On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 12:22 PM, Jordin Kare <jkare@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A side story:
Luis Alvarez, whose main job at Los Alamos was developing the exploding-wire
detonators that made the first implosion devices
possible, was one of my mentors in graduate school. I don’t remember the
exact context,
but someone had made a comment about the Nagasaki bombing being unneeded,
and Luis
responded (quite heatedly, for him) that if he’d been a Japanese physicist,
and the Emperor
or the generals had asked him after Hiroshima whether the U.S. could destroy
Japan with
these new bombs, he would have said no: it was clear from the isotopes left
from the
explosion that the bomb had been made with U-235, and that the U.S. couldn’t
possibly have
enough U-235 for more than one or two such bombs (which was correct), so the
new bombs didn’t
change the military situation. The U.S. *had* to drop* a second bomb to
prove that we could make a plutonium-based bomb, and therefore could make
as many bombs as we wanted.
