They Hate Us for Our Freedom...

And I'm saying it's there, it's easily accessible, it's been parsed and published by professional historians and political scientists over the last thirty years, and largely verified by the principal actors. I'm also saying that anyone who wishes to speak with authority about such matters needs to look at the documents and the authoritative work done with them.



You've missed my point.

It doesn't matter which set of estimates you or I "prefer" sixty years after the fact. What matters are the assumptions, impressions, and estimates the principal actors were working with in 1945. They made the decision, and you cannot defend that decision based on criteria they chose to reject.

It is very clear from the original documents that the principal actors believed that the naval estimates were tainted. It is very clear that the Marshall estimates were given more weight by primary policy-makers like Stimson and Byrnes; memos and telephone transcripts contain Stimson's and Byrnes' comments to that effect. It is also very clear that the importance of the naval estimates were inflated by McGeorge Bundy in 1947, when he prepared Stimson's article for Look.

I'm sorry, Roland. None of these facts are in dispute, except among people with political agendas, and/or people who haven't looked at the documents.



You do Marshall a disservice. He was a career Army officer with an enormous interest in air power and the Army's Air Corps. He had every personal and career reason to extoll the advantages of a bomber-delivered nuclear attack on Japan - for the advantages it would give the Army in the postwar strategic environment, and the lives of American soldiers it might save - his soldiers. Instead, he chose to rise above such concerns and act in the best interest of his country - as chair of the JCS. The report he put out was by far the most objectively researched and calculated, by professionals who had no stake in American interservice rivalry - because Marshall himself insisted on it.



Sorry, you're arguing a tautology here. Kamikaze attacks and force estimates based on tetraechelon formations and civilian irregulars were how the naval estimates were inflated.



If warfare was subject to an Avalon-Hill sort of simple gaming calculus at that late stage of the confict, you might have a point. But you haven't read your Clausewitz, and you fail to take into account the political, social, and diplomatic dimensions - which both Marshall and Nimitz did. Your numbers are meaningless in terms of predicting what might have happened, because they are far too simplistic - they don't take into account the realities beyond the beaches.

Factor in the probabilities of situational political, social, and diplomatic dynamics intruding into your invasion scenario - and they were far more powerful than the corresponding military dynamics at that point in the war - and you'll find the likelihood of the nightmare you describe shifting rapidly.

A good recent commentary on the limitations of your approach as it relates to 1945 can be found in several works by Robert McNamara - who was actually doing that sort of thing for the Army Air Corps during the war.



No, as I've stated before - I'm simply relating what the principal actors themselves were thinking, saying, and doing. The real problem with your scenario is that it represents an argument constructed to demonstrate a contemporary point of view. It does not accurately represent an historical reality.

Actually Hiro, I was just reading up on some nuclear weapons stuff a while ago, and that's not quite how a neutron bomb works.. Or why the projects were killed.

A neutron bomb is still a nuclear weapon. If you set it off over a town, you don't get a "ghost town" filled with dead people and intact infrastructure. you get everything in a few hundred feet squashed flat, fires from the thermal pulse, and all the usual effects of setting off a tactical nuclear weapon.

Problem is, something like, say, a Russian t-72 tank will survive a small tacical nuke a few hundred feet away. which means that to flatten a concentration of russian tanks, you'd need to use a much larger nuke, and do even MORE property damage to the countryside. And since we expected to be fighting in Germany, on friendly soil, that seemed like a bad idea.

A nuetron bomb is also called "Enhanced Radiation." The design is cpmplicatd, but suffice to say it's put together so that as much of the energy released as possible is put out in the form of neutrons, instead of blast effects. Now, it takes a massive neutron bombardment to kill someone instantly, like flicking off a light. Lower dosages will give the target a few hours or days before the radiation really starts imparing them. A neutron bomb has the added "benefit" that it irradiats the material around it. For example, the steel of a tank will actually produce radioative isotopes of iron. which short lived, they would render a tank radioactive for days. so the russians wouldn't be able to just yank out the dead crew and pop in a new one and keep rolling.

So neutron bombs were never "Wonder Weapons" that killed everyone and left buildings intact. They were just slightly less destructive and indesciminate weapons which would work better against their intended military targets, and do less damage to the countryside. Sore of like the difference between a laster guided bomb and carpet bombing with a B-52.

Now, the REASON it was canned has less to do with how "inhumane" it was. (Because, you know, getting incinerated by a nuclear fireball or turned into paste by overpressure is so much MORE humane than having your nervous system collapse from radiation bombardment) and more to do with the fact that it was (slightly) less destructive than standard nuclear weapons.

Some politicians and policymakers felt that neutron bombs reduced the destruction a nuclear war would cause... and thus made the idea more palatable. They prefered to stick with the currently massively descrutive nuclear weapons that made people more hesitant to use them, rather than a slightly more human version people might be MORE inclined to use. The concept was along the lines of "Let's make/keep a nuclear war as horrific as possible, so no one dare to fight one." I don't generally subscribe to that theory (how many weapons designers have proclaimed their creations so terrible they'll mean the end of war?) but it's a valid position I suppose.

Now, if you want to see a REAL crazy weapon... Look up the "Davey Crockette." Pretty much a man portal nuclear bazooka. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but one should always be leery of any weapon that when set to full power will kill the crew firing it.