

July 16 (four hours after the Trinity explosion): Little Boy shipped aboard USS Indianapolis

July 23: second plutonium core completed (unclear whether this means the core for the Nagasaki bomb or for the third bomb)

July 26: Indianapolis arrives at Tinian; Little Boy unloaded

Same day: uranium warhead for Little Boy (the Hiroshima bomb) sent to Tinian by C-54 transport plane

Same day: plutonium core and initiator for Fat Man (the Nagasaki bomb) sent to Tinian by C-54

August 2: "Parts of Fat Man arrive at Tinian"

August 11: "Interruption of transport to Tinian of the 2nd Plutonium core and initiator by the order of G.C. Marshall"

There are gaps here, but it seems pretty obvious that on August 11 the heavy stuff for the third bomb (Fat Man #2) was either already on Tinian or soon to arrive by sea, and that it could have been married up with the fissile core within a week.

Question? Comment? Newsletter? Send me an email. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

the Glen Edwards diaries

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/25/weekly-document-the-third-shot-and-beyond-1945/



Redactions
The Third Shot and Beyond (1945)
by Alex Wellerstein, published April 25th, 2012

Counterfactual history — or alternate history — is not a genre that most professional historians indulge in. We’re quick to sneer at it, for good reason: it’s pure fantasy, and about as relevant to history as Star Trek is to serious physics. (Star Wars is, unfortunately, another story.)

But sometimes the genre of What If? can be somewhat useful at pointing out assumptions in the current historical narrative. Controversial topics can cause us to get stuck in narrative ruts, parroting back the same sequence of events, taking for granted what did happen and losing sense of the contingency — the way in which things might have turned out otherwise.

Hiroshima, October 1945. The domed structure in the far background, at right, was nearly directly under the bomb when it exploded. When showing such photos to students, I always point out that the reason there aren’t any corpses isn’t because they were vaporized — it’s because these photos were taken after they were already removed.

In the comment section of a post on here from last week, Michael Krepon of the Stimson Center (and Arms Control Wonk) posted an interesting hypothetical question:

What do you think would have happened differently had Japan not surrendered and if the US kept using atomic weapons when they were ready? We know what would have been the same: Japan would have lost the war. We can readily imagine what would have been different in Japan: more smoldering, radioactive rubble. But what would have been different outside of Japan?
I strangely wonder about the question. I suspect that there would have been an open revolt at Los Alamos. Would Truman have said, “enough”? Would attitudes about the Bomb in the US & Russia have been any different? Attitudes toward the US?

It’s worth noting explicitly that this is a very different question to the “what if we hadn’t dropped the bomb at all?” question, which is more common and has some pretty well-worn narrative ruts (deaths of bomb vs. invasion, whether demonstration would have worked, the importance of the Soviets invading Manchuria vs. the bomb, etc.). This query presumes that Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened as they did, but instead of surrendering shortly thereafter, the Japanese had kept on going, and Truman had OK’d the dropping of more bombs.

I gave some gesture at a response, synthesizing some interesting work that I thought was relevant to the issue. I also managed to get Michael Gordin, author of Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War, to chime in as well. You can read the responses at the post linked to above.

How realistic is the question? Pretty realistic, as it turns out. As Michael G. argued in his book, the notion that “two bombs were enough” wasn’t actually dominant at the time — some people thought it would be “enough,” but most people, naturally, had no idea how many would be “enough.” In early August 1945, nobody knew whether the atomic bombs would be the “war-ending weapons” that they were later (controversially) touted as being. Only after surrender do you really get into the idea that two are “enough,” if not too much.

This week’s document is one of the more vivid demonstrations of this fact. It is a transcript of a telephone conversation between General John E. Hull, who was involved in Allied planning in the Pacific theatre, and Colonel L.E. Seeman (here incorrectly noted as “Seaman”), an assistant of Groves, on August 13, 1945. The subject is the “third shot” — the next bomb ready for use after Nagasaki, which was anticipated to be ready by August 23 — and the shots beyond that.1

Click for the PDF.

From the transcript:

S[eaman]: … Then there will be another one the first part of September. Then there are three definite. There is a possibility of a fourth one In September, either the middle or the latter part.
H[ull]: Now, how many in October?
S: Probably three in October.
H: That’s three definite, possibly four by the end of September; possibly three more by the end of October; making a total possibility of seven. That is the information I want.
S: So you can figure on three a month with a possibility of a fourth one. If you get the fourth one, you won’t get it next month. That is up to November.
H: The last one, which is a possibility for the end of October, could you count on that for use before the end of October?
S: You have a possibility of seven, with a good chance of using them prior to the 31st of October.
H: They come out approximately at the rate of three a month.

That’s a lot of bombs. (Incidentally, this also lets you estimate the maximum stockpile size throughout much of the late 1940s. In practice, bomb production fell off in the confusion at the end of the war, and didn’t pick up again until 1948 or so.)

H: That is the information I wanted. The problem now is whether or not, assuming the Japanese do not capitulate, continue on dropping them every time one is made and shipped out there or whether to hold them up as far as the dropping is concerned and then pour them all on in a reasonably short time. Not all in one day, but over a short period. And that also takes into consideration the target that we are after. In other words should we not concentrate on targets that will be of the greatest assistance to an invasion rather than industry, morale, psychology, etc.
S: Nearer the tactical use rather than other use.

“The other use”: what a euphemism! Though perhaps no worse than “strategic bombing,” which is a nicer formulation than “terror bombing” (as it was, for awhile, originally called, in the context of firebombing). This idea of one-bomb-as-you-get-them or holding them up and then “pour[ing] them all on” is one of the ones that has stuck with me. A “rain of ruin” indeed. It’s tempting to imagine this as periods of peace punctuated by periods of terrible destruction, but it’s probably worth noting that there would have likely been firebombing during those “peaceful” periods as well, so there’d be a lot of terrible destruction to go around.

H: That is what it amounts to. What Is your own personal reaction to that?
S: I have studied that a good deal. Our own troops would have to be about six miles away I am not sure that the Air Forces could place it within 500 feet of the point we want. Of course, it is not that “pinpoint”. Then the stage of development has to be considered. The work it is liable to be used for the more or less has to be explosive effect. It would be just a gamble putting or sending those troops though.
H: Not the same day or anything like that. We might do it a couple or three days before. You plan to land on a certain beach. Behind which you know there is a good road communication and maybe a division or two of Japanese troops. Neutralization of that at some time from H Hour of the landing back earlier, maybe a day or two or three. I don’t anticipate that you would be dropping it as we do other type bombs that are in support of the infantry. I am thinking about neutralizing a division or a communication center or something so that it would facilitate the movement ashore of troops.
S: That is the preferable use at this time from that standpoint. The weapon we have is not a penetration weapon. The workmanship is not as good as possible. It is much better than average workmanship. We are still developing it though.
H: From this on more or less of the timing factor, how much time before the troops actually go into that area do you think would be the safety factor? Suppose you did get a dud or an incomplete explosion, what safety factor should you consider, one, two, three days?
S: I think we are sending some people over to actually measure that factor. I think certainly by within 48 hours that could be done. Everything is going so fast. We would like to train people and get them in a combat spirit to do that. I think the people we have are the best qualified in that line. Of course, as you say, if it is used back in a kind of reserve line or in a reserve position or a concentration area but that you wouldn’t be up against right away.
H: I don’t think you would land at eight o’clock in the morning and you would drop it at six o’clock, out the day before, even from the tactical standpoint without regard to when it fails to go off or something like that.
S: Another thing you may be likely to consider is that while you are landing you might not want to use it as it could be a dud. It is not something that you fool around with.

Atomic bombs: “not something that you fool around with.” Truer words never spoken, eh? I’m not sure how they were planning to measure acute, on-the-ground radioactivity in the places they’d just bombed, given that the war wasn’t over yet. (They did send over people in September 1945 to learn about things like that, after the war was over.) In any case, imagine if they had, haphazardly, sent American troops through recently atomic-bombed zones as part of the invasion. What would the legacy of American use of the bombs been, then?

The concern with the possibility of a “dud” is also counter to the usual historiography. What if one of them hadn’t gone off? The Los Alamos folks had calculated that the possibility of a bomb failing was pretty high; neither of them did fail, so it’s easy to see them as resounding successes, but the sample size here (n = 3) is awful small.

H: I would appreciate if you would discuss that angle with General Groves. I would like to have his slant on it. That is the question, how do we employ it and when do we employ it next? It has certainly served its purpose, those two we have used. I don’t think it could have been more useful than it has. If we had another one, today would be a good day to drop it. We don’t have it ready. Anyhow within the next ten days the Japanese will make up their minds one way or the other so the psychological effect is lost so far as the next one is concerned in my opinion, pertaining to capitulation. Should we not lay off a while, and then group them one, two, three? I should like to get his slant on the thing, General Groves’ slant.

Again, the possibility of “pour[ing]” them out in groups, linked towards guessed psychological reactions. I also find Hull’s comment about “today” (August 13) being a good day to “drop it” interesting. August 13 was about four days after the last bomb; presumably Hull’s “feel” for this was that every three or four days would have been a good rhythm for atomic bombing.
Notes