The Glade 4.0

I just watched the video of Dr. Openheimer talking about the nuke...
Video Link at Atomic Archive.com

His regret is very powerful.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Good thing we got it before the Nazis did...

Even if the nazi's did get it, they didnt really have a delivery system to get it to the US mainland.

They wouldn't have used it on us right away.

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Raell Kromwell

You have to remember, these were not stupid men. The Manhattan Project assembled some of the most brilliant minds on the planet in that era. They knew what they had just built, and the terror it was going to unleash on the world.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

What makes you think the US mainland would have been the first, or even a necessary, target?

Interesting thought when it comes to the Nazis, what if Hitler hadn't turned on Russia?

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Yeah, hitting certain places in Europe (especially the U.K.) could have ended the U.S. war effort. If they would have got the bomb, and the U.S. wasn't close to getting it, then the Nazis would have likely won the war.

And one thing, looking back at history, how do you think history would have turned out if no one had got the bomb?

We'd be speaking German.

Maybe a Korea-type situation in Japan, with the Soviets occupying the northern part of Japan. That invasion probably would have ended sometime in the late 1940s; an interesting question is whether the Soviets would have held back expanding their influence and setting up client states in Eastern Europe in the interests of maintaining the alliance against Japan. Probably not, as most Western military planners assumed we'd need the manpower of the Soviet Army to succeed in invading Japan. In that case, the Soviets may have even had more of a free hand in doing what they wanted in Eastern Europe. In Western Europe, you'd have had much more authoritarian governments, and probably a re-armed Germany by the mid-1950s.

Much of this depends on when you think the U.S. would have gotten the bomb, if they didn't get it by 1945. You know, give America the bomb in 1952, let's say. For even more fun, let MacArthur win the 1952 election instead of Eisenhower. There's some fun for ya.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

Do the Japanese still attack us to bring us into the war? If not ... we might come to some rapprochement with the Japanese - sell 'em Venezuelan oil and Brazilian rubber, something like that - and turn isolationist. I think we'd still be speaking English, but we might have had a less-democratic system. The zeitgeist of eugenics and final solutions might have pushed civil rights back 20 years or so. The New Deal would probably have gone down the tubes as Roosevelt loses the 1944 election, or dies earlier than he did IRL. Interesting questions, hope they never give me a time machine.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

That was one of my favorite quotes from Civ IV, Leonard Nimoy was a perfect pick to do the vocals on that.

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Leonard Nimoy did all the narration in Civ IV, didn't he?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yes

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"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." - Alice R. Longworth

"Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun." - Ash Williams

Yes and he was perfect.

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While I agree 100% that they knew what they'd created, I'm not so sure that all the consequences of the bomb's creation could be forseen. They undoubtedly had a much clearer concept of what genie they'd just let out of the bottle after the tests, but I'm willing to bet that during the R&D phases, it wasn't quite as obvious where their path was leading.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

They ahd the V2 which was more than adequate to hit London, or they might have snuck one through on a bomber. Or used it as a tactical weapon on either front against armor formations.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No we wouldn't. England would ahve been forced to negotiate peace with Germany and the rest of WWII would ahve been us beating the tar out of the Japanese. Germany had zero chance of invading England; it lacked amphibious equipment or the training to use it, and it had only 4 battleships to protect any landing against the Home Fleet, 2 of which were armed only with 11-inch guns. Any German landing attempt would have been massacred by sea and air power before they could land more than a token force on the British Isles.

Given that, there is no way they were going to cross the Atlantic. They lacked the means to defend their convoys against sea or air attack; Germany never finished an aircraft carrier, and again they had only 2 large battleships and 2 small ones; any of which would ahve been hard-pressed at best against a Colorado, North Carolina, South Dakota, or Iowa. All of these had larger main batteries (in bore size, number of guns, or both) and at least all of the newer 3 classes had thicker armor that was better distributed in an all-or-nothing arrangment compared to the incremental arrangment of Bismark which was really unchanged since WWI. Remember that Germany was not allowed to build capital ships after that, so they lost 30 years of building experience. Then there was the rapidly-advancing American radar fire control, which proved devastatingly effective in the Washington vs Kirishima engagement and at Leyete Gulf - and of course counting just those classes and not the older 14-inch gun battleships the U.S. has 13 battleships to the German 4. Submarines might have knocked that down some, but by the same token the U.S. had subs and German destroyers were notoriously poor at long-range work, hence why Bismark and Prinz Eugen were alone.

Subs also wouldn't stop dive bombers or torpedo planes and German ships were considerably inferior to U.S. ships in antiaircraft weapons as well.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I guess I was thinking more along the lines of no bomb for at least 30 years. IMO in such a situation, we are in WW3 before we reach 1952. U.S. spends a lot of time and lives defeating Japan, with Russia's "help". Russia would have likely kept much of mainland terretory recovered from the Japanese. It would not have taken long for Russia to invade West Germany without the threat of the Bomb. That, along with the Russian invasion of Southern Japan, would kick off WW3 in ernest. Where it goes from there is hard to say. Would the U.S. war weary, sue for peace? Or would there be a long and brutal war with Russia. I think the U.S. likely would have won such a struggle, but its hard to say. In any case, it would be a completely different world, and not necessarily a better one. From 1850s+ the world suffered from larger and more deadly wars. Bigger and bigger. Than, after WW2, it suddenly stopped. From then until now, there have been no major wars. WW2 makes Iraq/Afghanistan look like a backyard brawl.

I think this is in large part, thanks to the Bomb. Assured anihilation goes a long way towards providing motivation for keeping wars small and contained.

Yeah, 30 years with no U.S. bomb would have left us with a much different world. I was obviously thinking of a much shorter time frame.



Which is exactly why we should not get our **** in a bundle about Iran getting weapons. First phone call after a successful Iranian test is from the U.S.: "Welcome to the targeting list."

Even if that phone call isn't made, I think it quickly becomes apparent to whoever gets the bomb that their world has changed. Witness the Chinese in the early 60s. They become much more docile after they get the bomb.

Not that Hillary or any U.S. official can say as much. They have to keep up the non-proliferation facade.

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

Well, part of the problem is that with countries like Iran, it isn't certain that they wouldn't do it even knowing the consequences. Ahmedinejad (sp?) is a big believer in the 12th Imam prophecy which states "that Imam al-Mahdi will reappear when the world has fallen into chaos and civil war emerges between the human race for no reason." He then reappears to "reestablish the rightful governance of Islam and replete the earth with justice and peace."

It very well could be part of their aims to sow such chaos by using the bomb. Not likely openly, but by passing it off to a terrorist organization. Countries like Russia, China, etc, would never do something like that as it is way too risky. But for Iran the calculation may be completely different.

Fifty years ago, people would have said the same thing about the "Reds" and "Russ" - they don't think like us, you know.

That's where I don't buy the non-proliferation arguments; nuclear weapons have a way of imposing their own rationality. Now, if you want to make an argument about keeping these weapons out of the hands of states that are less likely to be able to control them, sure, I can buy that. But that often seems to be an afterthought.

Just my own soapbox, feel free to ignore.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

You assume the Iranians in power care, and the CiC in america has the balls to do that.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

They care. They've just weighed the pros and cons and decided to accepting being a target.

They will be a target too. It doesn't take any balls to draw up targeting plans, and the President wouldn't even be involved. The technical details of targeting and attack options aren't something he'd work on.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

MAD is usually a good deterrent against those with things to lose.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville