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Before he developed the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s early work revolutionized the field of quantum chemistry – and his theory is still used t

I understand the rationale of firebombing and nuking Japanese cities on the mainland to destroy their national will to fight. What I don't understand is why we didn't first nuke military targets like Iwo Jima and Okinawa and Tarawa and Guadalcanal We might have avoided the deaths of thousands of American fighting men but who knows the shortest path to victory?
 
Thanks for the article! Many of those scientists suffered incredible guilt after the fact and many moved on to promote restrictions on nuclear proliferation. It must have been a wild time to be a scientist during that time.
I am a molecular biologist and couldn’t imagine developing biological agents with the sole purpose of inflicting massive human suffering. There are some that have no problem with it (think 2019).
 
HayesGreener said:
I understand the rationale of firebombing and nuking Japanese cities on the mainland to destroy their national will to fight. What I don't understand is why we didn't first nuke military targets like Iwo Jima and Okinawa and Tarawa and Guadalcanal We might have avoided the deaths of thousands of American fighting men but who knows the shortest path to victory?
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You make a good point, but we did not have enough uranium until 1945 for even the simple "gun" type device used in Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima. The design was initially developed by the British I think but the materials and technology had not come together yet. The Trinity test using an implosion design wasn't tested until July 1945. Not knowing the final outcome of these bombs or even that we were working on them I doubt the political and military leadership would want to wait to go on the offense.

My question would be why wasn't the full might of our strategic air arm employed to pulverize these islands in these campaigns? In Europe prior to D-Day, Ike grabbed USAAF Gen. Spaatz by the stack and swivel and ordered the strategic bombers be pulled off their deep missions and after two weeks effectively sealed off the Normandy operational area. Then again, I don't know the inside baseball story of commanders in the Pacific other than MacArthur and Nimitz hated each other but that doesn't really explain not using every asset at our disposal.
 
My good friend put in a great deal of time reading and researching the building of the atomic bomb. He gave me this timeline:

Roosevelt July 16,1939 Teller, Szilard got Einstein to sign the letter to
Roosevelt - 6 years before Trinity.

Guadalcanal Feb 1943 Ended

Los Alamos March 1943 Opened, the bombs weren't even a gleam at this point

Iwo Jima Feb 1945 Implosion still hadn't been worked out.

Los Alamos March 1945 Implosion design is frozen

Roosevelt April 12, 1945 Roosevelt passes

Okinawa June 1945 There still wasn't enough uranium or Plutonium

Trinity July 16, 1945 1st atomic bomb detonation

Hiroshima August 6, 1945 After Hiroshima, it will be months before we have enough
uranium for another bomb

Nagasaki August 9, 1945 We had another Plutonium bomb core which could have been
dropped on Aug 17, then it would have been a while before
we had another core.


The Trinity test site is open 2 days a year ( always on a Saturday ), this year it is October 21. But the Trinity web site says:

Due to the release of the movie, Oppenheimer in July, we are expecting a larger than normal crowd at the 21 October open house. You may experience wait times of up to two hours getting onto the site. If you are not one of the first 5,000 visitors, you might not get through the gate prior to its' closure at 2 p.m.​

 
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