There's a lot of people in this thread who see "North Korea" and "nuclear test" and get fired up but would otherwise shrug if it were instead, say, "Oklahoma" and "fracking".
The supplemental information is available and says:
> Our earthquake catalog consists primarily of small events with magnitudes of < 2.0
and there were 1399 of them.
The cited Ren&al says:
> The magnitudes of these seismic events primarily range from 1.5 to 2.5
and that there were 647 of them.
USGS (https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/earthquake-and-energy-comp...) says that a magnitude 2.0 earthquake is the equivalent energy of 56kg of explosives, which is more than I'd want to be around but I think for people who actually use the stuff it's not a lot.
This threw me into a rabbit hole for a bit. Apparently there is good evidence that a lot of historical earthquakes in california were due in part at least to the oil industry, which early on would not replace pumped out oil with water.
Now a days they claim they replace the oil with water and all is well. However, as anyone who has owned an ancient used car and has switched from conventional to synthetic motor oil would tell you, there's no way that would work. The assumption is that these voids the oil are in are these hermetically sealed vaults such that one can simply pump in more volume of liquid and balance out pressures. That seems like a big assumption to me. Water is obviously not nearly so viscous as crude oil. It will seep in situations where crude will not. It's probably leaking out like a sieve if its really choss all the way down in California. The oil as it is isn't even very well contained given how common tar seeps are.
Agriculture probably also plays a role. Central valley has sunken what is it 20-25 feet now from historic ground levels? Same issue as a void generated by an atomic test or oil extraction, one would imagine. Mining probably also plays a decent role. Really anything involving removal or non like for like replacement of structural substrate from the ground is probably liable to be associated with seismic activity.
Kind of depressing a realization if this is the case, like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too. You can't really get that stability back without all this new potential energy leaving the system in the form of stuff falling down and new quakes and plates breaking loose and budging a bit more.
>like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too
I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out
we either get it right this time around or it's over for us
it largely depends on the metal but the issue is with quality, not amount. plus, you don't have much in the way of just iron items these days - you have steel which requires temps quite a fair bit above what's possible in a charcoal/coal-based forge to work. early copper metallurgy utilized ores that were 10%+ metals - much softer, more malleable. these days we work with less than a single percent (but from much larger veins). much smarter people have written about this than me: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025GsGe....400323M/abstra...
a better focus would probably be on the fact that there's no longer really easily accessible coal anymore, much less oil. there also are far less trees by which you can make charcoal and firewood (except in certain areas) and that's actually fairly important when it comes to crafting and technology: https://www.postcarbon.org/can-civilization-survive-these-st...
If human society collapses, our cities and landfills will become ores. Strange ores filled with unnatural mixtures of metals, but ores nonetheless.
The sources you've linked discuss mostly the recovery of additional metals on top of what we have already recovered. That's a different and much harder problem. It's worth remembering that historically, the amount of metal obtained was much smaller — the vast majority of the copper that has ever been mined was mined in the last century, even though humans have been using copper for thousands of years. But historically, that copper was mostly used for consumer products, while today it becomes electrical cables, so it's less obvious how much copper we all use. There's surely enough copper in the walls of my apartment for everyone living here to cook in a copper pan, even though we think of copper pans as being too expensive nowadays.
> I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out
> we either get it right this time around or it's over for us
The materials just in the frame of a typical big box store would be sufficient for any basic blacksmith to make millions of spades (and shovels!) using nothing but basic charcoal and a blower.
And you can make several thousand human operated blowers, forges, and small utility buildings also with the materials in a typical big box store’s frame.
The biggest issue would
be food and day to day energy requirements and fertilizer. A lot of our economy is highly dependent on refined hydrocarbons and derived products like ammonia/nitrates that aren’t locally producible right now.
Nah. Smiths literally came along with travelling war parties all the time.
In Europe, nearly every village had one (it was pretty required), and they operated even during active wartime. Because they had too.
All you really need is a skilled blacksmith, a forge, an anvil, and some hand tools. Well, and some fuel and iron.
All that can be transported by cart with a small team of people. In a village, even in wartime, you don’t need to move it, so it’s really just fuel and a few folks + metal feedstock, which is likely even more available from scavenged weapons and the like.
On the other hand, it's kind of reassuring that if we cock it up bad enough this time around, we won't be given the opportunity to make the same mistakes a second time?
Eh, not really. Any large scale dump will contain riches - in both accessible energy sources, like burnable and melt able plastics and other materials and metals - that it dwarfs whatever was available to any pre-industrial society.
We might have a pretty rough time dealing, but we’ve got a lot of wealth accumulated above ground now, and we’d have plenty of chances to make a go at it.
I wonder if there's an argument to be made that these little earthquakes help release stored potential energy in the crust, preventing it from building into a more severe and dangerous event?
In the Johannesburg area in South Africa, gold mining has produced up to half of all gold ever extracted in the world, with mines reaching depths of 4000m.
This has resulted in frequent seismic events, in the 2.0 to 3.0 range on the Richter scale, occurring on a daily or weekly basis, more occasionally reaching 5.0. This started around 1906 and still continues today. See:
What's a little permanent undermining of unknown scope across wide swaths of developed area if it means a decade or two of profitability over the working life of the well? I mean have you even considered the shareholders interests?
(Not to be contrarian, but I rather thought usa has recently and repeatedly threatened to bomb and nuke countries into stone age... And in fact went significant way through that effort over last few months, to the tune of some $40bil or so, for no clear, consistent, rational, elucidated reason whatsoever. And of course, rather famously, is the only country that actually deployed nuclear weapons against other people).
I don't necessarily disagree with your underlying point mind you, but USA isn't what it used to be internationally, if it ever truly was. "Oklahoma / USA are peaceful, predictable. rational political entities" is a rather laughable point to try to make today :-/
A certain highly respected American general wanted to make the border between North Korea and China a literal radioactive wasteland in order to cut off Chinese reinforcements and supplies.
We can all be very happy the US is not the sole owner of nukes lol.
As someone that has no stakes in the oil industry, I would describe fracking as deeply anti-social.
NK possessing nukes is the reason there hasn't been a war in the region for so long. Which gives a "good" model for Iran to follow. I'm not happy that NK has nukes, or that Iran is trying to get them, but you have to admit that while the US exists as it is, they are the only way for a nation to protect itself from constant wars and invasions. I would be willing to bet that Iran getting nukes would paradoxically make the Middle East much safer: the US and their allies would be forced to leave it alone, which in turn would shrink the anti-US sentiment in the long term, which would cut into the ranks of terrorist cells, etc.
It makes an invasion of Iran less likely, but it also probably means more conflict, not less.
Acquiring nukes rebalances the power between Iran and the US and its neighbors. Roughly equal pairs of states fight more than lopsided ones, historically. The probability for a win on either side is higher when on equal footing.
Nukes as a deterrent caps escalation. This emboldens the holder of the nukes in lower levels of conflict. See Russia with Ukraine (knowing NATO wouldn’t respond), Kargil after Pakistan got nukes, and NK sinking the Cheonan.
Iran getting a bomb probably triggers Saudi Arabia to follow suite, possibly Turkey and Egypt too. Many of the conflicts in the area aren’t (solely) defined by US presence. The Iran–Saudi, Sunni–Shia, and Israel–Iran rivalries to name a few.
It’s possible the dynamics shake out differently, but color me skeptical.
I'm no expert in geopolitics, but to me the relation between a nuclearized Iran and Saudi Arabia could become like that of North and South Koreas: tense but ultimately passive.
That relationship is (was?) a proxy for two mature superpowers. The dynamic between the mid-tier powers in the Middle East is not that similar, IMO. With the US realigning, I expect to see more activity in that conflict.
I can’t know the future, but if the model I’m proposing is correct we’ll see some NK/SK shake-ups soon. That won’t bode well for Iran.
Looked at another way, shale natural gas has largely displaced coal which emits more CO2 and can be burned in the same power plants. This base load allows for more wind and solar. Natural gas is a great bridge fuel.
If you could remove a gigaton of usable coal from the world and replace it with an equivalent amount of natural gas, that would be a nice improvement.
When the natural gas is displacing coal by being cheaper, that's pretty bad in the long run. We're still probably going to use that coal later, and cheaper fossil fuels reduce the price pressure to install renewables.
We probably won’t go back to coal, most of the cheap high quality surface level coal is gone and we have a lot of natural gas. We also may see a resurgence of nuclear power and a lot more solar of course.
If we were running out of cheap coal anyway then we would have been better off without the surge in natural gas.
Higher prices would promote a faster shift directly from coal to solar (or nuclear if the price works out). And there was already enough natural gas production to fill the gaps that solar, wind, and batteries can't fill.
This is some rhetorical thing people say, but you don't actually believe it, right? You're not that wildly delusional? You think that if the air is 4C warmer, we won't have laws, people, culture, or whatever else makes a civilization? And that in the mean time, people being able to heat their homes in winter and not freeze to death, and otherwise afford electricity, are not offsetting pro-social benefits?
It's worse than people think. The fact that North Korea-traditionally nuttier than all the Middle Eastern governments combined-gets mean Hollywood movies made about them while Saddam, Gaddafi, and Assad got regime changed sent a certain kind of message, you know? Not to mention, the Iranians, Syrians, Pakistanis, et all could have never got off the ground without massive North Korean help.
I'm saying this as someone who is on the whole deeply cynical about Boomer pearl clutching when it comes to atomic proliferation.
Sure - but the content and intent of the article is clearly about understanding the geographic conditions that lead to sustained seismic activity, when that's not what our models currently predict.
And it's hardly like we're "super concerned about the tests because of the test itself" here... given we've triggered nearly 1000 underground nuclear blasts in the US alone, across several states (at least 6).
So... yeah - a relatively unstable state gaining nuclear capabilities sucks, but the interesting part of the discussion in the article is why we're seeing activity years after the testing.
The energy being released in these many tiny earthquakes was always going to exist in this location. Much better to release it slowly via thousands of tiny earthquakes than all at once. Better to have 10k magnitude 3 quakes than one magnitude 7.
Geologic systems are more complex than this. Analyzing something like this as though it were a single system is wrought with the dangers of miscalculation.
You could locally release stresses on an incremental, short term basis this way in a local system, while at the same time increasing stresses on nearby systems which could fail even more spectacularly, especially if the increasing stresses are being moved from a less dangerous system to a more dangerous system.
I'm not suggesting the above is true in this case, but that you need to cast a pretty wide net with increasingly unknown (and perhaps unknowable) variables as you start to inject real changes into a local system and try to predict what those changes will actually do.
It's logarithmic so you'd need more like 30,000 magnitude 3 earthquakes to equal the energy of a magnitude 7. I don't think it's clear this is better. You can also make the argument that this may trigger the large earthquake that might not have happened for a long time.
Energy is logarithmic with magnitude, but if the underlying model is analogous to springs being loaded and suddenly released, that model is quadratic in energy with distance.
The article cites 1399 detectable follow-on earthquakes. If each of them represented a movement of earth an equal distance as compared to a single event, each of those movements would be 1/1399th in scale and therefore ~5x10^-7 in energy per event. (One two-millionth.)
There isA study about fire fighting. If you shit down every fire quickly then eventually you’ll have a major black swan. If you let fires burn a bit more then you’ll avoid black swan effect that burns down everything
I’m not sure if “let fires burn a bit more” is exactly what we’re after but hazard reduction burns are absolutely a thing and are an essential part of fire risk management. I don’t think your post deserved to get slammed like that.
The region can build up resistance to big fires by having small fires.
If you have an anvil hanging over your head, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the anvil makes sense. Damaging the rope holding the anvil doesn't.
I think the real problem is that you don't know whether it's a good analogy in your situation. You don't know whether you're lowering the anvil or just fraying the rope. It depends on a lot of hard-to-measure things about your whole geologic situation.
It makes sense to me, if you consider that a "damaged rope" is a bit more elastic, so it stretches more, and allows the anvil to come to rest at a marginally lower position above your head. But only marginally.
In other words, it'd probably a terrible tradeoff to reduce the impact of some disaster by 0.0001% at the expense of making it 0.1% more likely/frequent to occur.
If you have an ~~anvil hanging over your head~~ ton of compressed rock under you, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the ~~anvil~~ potential energy of the rock makes sense. Damaging the ~~rope holding the anvil~~ rock containing the energy doesn't.
Yeah, I mean, I understand the words you wrote. I don't think it's a good analogy.
It is entirely feasible that the same amount of potential energy, delivered either in small, successive amounts, but spaced out, proves to be tolerable, while a single large amount would be fatal.
But setting off small earthquakes doesn't just damage the rope, it also lowers the anvil. Also the anvil in our analogy is constantly getting heavier, so the chances of our rope holding forever are very low
At least naturally, faults release almost all their energy in the few largest events. You never see enough small earthquakes that you would "release slowly" that amount of energy. It would really need to be several orders of magnitude of more energy being released slowly.
A 150kt nuke has like 500,000x the energy release of a mag 3.0 earthquake, but as the article mentions that energy went into the original magnitude 6.3 event.
We are not even remotely close to being able to predict this in a way to apply it reliably. Plate tectonics and volcanology are incredibly difficult to forecast anything short-term in.
This article does a very poor job of differentiating earthquakes people feel and care about versus magnitude 2 quakes that are like your neighbor dropping a book upstairs.
The issue on real faults is they span massive areas. The San Andreas fault system spans basically the entire coast of California.
Even if we could identify the right points there's a big liability shift both legal and political between doing nothing and intentionally setting off an earthquake that would be hard to predict the size of. It's part of why ~~proscribed~~ prescribed burns fell out of favor, it's way easier to do nothing and blame nature than defending damage caused by intentional acts. It gets into messy areas where it's hard to convince people that the damage was lesser than it otherwise would have been in the future.
The main reason is there are alternative paths where neither were required. Japan was already fishing around for diplomatic end to the war with the major sticking point being conditional vs unconditional surrender and their main condition iirc was protection for the Emperor which the US ended up not messing with significantly anyways (at least in terms of execution for various war crimes committed by Imperial Japanese forces). That's usually the main argument I see and honestly I see the points there, Japan really was putting out fairly significant feelers about a possible negotiated end to the war before the Soviet Union was able to pivot to the Far East theater.
We'll never /really/ know what the outcome of a negotiated peace would have looked like since it was obviated so soon after it started by the bombing and Japan's unconditional surrender afterwards. We don't really know how much that path would differ from the outcome of the unconditional surrender turned out to be. The main point is it's not an either or situation between bomb and the bloody full on land invasion scenarios as presented by the bomb apologist [0] camp.
[0] I mean this in the neutral dictionary sense of simply "one that defends a controversial position", just to clarify.
>The main reason is there are alternative paths where neither were required. Japan was already fishing around for diplomatic end to the war with the major sticking point being conditional vs unconditional surrender and their main condition iirc was protection for the Emperor ...
This is not true. While there were peace feelers put out by the civilian members of the Big 6, the military hardliners blocked each of them. (Most accounts also state that part of their conditions would be to be given the islands in the South Pacific that the allies had just conquered.)
Even AFTER an atomic bomb had been dropped, the military had unacceptable demands:
>...Three members held out for three additional terms: Army Minister General Korechika Anami and the Chiefs of Staff of the Army, General Yoshijiro Umezu, and Navy, Admiral Soemu Toyoda. These additional terms included: 1) Japan would disarm her own forces; 2) Japan would conduct any “so-called” war crimes trials of her own nationals; and 3) there would be no occupation of Japan. This last term would assure the continuance of the Imperial system and Hirohito’s seat on the throne. These positions would be referred to as the “one condition” and the “four condition” Japanese peace terms. Under the Japanese governing system, however, the Big Six could only act when unanimous. With a three to three split, they were deadlocked.
It was at this point that Hirohito intervened:
>...At the end of the theatrical demonstration of the deadlock, the emperor spoke. He stated he had given serious consideration to the situation at home and aboard. He then announced his support of the “one condition” offer. He and Japan must “bear the unbearable.” The Big Six and later the full cabinet made Hirohito’s decision official government policy.
The American and Allied reply accepted the Japanese surrender offer, except that it stated clearly that the emperor would be subordinate to the occupation commander. This produced another dispute as to whether Japan could accept these terms. The emperor intervened again to announce he was satisfied with the American cable.
Even after all this, hardline military officers attempted a violent military coup to destroy the Emperor's recorded surrender broadcast and keep the war going.
I talk in more (somewhat ramble-y) detail here [0], but I think I can put a more succinct version of the anti argument here, the main argument is that to morally justify the extreme act dropping atomic bombs on those cities requires an extreme set of justifications to the level of "it was the only option short of a bloody millions dead between both sides home island invasion" that history doesn't necessarily support.
The core thrust that undermines the this or that between bombs and traditional invasion justification for dropping the bombs is that a) the Emperor was already exploring possible peace deals and b) ultimately the Emperor was able to override the extreme militarists in the war council and accept the peace after the bombs. A lot of the pro-moral-bomb argument presupposes that the shock and awe of the atomic bombs were a prerequisite for the change in stance and that anything short of a full invasion of the home islands would not achieve shift large enough to get to a peace deal. (and that to achieve that impact required them to be used on a city)
Ultimately I think (and I know this is extremely hard to prove ahistorically) a naval blockade and shelling/arial campaign that devastated what little military might Japan had left would have lead to the same shift as the bombs and that the casualties from that would be lower or at least less morally weighted as the intentional atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When that shift would happen and how to weigh the deaths morally are going to vary a lot from person to person though and I accept that.
> Even after all this, hardline military officers attempted a violent military coup to destroy the Emperor's recorded surrender broadcast and keep the war going.
A coup that ultimately fails though. I don't think anyone really argues that there weren't fanatical elements remaining even after the bombs were dropped. Their existence doesn't mean peace required the bombs however, the big question is what were the conditions that would reduce their power to the point the peace could be accepted. We have one example in the bombing but that doesn't mean that was the only option.
I personally subscribe to the theory that nuking Japan (at least once) probably stopped the need for an invasion. Almost all of the archives that were sifted through pretty much answers the fact that the Japanese were never going to negotiate a peace that removed its militant aspects otherwise. There would likely have been another war and Japan wouldn't have become democratic.
The 2nd bomb? I can be convinced either way. Japan needed to know they had more than one, but it probably didn't have to be a city. That being said, this is a lot of presentism (looking at the past with modern ethics). World War Two was a brutal, total war and the long term effects of nuclear weapons were not fully understood. Remember that there was carpet bombing with incendiary bombs happening against Japan's wooden cities for the year leading up to this. A non-nuclear end the the war would almost certainly have involved a land invasion and many, many more deaths on all sides.
Japan (as a country) was also not innocent in all this. They started the war - both with China and the USA. The Japanese military IN COLD BLOOD slaughtered more civilians than the Allies did in all their strategic bombings, let alone just nuclear. Even the nuclear bombs had military targets in mind...
1) is a place where symbolic and actual authority are two very different things.
2) is a place where outward consensus is prioritized. Heavily.
After the fall of Tojo in the middle of 1944, the cabinet which regained a modest degree of civilian control was split between those who wanted to surrender with one condition (the kokutai gets preserved in some form-this is what Truman eventually agreed to) and those who wanted to surrender, but with several conditions-they handle their own war crimes trials, all kinds of unrealistic stuff.
The thing is: the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the atomic bombings, the potential social unrest, it all happened within the space of a week. It's frankly a bit bizarre to suggest that one and only one of these played a role in the Japanese decision to surrender, especially given the structure of their government. It probably all combined together at once. And even this led to the Kyujo incident.
>The Japanese military IN COLD BLOOD slaughtered more civilians than the Allies did in all their strategic bombings, let alone just nuclear. Even the nuclear bombs had military targets in mind...
Operation Meetinghouse killed more than the atomic bombs did. And the Soviets-quite literally-raped, murdered, and looted their way through Manchuria to the point where anti-Soviet demonstrations in multiple Chinese cities became very difficult for the KMT regime to control. The Americans would pardon Shiro Ishii, the Soviets would put several Unit 731 goons to work on their own human experimentation program at Sverdlovsk. And these were the relative good guys. So, yeah: it was a dark time in human history.
Ultimately, the decision to use the atomic bombs can't be separated from the decision to press for unconditional surrender of some kind. You could genuinely make the argument that Roosevelt was careless in applying something meant for Germany and its history to a completely different country with different pathologies, and it is certainly true that a "placated" Stalin, a strong pro-US nationalist China, a demilitarized irrelevant Japan, and a decolonized Asia were four goals that were never going to be compatible. But it didn't really matter for Truman, one of the few American Presidents who knew what war actually was-WWI as well as being descended from the losers in the Civil War-and someone who barely had the legitimacy needed to agree to keeping the kokutai after the atomic bombings. I think their usage was inevitable by 1945. Those incandescent with rage from 80 years later miss the forest for the trees.
After the 1944 D-Day landings, Allied planners thought that the war might easily stretch into 1946. The original plan was to drop dozens of atomic bombs on Germany. There was no such thing as "Let's sign a peace treaty where we stop fighting the Germans without invading Germany." You seem to be proposing that when we got to the German border in March 1945 we should have suddenly decided not to enter German territory, but only blockade them instead. The only reason we didn't drop dozens of bombs on both Germany and Japan was that our production lines didn't reach their three bombs per month full capacity until June.
>...Ultimately I think (and I know this is extremely hard to prove ahistorically) a naval blockade and shelling/arial campaign that devastated what little military might Japan had left would have lead to the same shift as the bombs and that the casualties from that would be lower or at least less morally weighted as the intentional atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A full blockade would have led to many more deaths due to famine, etc.
The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.
>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.
>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.
Japan had every intention of defending the main islands just as strong, or stronger, starting with operation Ketsu-Go. One of the slogans in Japan in 1945 was "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."
The proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Please take a moment to try and picture that armada... Yet even with an armada of that size, that wasn't considered enough!
>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."
One thing they would have been facing was a massive kamikaze force:
>...Estimates of how many would have been available vary, but range between 5,000 and 7,000; plans for waves of 1,000 planes were in place. Both sides planned for higher-than-normal success rates since the invasion would greatly reduce problems of finding targets ("fly to the shore, hang a right, find a transport") and the vulnerable transports would be concentrated near shore in order to offload troops.
These weren't the only suicide attackers. The navy had midget submarines and frogmen who would attack the landing craft with explosive charges. Civilians were formally "drafted" into defense units, most of which had no military weapons or uniform, and which had been instructed to attack with bamboo spears or hand tools. There's no way to tell whether such units would have had any positive effect - but their inclusion would almost guarantee that US troops would fire on civilians, with the potential for mass slaughter.
A Japanese military officer summed up the thinking by the Japanese military this way:
>...We will prepare 10,000 planes to meet the landing of the enemy. We will mobilize every aircraft possible, both training and "special attack" planes. We will smash one third of the enemy's war potential with this air force at sea. Another third will also be smashed at sea by our warships, human torpedoes and other special weapons. Furthermore, when the enemy actually lands, if we are ready to sacrifice a million men we will be able to inflict an equal number of casualties upon them. If the enemy loses a million men, then the public opinion in America will become inclined towards peace, and Japan will be able to gain peace with comparatively advantageous conditions.
> Estimates of how many would have been available vary, but range between 5,000 and 7,000; plans for waves of 1,000 planes were in place.
My problem with quotes like that from the Japanese side is I don't believe they could have actually fielded anywhere near that number or at least not for any sustained amount of time. The total number of aircraft counted during the disarmament efforts post war were something like 15k across the entire Japanese army and navy combined across all types of planes and Japan was having massive trouble building any more planes and training new pilots.
Then ultimately the question is how much of that would have been required before the same shift that happened after the atomic bombs were dropped happened in the run up to blockade/invasion? How much of the remaining airforce could have been destroyed before it was really a threat to this alt-history force? etc.
> "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."
Like if we take this quote and others about the defense of the home islands at face value and suppose that they wouldn't have broken soon any ways in the run up to an invasion or in the early days of that effort why are the 100-200k that died by the end of 1945 from the bombings enough when similar amounts wouldn't have been spread among military targets the US could more precisely hit? History already proves that the "One hundred million die proudly" is propaganda bluster.
A big part of the anti-moral-bomb does hinge on the supposition that Japan would not have held much longer and the feared invasion scenario was a case of prudent planning for a worst case that was unlikely to happen. Living as it does in the land of the counterfactual it's tough to really say when they might have broken in this alt-history scenario.
>...The total number of aircraft counted during the disarmament efforts post war were something like 15k across the entire Japanese army and navy combined across all types of planes
They were not planning on using those planes for dog-fighting. They planned to use everything they could for kamikaze attacks.
>...why are the 100-200k that died by the end of 1945 from the bombings enough when similar amounts wouldn't have been spread among military targets the US could more precisely hit?
The atomic bomb was the only reason Hirohito gave in his surrender speech to the Japanese people. There also was this:
>...Later in a private letter to the Crown Prince he did not expect to be made public, the emperor stressed Japan’s deficiency in “science”—a euphemism that encompassed atomic weapons—and an underestimation of the United States and Great Britain. He did not mention Soviet entry into the war.
>...History already proves that the "One hundred million die proudly" is propaganda bluster.
I am not sure why you say that "History already proves" - we really don't know what would have happened. For example, if in 1944 someone was saying that Japan would have over a thousand kamikaze attacks by the end of the war, you might have claimed that was propaganda bluster, but it turns out that is what happened. If someone had said that 90% of the Japanese defenders on Okinawa would fight to the death, you might claim that was propaganda bluster. Or that hundreds of civilians would commit suicide, etc, etc. This was total war.
>...A big part of the anti-moral-bomb does hinge on the supposition that Japan would not have held much longer and the feared invasion scenario was a case of prudent planning for a worst case that was unlikely to happen.
By the time of the fight for Okinawa, Japan was far past any hope of winning that war, yet it was the bloodiest campaign of the entire war. No one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was defeated. Truman and others just hoped that the atomic bomb might be enough to convince Japan to give up.
I think very few people on the anti-bomb side would seriously argue there wasn't a split in the Imperial government and a lot of preparation going into defending against a potential US invasion attempt. At the same time however there were the beginning of diplomatic efforts to explore a negotiated peace from minority factions in the Japanese government partially backed by the Emperor, these (to me) undermine the "it was the only option" argument supporting the bombings morally. I found this article that talks a bit about the feelers (even though it gets side tracked about a supposed early-1945 prototypical peace "offer" that closely matched the eventual status post war, though that's an interesting read and an important bit of info about how to treat and examine reports of things like that). [0]
The main thrust of the anti-moral-bombing argument is essentially that the MAGIC intercepts we know happened for sure of their early diplomatic feelers indicate that the Emperor and some minority factions were beginning to develop the terms for a possible surrender and that combined with the main reasons for the US bombing not being directly oriented towards defeating Japan but were already looking to their next adversary, the USSR, weakens the argument that the bombing was ultimately more moral way of ending the war. We know for sure from Truman et al's own writings at the time show that their only concern wasn't the least bloody end of the war with Japan and they wanted to demonstrate the bomb to the USSR, I think that's pretty undisputed history even by the pro-moral-bombing side of the argument.
I tend to agree that it's unlikely Japan would have been able to stand up to a US blockade when we were already able to safely park battleships off their coast before the bombs were dropped and ultimately the Supreme War Council would have been overruled by the Emperor the same way they were after the atomic bombs were dropped. How quickly would the pro-negotiation side have gained power with a blockade of the home islands? That would have been a pretty safe operation for the US at the time.
The biggest question marks in the whole thing are largely impossible to answer how many more defeats would the militarist side have to suffer before accepting a surrender that looks like the eventual post war status. The insistence on unconditional surrender is also a thing that's difficult to weigh morally. If the US insists on a condition it knows is unacceptable how much does that shift the moral blame for Japan not accepting the ultimatum of an "unacceptable" condition or bomb?
Sorry if it's a bit jumbled, I'm bouncing between work and this and I'm not a great essayist to begin with.
Too long; You rambled too much there in the middle: the main argument of the antibomb remains that it's unlikely that a full or even partial invasion of the home islands would have been ultimately required and the atomic bombing of civilians is so morally bad that it requires an iron clad "there was no other option to end the war" (or the only alternatives were far bloodier; eg a full home island invasion) which the Japanese feelers about negotiating a peace undermines.
I think ultimately if we could part the curtains of time for both sides and show the post war outcome to both sides Japan would have accepted a surrender that lead to that future.
>...We know for sure from Truman et al's own writings at the time show that their only concern wasn't the least bloody end of the war with Japan and they wanted to demonstrate the bomb to the USSR, I think that's pretty undisputed history even by the pro-moral-bombing side of the argument.
There is very little evidence of this. Truman's own writings at time (or later) never mention this idea.
This idea that Truman decided to drop the bomb to impress the Soviets was popularized later. It even has an analysis in the Reddit BadHistory subreddit:
Hmm ok that's new info to me thanks. I don't think it's fatal to the anti argument but I'll try to jettison that from my understanding of the decision to drop the bombs.
Nah, that whole thing is pure human. I originally had simple "tl;dr" but this felt more true and acknowledging of my poor self editing/thought organizing plus a little self deprecating. [0] Somethings that smell of llm speak are common in their output because the llms are mirroring human writing patterns after all.
The only LLM sourced thing in there is I found the nuclear secrecy blog post in a citation link but I then read it myself to try to avoid cherry picking a portion of an article that ultimately shut down my own argument.
[0] eta: Also I thought some people might take tl;dr offensively so softened it with the self deprication.
3-days is a pretty short time for such a major shift in politics for starters. Would a 3rd or 4th have been justified in the 6 day gap before their August 15th surrender announcement if the US had had them available?
Also the justification for the second bomb, that it was required to demonstrate it wasn't a one off doesn't require the that bomb be dropped on a second city either. The main thrust isn't that the bombs weren't effective it's that the extreme nature of the act requires extreme justification bordering on it being the only option but for a bloody home island invasion. See my other long posts about the anti-moral-bomb argument in this thread, I don't want to duplicate them here to avoid spamming the thread.
If the premise is that nuclear bombing was excessive compared to the firebombing and if the United States had waited a few more days between nuclear bombings they would have still continued with firebombing which was just as destructive as nuclear bombing and more people would have died.
The US wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and prevent the Soviets from invading and holding even a small piece of Japan for an indefinite period of time.
In doing so they probably prevented more deaths of Japanese civilians from continued firebombing and a Soviet occupation that would have been incredibly brutal.
And you can look at how the Soviets treated the people in the states that it occupied for decades after and compare it to how the US treated occupied Japan in the post war period.
The effects of both occupations still linger to this day, it's startling to look at economic differences in West Germany vs East Germany. It's doubtful that the USSR would have been able to prevent massive famines in Japan in a post war scenario where they occupied Japan or a portion of it.
A scenario where the US lacked nuclear weapons would have resulted in tremendous firebombing campaigns by both the Americans and the Soviets, as well as famine induced by a naval blockade and the war would have dragged on for much longer, drawing resources away from rebuilding both Europe and Asia, and the result would have been more civilian casualties from war and later famine that would have followed.
I don't think the blame for these civilian deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki falls on the shoulders of the Americans just like the deaths of civilians in the battle of Berlin were the responsibility of the European allies -- The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the madmen who lead their countries to their doom for ultra nationalist reasons and a deranged sense of pride.
And that sense of pride thing there probably played into why the nuclear bombings were necessary -- The ultra-nationalist Japanese leadership needed to save face and it was easy to do so by surrendering to an enemy who had an unfathomably powerful new weapon.
Communications between Hiroshima and Tokyo had totally broken down. When input was received on what actually happened, it would have been so fantastic that it would have been hard to process. And this was at a time where the Bolsheviks-hard to understate the Imperial Japanese government's loathing and horror of Communism despite the pragmatic and often deeply mutually cynical relationship they had during the war-were about to go to war with them.
No this is apologizing for a fascist and suicidal regime. One day people will make this claim about Russia in their current Ukraine war even though it’s painfully obvious Russia is not seeking an actual diplomatic solution, and I will view them with the same distain as I view you now
> One day people will make this claim about Russia in their current Ukraine war
They might, it would be a sore excuse to nuke Russian territory or bomb Moscow a-la Dresden in 1945. The fact that Americans cannot imagine resolution to war without nuclear violence is exactly how Crimea was annexed and lost. If you ignore proportionality, then your adversary can test your patience and win every time.
This is why asymmetric warfare is so popular in Russia and China, and why it pisses off Americans so consistently. Nuclear weapons give nations a false sense of security, it doesn't protect you against subtle escalation like widespread corporate hacking, political blackmail, proxy conflicts, border harassment or industrial overmatch.
The complicating part to that is there's not the same Supreme War Council populated by militarists vs the Emperor split in modern Russia, there's just Putin. To match scenarios there would have to be an oligarch council in Russia pushing continuing the war while Putin put out feelers and that's not what's happening.
Also nothing about the anti-moral-bomb argument hinges on apologetics for Japanese actions just arguments that the bombs were unnecessary to achieve the end to the war. The only assumption is that there was some set of conditions and peace deal short of the two bombs that would lead to the emperor overriding the war council and surrendering.
Yes there was. They didn’t surrender, and the US intended to make it look like they had an enormous number of bombs even though the next was going to be weeks away
Even with the first bomb I wonder if they could have handled it a bit differently. Maybe scuttle a ship with it in the middle of the Tokyo bay, then drop a dud bomb directly onto the imperial palace with a warning painted on it. Seems like immediately after the bombings in hiroshima and nagasaki there was still quite a fog of war going on initially about what even happened. Making the sun appear in the middle of the tokyo bay would have been indisputable however. You'd get the blinding flash, the shockwave, the awe of the cloud, and everyone including everyone in government would not only witness it (anywhere with a window would have gotten the at least the flash), but survive, and do something about having witnessed it.
Of course 1940s thinking of the world was a bit less restrained when it came to the question of wasting a quarter million people in an instant. One wonders if the US felt the bombs were necessary to use with the war already won by that point to have sort of established precedent to use them in future conflicts. The quickness between targets would say as much as well: this is just another bombing run no different than an incendiary run a few days apart from another. After all, that's exactly what MacArthur intended to do in Korea. They were probably desperate to ensure their miracle weapon, one that took so much investment and effort and had so many careers staked in its success, would not end up like chemical weapons where it was verbotten to use even by the nazis.
I think you’ve made reasonable points. I think of it like this: the US was already firebombing Tokyo which was actually much worse than the nukes, they did likely see it as a continuation of the existing firebombing campaign
Yeah I don't think that comes up too much in the defense because it requires admitting the the US was already doing some pretty horrendous things to civilians outside the atomic bombs which is a rough datum to raise when you're defending dropping the atomic bombs. "Well it's good we dropped them because among the alternatives was a continued firebombing campaign." Kind of feeds into the argument that the very least the US weren't the the unambiguous Good Guys just the Better Guys in a lot of ways. (And lets be clear it's not exactly hard to be better than Imperial Japan....)
Nothing nuclear is easy. People will want to make sure you are not going to contaminate the atmosphere, or the aquifers. Not just on the day of the explosion, but long term. They will want to know your plans about how you will contain the nuclear contamination for thousands of years.
And then everyone and their uncle will sue you for any property damage they think they suffered as a result of your engineering. Which can be everyone who owns real estate for hundreds of miles?
But apart from those things there are really no major legal problems with it.
Who said anything about engineering... Do it the American way -- mine the entire fault with nukes, set them off simultaneously, broadcast the entire thing live and sell ad time!
Such ambition! Hey, there's a mountain in the way. Let's blow it up! The audacity to reshape the world in such a way that it suits ourselves has been lost. Why shouldn't we green the Sahara? Why can't we make a new continent?
Imagine if they trigger the California Big One and all of LA, San Diego and the SF Bay (and innumerable towns) are swallowed "because of man-made actions", I wouldn't want to be the Governor or President to approve that one lol
Reminds me of a display at Chabot in the bay area. A bubbling volcano covered by a stable mass stays bubbling underneath, but shaking up the mass gives little bubbles a bath up and they break way for the big bubbles leading to a volcanic eruption. If you fragment a he soil at some point in the mantle of earth and there is pressure anywhere below, you could get yourself a new volcano.
> Since the treaty's opening for signature in 1996, only sixteen nuclear tests have been conducted, all by non-signatory states: Pokhran-II by India and Chagai-I by Pakistan in May 1998, and six tests by North Korea from 2006 to 2017.
I always wondered where and how my country would test nukes if it developed them. Basically there is an expectation that you have to explode at least one.
It was much easier in colonial times when everyone owned a desert or remote island
There have always been earthquakes in Korea. They are just typically quite weak. Though the south region that is closer to Japan has experienced some intense ones, but nothing like the massive ones they have in Japan.
Leaving aside for the moment the DDoS issue, that link is currently working for me. Archived pages on that site are puzzling, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, I'm not sure what accounts for the difference.
People are critical of North Korea - very understandable since
the Juche ideology is absolute rubbish nonsense and North Korea
remains hostile to South Korea. However had, with the USA becoming
a rogue country now, I think it is time that many more countries
will need a small, defensive nuclear arsenal: South Korea, Taiwan,
Japan, Canada, the whole EU (that is, all EU members need protection
on their own; the USA can not be trusted anymore, Trump made that
clear while serving Putin as agent Krasnov).
One can say that more nukes are bad; that's true. However had, the
big old countries CONSTANTLY abuse smaller countries. This happens
again and again and again. So, since they don't stop their own
nuclear abuse and blackmail, the only response that is logical is to
more fairly distribute nukes. Of course a much better option would be
for all countries to give up nukes; perhaps that will happen one day
in the future though probably not, since when one refuses, others would
have to follow suit and also get nukes. So the only viable long-term
strategy is to have nukes, while also working much harder to improve
diplomacy.
I don't see how anyone can argue that North Korean decision making has NOT been vindicated.
Personally: let everybody who needs one have a few instead of relying off the caprices of others. It's not like a small country wouldn't still be having a death sentence if they chose to nuke a big one. But it provides psychological security, as well as deep mutual interest to never let any crazy network have access to a bomb through mutual complicity.
> let everybody who needs one have a few instead of relying off the caprices of others
I don't think this is the solution.
We have a huge number of people willing to press a button and cause pain. And it's escalating. I don't want more of those.
Instead, we should isolate countries that tend to be the aggressors. The Iranians, the Israelis, the Americans, the Russians. Because we have long pretended to not see or found excuses for those aggressions.
Needless to say, we also need to get rid of systems that concentrate too much executive power in a single person. Authoritarian governments are the first, but presidential and semi presidential republics come second.
Geopolitics is very complex, but at least those bigger states have a lot to lose. Under mass proliferation I can see a small country with an ideological nemisis deciding to just nuke them.
I've been thinking about nukes lately (way too much, in fact). And, IMO, the only people who want nuclear weapons are national leaders. If the US invaded North Korea tomorrow, then NK has three options:
1) Launch nukes at the US. The minute those missiles leave their silos, the US will launch theirs. Even assuming the best case of no other nations joining in, most residents of NK and many residents of the US are either dead or going to die soon. The leaders of NK are probably dead.
2) Fight a conventional war. NK will probably hold out fairly well using drones. If they learned from Iran's diffuse decision-making in the military, they'll do even better. They might hold off the US long enough for peace talks. Leadership has a chance to survive, more so if they flee to China or Russia.
3) Capitulate immediately. Leadership flees to China or Russia, and the US probably lets them. The citizens aren't massacred or conscripted into a massacre, and they go on living their lives.
For NK citizens, the order from best to worst is scenario 3, 2, then 1 (if NK had good human rights, the order would be 2, 3, then 1). For pragmatic leadership, it's 2, 3, then 1. For crazy leadership, it's 1, 2, then 3. In the long run, every country will have a crazy ruler.
And that applies to any two countries. If Russia invaded the US tomorrow, I'd prefer we put up a good fight with conventional weapons, and then surrender if that fails. No nukes. I would rather live a mean life under Putin than watch my family suffer radiation poisoning. At least there's a chance of improvement and rebellion with the former.
Thinking more about it, is there any good circumstantial evidence that nukes have deterred war? Conventional war between any major powers would be devastating to everyone's economy. When the USSR was falling apart, they knew it was because of their own system and choices. Was would have just made things worse. The US goes to war with weaker nations and still leaves before winning, because we're a democracy and wars are very unpopular.
imagine the decades of quakes US will set off with the bunker buster they are now developing for Pickaxe Mountain (Iran, solid granite rock, one mile deep)
billions more drained from our economy and I bet the irony is it will be nuclear somehow
There's a lot of people in this thread who see "North Korea" and "nuclear test" and get fired up but would otherwise shrug if it were instead, say, "Oklahoma" and "fracking".
The supplemental information is available and says: > Our earthquake catalog consists primarily of small events with magnitudes of < 2.0 and there were 1399 of them.
The cited Ren&al says: > The magnitudes of these seismic events primarily range from 1.5 to 2.5 and that there were 647 of them.
USGS (https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/earthquake-and-energy-comp...) says that a magnitude 2.0 earthquake is the equivalent energy of 56kg of explosives, which is more than I'd want to be around but I think for people who actually use the stuff it's not a lot.
This threw me into a rabbit hole for a bit. Apparently there is good evidence that a lot of historical earthquakes in california were due in part at least to the oil industry, which early on would not replace pumped out oil with water.
Now a days they claim they replace the oil with water and all is well. However, as anyone who has owned an ancient used car and has switched from conventional to synthetic motor oil would tell you, there's no way that would work. The assumption is that these voids the oil are in are these hermetically sealed vaults such that one can simply pump in more volume of liquid and balance out pressures. That seems like a big assumption to me. Water is obviously not nearly so viscous as crude oil. It will seep in situations where crude will not. It's probably leaking out like a sieve if its really choss all the way down in California. The oil as it is isn't even very well contained given how common tar seeps are.
Agriculture probably also plays a role. Central valley has sunken what is it 20-25 feet now from historic ground levels? Same issue as a void generated by an atomic test or oil extraction, one would imagine. Mining probably also plays a decent role. Really anything involving removal or non like for like replacement of structural substrate from the ground is probably liable to be associated with seismic activity.
Kind of depressing a realization if this is the case, like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too. You can't really get that stability back without all this new potential energy leaving the system in the form of stuff falling down and new quakes and plates breaking loose and budging a bit more.
>like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too
I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out
we either get it right this time around or it's over for us
If you ignore all the metal every place around everywhere, then yeah it's harder to get to.
I have to believe we would be able to make due with the available mountains of metal that is already in use in things?
it largely depends on the metal but the issue is with quality, not amount. plus, you don't have much in the way of just iron items these days - you have steel which requires temps quite a fair bit above what's possible in a charcoal/coal-based forge to work. early copper metallurgy utilized ores that were 10%+ metals - much softer, more malleable. these days we work with less than a single percent (but from much larger veins). much smarter people have written about this than me: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025GsGe....400323M/abstra...
a better focus would probably be on the fact that there's no longer really easily accessible coal anymore, much less oil. there also are far less trees by which you can make charcoal and firewood (except in certain areas) and that's actually fairly important when it comes to crafting and technology: https://www.postcarbon.org/can-civilization-survive-these-st...
If human society collapses, our cities and landfills will become ores. Strange ores filled with unnatural mixtures of metals, but ores nonetheless.
The sources you've linked discuss mostly the recovery of additional metals on top of what we have already recovered. That's a different and much harder problem. It's worth remembering that historically, the amount of metal obtained was much smaller — the vast majority of the copper that has ever been mined was mined in the last century, even though humans have been using copper for thousands of years. But historically, that copper was mostly used for consumer products, while today it becomes electrical cables, so it's less obvious how much copper we all use. There's surely enough copper in the walls of my apartment for everyone living here to cook in a copper pan, even though we think of copper pans as being too expensive nowadays.
Yup, assuming post-collapse populations are smaller, we’d have unimaginable wealth available just salvaging from existing equipment and buildings.
> I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out
> we either get it right this time around or it's over for us
Space, the final frontier.. *cue intro music
can't get to space if you can't even smelt a spade, imo
The materials just in the frame of a typical big box store would be sufficient for any basic blacksmith to make millions of spades (and shovels!) using nothing but basic charcoal and a blower.
And you can make several thousand human operated blowers, forges, and small utility buildings also with the materials in a typical big box store’s frame.
The biggest issue would be food and day to day energy requirements and fertilizer. A lot of our economy is highly dependent on refined hydrocarbons and derived products like ammonia/nitrates that aren’t locally producible right now.
For a smith to operate at all there has to be a level of societal stability that could well be too much of a starting assumption in this scenario.
Nah. Smiths literally came along with travelling war parties all the time.
In Europe, nearly every village had one (it was pretty required), and they operated even during active wartime. Because they had too.
All you really need is a skilled blacksmith, a forge, an anvil, and some hand tools. Well, and some fuel and iron.
All that can be transported by cart with a small team of people. In a village, even in wartime, you don’t need to move it, so it’s really just fuel and a few folks + metal feedstock, which is likely even more available from scavenged weapons and the like.
On the other hand, it's kind of reassuring that if we cock it up bad enough this time around, we won't be given the opportunity to make the same mistakes a second time?
Why are taking sci-fi authors seriously? They are entertainments, nothing more.
Looks like someone doesn't understand the difference between an attribution and an appeal to Authority
Eh, not really. Any large scale dump will contain riches - in both accessible energy sources, like burnable and melt able plastics and other materials and metals - that it dwarfs whatever was available to any pre-industrial society.
We might have a pretty rough time dealing, but we’ve got a lot of wealth accumulated above ground now, and we’d have plenty of chances to make a go at it.
I wonder if there's an argument to be made that these little earthquakes help release stored potential energy in the crust, preventing it from building into a more severe and dangerous event?
> Mining probably also plays a decent role.
In the Johannesburg area in South Africa, gold mining has produced up to half of all gold ever extracted in the world, with mines reaching depths of 4000m.
This has resulted in frequent seismic events, in the 2.0 to 3.0 range on the Richter scale, occurring on a daily or weekly basis, more occasionally reaching 5.0. This started around 1906 and still continues today. See:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S167477551...
What kind of earthquakes in California ?
When gas extraction caused earthquakes in Groenignen, this site was very clear on prioritizing fossil fuel extraction over a few small tremors.
What's a little permanent undermining of unknown scope across wide swaths of developed area if it means a decade or two of profitability over the working life of the well? I mean have you even considered the shareholders interests?
Oklahoma hasn't threatened to nuke anyone.....yet.
Technically, Oklahoma is on the short list of locations that _have_ detonated a nuclear bomb on their enemies in wartime.
Isn't the US literally the only country to ever use a nuke against humans?
(Not to be contrarian, but I rather thought usa has recently and repeatedly threatened to bomb and nuke countries into stone age... And in fact went significant way through that effort over last few months, to the tune of some $40bil or so, for no clear, consistent, rational, elucidated reason whatsoever. And of course, rather famously, is the only country that actually deployed nuclear weapons against other people).
I don't necessarily disagree with your underlying point mind you, but USA isn't what it used to be internationally, if it ever truly was. "Oklahoma / USA are peaceful, predictable. rational political entities" is a rather laughable point to try to make today :-/
Not Oklahoma but Trump has made nuclear threats from Maryland this summer...
Oklahoma is part of US, and there were several threats! Just a few months ago against Iran!
But they did bomb their own people in the Tulsa Race Massacre
nono the state is the only thing that counts. Not the country the state is in or the cities in the state.
It's simple, really. Fracking has offsetting pro-social benefits in a way that NK possessing nuclear weapons does not.
NK nuclear testing has stopped them from being on the active ‘shit list’ like Iran for… decades? Or at least stopped them from being bombed.
I’m sure they’d disagree.
That nuclear devices offer some benefit to the hereditary dictators of oppressed, impoverished North Korea does not actually make them "pro-social."
as I said, i’m sure they’d disagree.
I guess I'm not really interested in Kim Jong Un's opinion.
good thing they don’t have nukes, eh?
A certain highly respected American general wanted to make the border between North Korea and China a literal radioactive wasteland in order to cut off Chinese reinforcements and supplies.
We can all be very happy the US is not the sole owner of nukes lol.
As someone that has no stakes in the oil industry, I would describe fracking as deeply anti-social.
NK possessing nukes is the reason there hasn't been a war in the region for so long. Which gives a "good" model for Iran to follow. I'm not happy that NK has nukes, or that Iran is trying to get them, but you have to admit that while the US exists as it is, they are the only way for a nation to protect itself from constant wars and invasions. I would be willing to bet that Iran getting nukes would paradoxically make the Middle East much safer: the US and their allies would be forced to leave it alone, which in turn would shrink the anti-US sentiment in the long term, which would cut into the ranks of terrorist cells, etc.
It makes an invasion of Iran less likely, but it also probably means more conflict, not less.
Acquiring nukes rebalances the power between Iran and the US and its neighbors. Roughly equal pairs of states fight more than lopsided ones, historically. The probability for a win on either side is higher when on equal footing.
Nukes as a deterrent caps escalation. This emboldens the holder of the nukes in lower levels of conflict. See Russia with Ukraine (knowing NATO wouldn’t respond), Kargil after Pakistan got nukes, and NK sinking the Cheonan.
Iran getting a bomb probably triggers Saudi Arabia to follow suite, possibly Turkey and Egypt too. Many of the conflicts in the area aren’t (solely) defined by US presence. The Iran–Saudi, Sunni–Shia, and Israel–Iran rivalries to name a few.
It’s possible the dynamics shake out differently, but color me skeptical.
I'm no expert in geopolitics, but to me the relation between a nuclearized Iran and Saudi Arabia could become like that of North and South Koreas: tense but ultimately passive.
That relationship is (was?) a proxy for two mature superpowers. The dynamic between the mid-tier powers in the Middle East is not that similar, IMO. With the US realigning, I expect to see more activity in that conflict.
I can’t know the future, but if the model I’m proposing is correct we’ll see some NK/SK shake-ups soon. That won’t bode well for Iran.
“Pro-social” is a strange way to describe something that’s actively contributing to the death of our civilization.
Looked at another way, shale natural gas has largely displaced coal which emits more CO2 and can be burned in the same power plants. This base load allows for more wind and solar. Natural gas is a great bridge fuel.
If you could remove a gigaton of usable coal from the world and replace it with an equivalent amount of natural gas, that would be a nice improvement.
When the natural gas is displacing coal by being cheaper, that's pretty bad in the long run. We're still probably going to use that coal later, and cheaper fossil fuels reduce the price pressure to install renewables.
We probably won’t go back to coal, most of the cheap high quality surface level coal is gone and we have a lot of natural gas. We also may see a resurgence of nuclear power and a lot more solar of course.
If we were running out of cheap coal anyway then we would have been better off without the surge in natural gas.
Higher prices would promote a faster shift directly from coal to solar (or nuclear if the price works out). And there was already enough natural gas production to fill the gaps that solar, wind, and batteries can't fill.
> and can be burned in the same power plants
I don't believe nat gas is burned in the same plants as coal.
Most "closed coal plants" in the US are really plants that retrofitted to use nat gas.
here's a decent recap (now a couple years out of date)
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44636
Ah, cool.
It’s a straightforward retrofit.
This is some rhetorical thing people say, but you don't actually believe it, right? You're not that wildly delusional? You think that if the air is 4C warmer, we won't have laws, people, culture, or whatever else makes a civilization? And that in the mean time, people being able to heat their homes in winter and not freeze to death, and otherwise afford electricity, are not offsetting pro-social benefits?
It's worse than people think. The fact that North Korea-traditionally nuttier than all the Middle Eastern governments combined-gets mean Hollywood movies made about them while Saddam, Gaddafi, and Assad got regime changed sent a certain kind of message, you know? Not to mention, the Iranians, Syrians, Pakistanis, et all could have never got off the ground without massive North Korean help.
I'm saying this as someone who is on the whole deeply cynical about Boomer pearl clutching when it comes to atomic proliferation.
Fracking doesn't result in potential nuclear fallout or the likes of Seoul or Tokyo being held hostage.
Sure - but the content and intent of the article is clearly about understanding the geographic conditions that lead to sustained seismic activity, when that's not what our models currently predict.
And it's hardly like we're "super concerned about the tests because of the test itself" here... given we've triggered nearly 1000 underground nuclear blasts in the US alone, across several states (at least 6).
So... yeah - a relatively unstable state gaining nuclear capabilities sucks, but the interesting part of the discussion in the article is why we're seeing activity years after the testing.
Well oil is definitely the reason countries like Iraq or Venezuela have been held hostage by America.
Yes, and isn't it obvious why?
Could this be considered a good thing?
The energy being released in these many tiny earthquakes was always going to exist in this location. Much better to release it slowly via thousands of tiny earthquakes than all at once. Better to have 10k magnitude 3 quakes than one magnitude 7.
Geologic systems are more complex than this. Analyzing something like this as though it were a single system is wrought with the dangers of miscalculation.
You could locally release stresses on an incremental, short term basis this way in a local system, while at the same time increasing stresses on nearby systems which could fail even more spectacularly, especially if the increasing stresses are being moved from a less dangerous system to a more dangerous system.
I'm not suggesting the above is true in this case, but that you need to cast a pretty wide net with increasingly unknown (and perhaps unknowable) variables as you start to inject real changes into a local system and try to predict what those changes will actually do.
It's logarithmic so you'd need more like 30,000 magnitude 3 earthquakes to equal the energy of a magnitude 7. I don't think it's clear this is better. You can also make the argument that this may trigger the large earthquake that might not have happened for a long time.
Energy is logarithmic with magnitude, but if the underlying model is analogous to springs being loaded and suddenly released, that model is quadratic in energy with distance.
The article cites 1399 detectable follow-on earthquakes. If each of them represented a movement of earth an equal distance as compared to a single event, each of those movements would be 1/1399th in scale and therefore ~5x10^-7 in energy per event. (One two-millionth.)
I think that's clearly better.
So even if this does release pressure with no negative side effects anywhere it isn’t actually useful for preventing “the big one”.
It can go either way, you might get a relief of pressure or you might get an increased destabilisation in the region.
There isA study about fire fighting. If you shit down every fire quickly then eventually you’ll have a major black swan. If you let fires burn a bit more then you’ll avoid black swan effect that burns down everything
By definition, a black swan event cannot be predicted. It doesn't just mean "a larger fire" or "the event of a lifetime".
Have you considered logarithms?
I’m not sure if “let fires burn a bit more” is exactly what we’re after but hazard reduction burns are absolutely a thing and are an essential part of fire risk management. I don’t think your post deserved to get slammed like that.
The region can build up resistance to big fires by having small fires.
Yeah that’s what I’m talking about
Are fires and earthquakes the same?
it would appear nobody here knows. We probably ought to shut up until a seismologist decides to chime in
What would a size scientist know about fires or earthquakes anyways
They'd know how big they are, obviously.
If you have an anvil hanging over your head, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the anvil makes sense. Damaging the rope holding the anvil doesn't.
I don’t think this is a good analogy.
I think the real problem is that you don't know whether it's a good analogy in your situation. You don't know whether you're lowering the anvil or just fraying the rope. It depends on a lot of hard-to-measure things about your whole geologic situation.
It makes sense to me, if you consider that a "damaged rope" is a bit more elastic, so it stretches more, and allows the anvil to come to rest at a marginally lower position above your head. But only marginally.
In other words, it'd probably a terrible tradeoff to reduce the impact of some disaster by 0.0001% at the expense of making it 0.1% more likely/frequent to occur.
If you have an ~~anvil hanging over your head~~ ton of compressed rock under you, the potential energy that would kill you already exists. Slowly lowering the ~~anvil~~ potential energy of the rock makes sense. Damaging the ~~rope holding the anvil~~ rock containing the energy doesn't.
Yeah, I mean, I understand the words you wrote. I don't think it's a good analogy.
It is entirely feasible that the same amount of potential energy, delivered either in small, successive amounts, but spaced out, proves to be tolerable, while a single large amount would be fatal.
That's what they said about slowly lowering potential energy.
But setting off small earthquakes doesn't just damage the rope, it also lowers the anvil. Also the anvil in our analogy is constantly getting heavier, so the chances of our rope holding forever are very low
I think this is analogus to lowering it bit by bit in small but manageable head bonks.
The issue is the mechanism of "lowering" it. You're not giving it more slack.
At least naturally, faults release almost all their energy in the few largest events. You never see enough small earthquakes that you would "release slowly" that amount of energy. It would really need to be several orders of magnitude of more energy being released slowly.
We set off explosives to control avalanche risk.
How does the energy for the nuke itself factor into the equation though?
A 150kt nuke has like 500,000x the energy release of a mag 3.0 earthquake, but as the article mentions that energy went into the original magnitude 6.3 event.
We are not even remotely close to being able to predict this in a way to apply it reliably. Plate tectonics and volcanology are incredibly difficult to forecast anything short-term in.
Yeah, no.
This article does a very poor job of differentiating earthquakes people feel and care about versus magnitude 2 quakes that are like your neighbor dropping a book upstairs.
Makes me think of the fact that the UK officially has over 300 earthquakes per year, but any you would actually feel are unheard of.
There're like 20 magnitude 4 earthquakes worldwide every day too. Even those are rarely noteworthy.
Huh. I never looked this stat up, but I assumed it was close to zero. The one time I had the house rattled in England with a 4.0 was a big surprise.
How long until someone attempts to diffuse a pent up fault line via nuclear geoengineering?
The issue on real faults is they span massive areas. The San Andreas fault system spans basically the entire coast of California.
Even if we could identify the right points there's a big liability shift both legal and political between doing nothing and intentionally setting off an earthquake that would be hard to predict the size of. It's part of why ~~proscribed~~ prescribed burns fell out of favor, it's way easier to do nothing and blame nature than defending damage caused by intentional acts. It gets into messy areas where it's hard to convince people that the damage was lesser than it otherwise would have been in the future.
Typo: prescribed burns.
One of the most ridiculous pairs of approximate homophones in the English language.
Proscribed = forbidden. Prescribed = recommended/required.
Whoops, thanks.
>It gets into messy areas where it's hard to convince people that the damage was lesser than it otherwise would have been in the future.
Morbidly adjacent, the US is still getting dragged over the coals for using nukes on Japan rather than a ground invasion.
The main reason is there are alternative paths where neither were required. Japan was already fishing around for diplomatic end to the war with the major sticking point being conditional vs unconditional surrender and their main condition iirc was protection for the Emperor which the US ended up not messing with significantly anyways (at least in terms of execution for various war crimes committed by Imperial Japanese forces). That's usually the main argument I see and honestly I see the points there, Japan really was putting out fairly significant feelers about a possible negotiated end to the war before the Soviet Union was able to pivot to the Far East theater.
We'll never /really/ know what the outcome of a negotiated peace would have looked like since it was obviated so soon after it started by the bombing and Japan's unconditional surrender afterwards. We don't really know how much that path would differ from the outcome of the unconditional surrender turned out to be. The main point is it's not an either or situation between bomb and the bloody full on land invasion scenarios as presented by the bomb apologist [0] camp.
[0] I mean this in the neutral dictionary sense of simply "one that defends a controversial position", just to clarify.
>The main reason is there are alternative paths where neither were required. Japan was already fishing around for diplomatic end to the war with the major sticking point being conditional vs unconditional surrender and their main condition iirc was protection for the Emperor ...
This is not true. While there were peace feelers put out by the civilian members of the Big 6, the military hardliners blocked each of them. (Most accounts also state that part of their conditions would be to be given the islands in the South Pacific that the allies had just conquered.)
Even AFTER an atomic bomb had been dropped, the military had unacceptable demands:
>...Three members held out for three additional terms: Army Minister General Korechika Anami and the Chiefs of Staff of the Army, General Yoshijiro Umezu, and Navy, Admiral Soemu Toyoda. These additional terms included: 1) Japan would disarm her own forces; 2) Japan would conduct any “so-called” war crimes trials of her own nationals; and 3) there would be no occupation of Japan. This last term would assure the continuance of the Imperial system and Hirohito’s seat on the throne. These positions would be referred to as the “one condition” and the “four condition” Japanese peace terms. Under the Japanese governing system, however, the Big Six could only act when unanimous. With a three to three split, they were deadlocked.
It was at this point that Hirohito intervened:
>...At the end of the theatrical demonstration of the deadlock, the emperor spoke. He stated he had given serious consideration to the situation at home and aboard. He then announced his support of the “one condition” offer. He and Japan must “bear the unbearable.” The Big Six and later the full cabinet made Hirohito’s decision official government policy. The American and Allied reply accepted the Japanese surrender offer, except that it stated clearly that the emperor would be subordinate to the occupation commander. This produced another dispute as to whether Japan could accept these terms. The emperor intervened again to announce he was satisfied with the American cable.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surren...
Even after all this, hardline military officers attempted a violent military coup to destroy the Emperor's recorded surrender broadcast and keep the war going.
I talk in more (somewhat ramble-y) detail here [0], but I think I can put a more succinct version of the anti argument here, the main argument is that to morally justify the extreme act dropping atomic bombs on those cities requires an extreme set of justifications to the level of "it was the only option short of a bloody millions dead between both sides home island invasion" that history doesn't necessarily support.
The core thrust that undermines the this or that between bombs and traditional invasion justification for dropping the bombs is that a) the Emperor was already exploring possible peace deals and b) ultimately the Emperor was able to override the extreme militarists in the war council and accept the peace after the bombs. A lot of the pro-moral-bomb argument presupposes that the shock and awe of the atomic bombs were a prerequisite for the change in stance and that anything short of a full invasion of the home islands would not achieve shift large enough to get to a peace deal. (and that to achieve that impact required them to be used on a city)
Ultimately I think (and I know this is extremely hard to prove ahistorically) a naval blockade and shelling/arial campaign that devastated what little military might Japan had left would have lead to the same shift as the bombs and that the casualties from that would be lower or at least less morally weighted as the intentional atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When that shift would happen and how to weigh the deaths morally are going to vary a lot from person to person though and I accept that.
> Even after all this, hardline military officers attempted a violent military coup to destroy the Emperor's recorded surrender broadcast and keep the war going.
A coup that ultimately fails though. I don't think anyone really argues that there weren't fanatical elements remaining even after the bombs were dropped. Their existence doesn't mean peace required the bombs however, the big question is what were the conditions that would reduce their power to the point the peace could be accepted. We have one example in the bombing but that doesn't mean that was the only option.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757977
I personally subscribe to the theory that nuking Japan (at least once) probably stopped the need for an invasion. Almost all of the archives that were sifted through pretty much answers the fact that the Japanese were never going to negotiate a peace that removed its militant aspects otherwise. There would likely have been another war and Japan wouldn't have become democratic.
The 2nd bomb? I can be convinced either way. Japan needed to know they had more than one, but it probably didn't have to be a city. That being said, this is a lot of presentism (looking at the past with modern ethics). World War Two was a brutal, total war and the long term effects of nuclear weapons were not fully understood. Remember that there was carpet bombing with incendiary bombs happening against Japan's wooden cities for the year leading up to this. A non-nuclear end the the war would almost certainly have involved a land invasion and many, many more deaths on all sides.
Japan (as a country) was also not innocent in all this. They started the war - both with China and the USA. The Japanese military IN COLD BLOOD slaughtered more civilians than the Allies did in all their strategic bombings, let alone just nuclear. Even the nuclear bombs had military targets in mind...
It's complicated because Japan, then and now:
1) is a place where symbolic and actual authority are two very different things.
2) is a place where outward consensus is prioritized. Heavily.
After the fall of Tojo in the middle of 1944, the cabinet which regained a modest degree of civilian control was split between those who wanted to surrender with one condition (the kokutai gets preserved in some form-this is what Truman eventually agreed to) and those who wanted to surrender, but with several conditions-they handle their own war crimes trials, all kinds of unrealistic stuff.
The thing is: the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the atomic bombings, the potential social unrest, it all happened within the space of a week. It's frankly a bit bizarre to suggest that one and only one of these played a role in the Japanese decision to surrender, especially given the structure of their government. It probably all combined together at once. And even this led to the Kyujo incident.
>The Japanese military IN COLD BLOOD slaughtered more civilians than the Allies did in all their strategic bombings, let alone just nuclear. Even the nuclear bombs had military targets in mind...
Operation Meetinghouse killed more than the atomic bombs did. And the Soviets-quite literally-raped, murdered, and looted their way through Manchuria to the point where anti-Soviet demonstrations in multiple Chinese cities became very difficult for the KMT regime to control. The Americans would pardon Shiro Ishii, the Soviets would put several Unit 731 goons to work on their own human experimentation program at Sverdlovsk. And these were the relative good guys. So, yeah: it was a dark time in human history.
Ultimately, the decision to use the atomic bombs can't be separated from the decision to press for unconditional surrender of some kind. You could genuinely make the argument that Roosevelt was careless in applying something meant for Germany and its history to a completely different country with different pathologies, and it is certainly true that a "placated" Stalin, a strong pro-US nationalist China, a demilitarized irrelevant Japan, and a decolonized Asia were four goals that were never going to be compatible. But it didn't really matter for Truman, one of the few American Presidents who knew what war actually was-WWI as well as being descended from the losers in the Civil War-and someone who barely had the legitimacy needed to agree to keeping the kokutai after the atomic bombings. I think their usage was inevitable by 1945. Those incandescent with rage from 80 years later miss the forest for the trees.
After the 1944 D-Day landings, Allied planners thought that the war might easily stretch into 1946. The original plan was to drop dozens of atomic bombs on Germany. There was no such thing as "Let's sign a peace treaty where we stop fighting the Germans without invading Germany." You seem to be proposing that when we got to the German border in March 1945 we should have suddenly decided not to enter German territory, but only blockade them instead. The only reason we didn't drop dozens of bombs on both Germany and Japan was that our production lines didn't reach their three bombs per month full capacity until June.
>...Ultimately I think (and I know this is extremely hard to prove ahistorically) a naval blockade and shelling/arial campaign that devastated what little military might Japan had left would have lead to the same shift as the bombs and that the casualties from that would be lower or at least less morally weighted as the intentional atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A full blockade would have led to many more deaths due to famine, etc.
The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.
>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.
>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/okinawa-costs...
Japan had every intention of defending the main islands just as strong, or stronger, starting with operation Ketsu-Go. One of the slogans in Japan in 1945 was "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."
https://irp.fas.org/eprint/arens/chap4.htm
The proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Please take a moment to try and picture that armada... Yet even with an armada of that size, that wasn't considered enough!
>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
One thing they would have been facing was a massive kamikaze force:
>...Estimates of how many would have been available vary, but range between 5,000 and 7,000; plans for waves of 1,000 planes were in place. Both sides planned for higher-than-normal success rates since the invasion would greatly reduce problems of finding targets ("fly to the shore, hang a right, find a transport") and the vulnerable transports would be concentrated near shore in order to offload troops. These weren't the only suicide attackers. The navy had midget submarines and frogmen who would attack the landing craft with explosive charges. Civilians were formally "drafted" into defense units, most of which had no military weapons or uniform, and which had been instructed to attack with bamboo spears or hand tools. There's no way to tell whether such units would have had any positive effect - but their inclusion would almost guarantee that US troops would fire on civilians, with the potential for mass slaughter.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ka1z1/what_...
A Japanese military officer summed up the thinking by the Japanese military this way:
>...We will prepare 10,000 planes to meet the landing of the enemy. We will mobilize every aircraft possible, both training and "special attack" planes. We will smash one third of the enemy's war potential with this air force at sea. Another third will also be smashed at sea by our warships, human torpedoes and other special weapons. Furthermore, when the enemy actually lands, if we are ready to sacrifice a million men we will be able to inflict an equal number of casualties upon them. If the enemy loses a million men, then the public opinion in America will become inclined towards peace, and Japan will be able to gain peace with comparatively advantageous conditions.
https://irp.fas.org/eprint/arens/chap4.htm
>We have one example in the bombing but that doesn't mean that was the only option.
Yes, besides the atomic bombs there could have been an invasion or a blockade. Both of these options would have resulted in more deaths on both sides.
> Estimates of how many would have been available vary, but range between 5,000 and 7,000; plans for waves of 1,000 planes were in place.
My problem with quotes like that from the Japanese side is I don't believe they could have actually fielded anywhere near that number or at least not for any sustained amount of time. The total number of aircraft counted during the disarmament efforts post war were something like 15k across the entire Japanese army and navy combined across all types of planes and Japan was having massive trouble building any more planes and training new pilots.
Then ultimately the question is how much of that would have been required before the same shift that happened after the atomic bombs were dropped happened in the run up to blockade/invasion? How much of the remaining airforce could have been destroyed before it was really a threat to this alt-history force? etc.
> "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."
Like if we take this quote and others about the defense of the home islands at face value and suppose that they wouldn't have broken soon any ways in the run up to an invasion or in the early days of that effort why are the 100-200k that died by the end of 1945 from the bombings enough when similar amounts wouldn't have been spread among military targets the US could more precisely hit? History already proves that the "One hundred million die proudly" is propaganda bluster.
A big part of the anti-moral-bomb does hinge on the supposition that Japan would not have held much longer and the feared invasion scenario was a case of prudent planning for a worst case that was unlikely to happen. Living as it does in the land of the counterfactual it's tough to really say when they might have broken in this alt-history scenario.
Taking numbers from here which pulls from a post war report: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e5fvss/comme...
>...The total number of aircraft counted during the disarmament efforts post war were something like 15k across the entire Japanese army and navy combined across all types of planes
They were not planning on using those planes for dog-fighting. They planned to use everything they could for kamikaze attacks.
>...why are the 100-200k that died by the end of 1945 from the bombings enough when similar amounts wouldn't have been spread among military targets the US could more precisely hit?
The atomic bomb was the only reason Hirohito gave in his surrender speech to the Japanese people. There also was this:
>...Later in a private letter to the Crown Prince he did not expect to be made public, the emperor stressed Japan’s deficiency in “science”—a euphemism that encompassed atomic weapons—and an underestimation of the United States and Great Britain. He did not mention Soviet entry into the war.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surren...
>...History already proves that the "One hundred million die proudly" is propaganda bluster.
I am not sure why you say that "History already proves" - we really don't know what would have happened. For example, if in 1944 someone was saying that Japan would have over a thousand kamikaze attacks by the end of the war, you might have claimed that was propaganda bluster, but it turns out that is what happened. If someone had said that 90% of the Japanese defenders on Okinawa would fight to the death, you might claim that was propaganda bluster. Or that hundreds of civilians would commit suicide, etc, etc. This was total war.
>...A big part of the anti-moral-bomb does hinge on the supposition that Japan would not have held much longer and the feared invasion scenario was a case of prudent planning for a worst case that was unlikely to happen.
By the time of the fight for Okinawa, Japan was far past any hope of winning that war, yet it was the bloodiest campaign of the entire war. No one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was defeated. Truman and others just hoped that the atomic bomb might be enough to convince Japan to give up.
I think this single image from 1945 captures everything about the situation with Japan at the time, and what went into the decision making.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps#/medi...
I think very few people on the anti-bomb side would seriously argue there wasn't a split in the Imperial government and a lot of preparation going into defending against a potential US invasion attempt. At the same time however there were the beginning of diplomatic efforts to explore a negotiated peace from minority factions in the Japanese government partially backed by the Emperor, these (to me) undermine the "it was the only option" argument supporting the bombings morally. I found this article that talks a bit about the feelers (even though it gets side tracked about a supposed early-1945 prototypical peace "offer" that closely matched the eventual status post war, though that's an interesting read and an important bit of info about how to treat and examine reports of things like that). [0]
The main thrust of the anti-moral-bombing argument is essentially that the MAGIC intercepts we know happened for sure of their early diplomatic feelers indicate that the Emperor and some minority factions were beginning to develop the terms for a possible surrender and that combined with the main reasons for the US bombing not being directly oriented towards defeating Japan but were already looking to their next adversary, the USSR, weakens the argument that the bombing was ultimately more moral way of ending the war. We know for sure from Truman et al's own writings at the time show that their only concern wasn't the least bloody end of the war with Japan and they wanted to demonstrate the bomb to the USSR, I think that's pretty undisputed history even by the pro-moral-bombing side of the argument.
I tend to agree that it's unlikely Japan would have been able to stand up to a US blockade when we were already able to safely park battleships off their coast before the bombs were dropped and ultimately the Supreme War Council would have been overruled by the Emperor the same way they were after the atomic bombs were dropped. How quickly would the pro-negotiation side have gained power with a blockade of the home islands? That would have been a pretty safe operation for the US at the time.
The biggest question marks in the whole thing are largely impossible to answer how many more defeats would the militarist side have to suffer before accepting a surrender that looks like the eventual post war status. The insistence on unconditional surrender is also a thing that's difficult to weigh morally. If the US insists on a condition it knows is unacceptable how much does that shift the moral blame for Japan not accepting the ultimatum of an "unacceptable" condition or bomb?
Sorry if it's a bit jumbled, I'm bouncing between work and this and I'm not a great essayist to begin with.
Too long; You rambled too much there in the middle: the main argument of the antibomb remains that it's unlikely that a full or even partial invasion of the home islands would have been ultimately required and the atomic bombing of civilians is so morally bad that it requires an iron clad "there was no other option to end the war" (or the only alternatives were far bloodier; eg a full home island invasion) which the Japanese feelers about negotiating a peace undermines.
I think ultimately if we could part the curtains of time for both sides and show the post war outcome to both sides Japan would have accepted a surrender that lead to that future.
[0] https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/05/06/did-the-japanese-...
>...We know for sure from Truman et al's own writings at the time show that their only concern wasn't the least bloody end of the war with Japan and they wanted to demonstrate the bomb to the USSR, I think that's pretty undisputed history even by the pro-moral-bombing side of the argument.
There is very little evidence of this. Truman's own writings at time (or later) never mention this idea.
This idea that Truman decided to drop the bomb to impress the Soviets was popularized later. It even has an analysis in the Reddit BadHistory subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1z07v8/deconstr...
Hmm ok that's new info to me thanks. I don't think it's fatal to the anti argument but I'll try to jettison that from my understanding of the decision to drop the bombs.
Thank you for the post.
> Too long; You rambled too much there in the middle […]
Is this Claude’s suggestions for editing your post??
Nah, that whole thing is pure human. I originally had simple "tl;dr" but this felt more true and acknowledging of my poor self editing/thought organizing plus a little self deprecating. [0] Somethings that smell of llm speak are common in their output because the llms are mirroring human writing patterns after all.
The only LLM sourced thing in there is I found the nuclear secrecy blog post in a citation link but I then read it myself to try to avoid cherry picking a portion of an article that ultimately shut down my own argument.
[0] eta: Also I thought some people might take tl;dr offensively so softened it with the self deprication.
Should Japan have A-bombed the US then? https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/what-am...
If nuking Japan wasn't necessary and excessive then why didn't they surrender after the first nuke was dropped?
3-days is a pretty short time for such a major shift in politics for starters. Would a 3rd or 4th have been justified in the 6 day gap before their August 15th surrender announcement if the US had had them available?
Also the justification for the second bomb, that it was required to demonstrate it wasn't a one off doesn't require the that bomb be dropped on a second city either. The main thrust isn't that the bombs weren't effective it's that the extreme nature of the act requires extreme justification bordering on it being the only option but for a bloody home island invasion. See my other long posts about the anti-moral-bomb argument in this thread, I don't want to duplicate them here to avoid spamming the thread.
If the premise is that nuclear bombing was excessive compared to the firebombing and if the United States had waited a few more days between nuclear bombings they would have still continued with firebombing which was just as destructive as nuclear bombing and more people would have died.
The US wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and prevent the Soviets from invading and holding even a small piece of Japan for an indefinite period of time.
In doing so they probably prevented more deaths of Japanese civilians from continued firebombing and a Soviet occupation that would have been incredibly brutal.
And you can look at how the Soviets treated the people in the states that it occupied for decades after and compare it to how the US treated occupied Japan in the post war period.
The effects of both occupations still linger to this day, it's startling to look at economic differences in West Germany vs East Germany. It's doubtful that the USSR would have been able to prevent massive famines in Japan in a post war scenario where they occupied Japan or a portion of it.
A scenario where the US lacked nuclear weapons would have resulted in tremendous firebombing campaigns by both the Americans and the Soviets, as well as famine induced by a naval blockade and the war would have dragged on for much longer, drawing resources away from rebuilding both Europe and Asia, and the result would have been more civilian casualties from war and later famine that would have followed.
I don't think the blame for these civilian deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki falls on the shoulders of the Americans just like the deaths of civilians in the battle of Berlin were the responsibility of the European allies -- The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the madmen who lead their countries to their doom for ultra nationalist reasons and a deranged sense of pride.
And that sense of pride thing there probably played into why the nuclear bombings were necessary -- The ultra-nationalist Japanese leadership needed to save face and it was easy to do so by surrendering to an enemy who had an unfathomably powerful new weapon.
Communications between Hiroshima and Tokyo had totally broken down. When input was received on what actually happened, it would have been so fantastic that it would have been hard to process. And this was at a time where the Bolsheviks-hard to understate the Imperial Japanese government's loathing and horror of Communism despite the pragmatic and often deeply mutually cynical relationship they had during the war-were about to go to war with them.
No this is apologizing for a fascist and suicidal regime. One day people will make this claim about Russia in their current Ukraine war even though it’s painfully obvious Russia is not seeking an actual diplomatic solution, and I will view them with the same distain as I view you now
> One day people will make this claim about Russia in their current Ukraine war
They might, it would be a sore excuse to nuke Russian territory or bomb Moscow a-la Dresden in 1945. The fact that Americans cannot imagine resolution to war without nuclear violence is exactly how Crimea was annexed and lost. If you ignore proportionality, then your adversary can test your patience and win every time.
This is why asymmetric warfare is so popular in Russia and China, and why it pisses off Americans so consistently. Nuclear weapons give nations a false sense of security, it doesn't protect you against subtle escalation like widespread corporate hacking, political blackmail, proxy conflicts, border harassment or industrial overmatch.
The complicating part to that is there's not the same Supreme War Council populated by militarists vs the Emperor split in modern Russia, there's just Putin. To match scenarios there would have to be an oligarch council in Russia pushing continuing the war while Putin put out feelers and that's not what's happening.
Also nothing about the anti-moral-bomb argument hinges on apologetics for Japanese actions just arguments that the bombs were unnecessary to achieve the end to the war. The only assumption is that there was some set of conditions and peace deal short of the two bombs that would lead to the emperor overriding the war council and surrendering.
There is no excuse for the second bomb.
Yes there was. They didn’t surrender, and the US intended to make it look like they had an enormous number of bombs even though the next was going to be weeks away
Even with the first bomb I wonder if they could have handled it a bit differently. Maybe scuttle a ship with it in the middle of the Tokyo bay, then drop a dud bomb directly onto the imperial palace with a warning painted on it. Seems like immediately after the bombings in hiroshima and nagasaki there was still quite a fog of war going on initially about what even happened. Making the sun appear in the middle of the tokyo bay would have been indisputable however. You'd get the blinding flash, the shockwave, the awe of the cloud, and everyone including everyone in government would not only witness it (anywhere with a window would have gotten the at least the flash), but survive, and do something about having witnessed it.
Of course 1940s thinking of the world was a bit less restrained when it came to the question of wasting a quarter million people in an instant. One wonders if the US felt the bombs were necessary to use with the war already won by that point to have sort of established precedent to use them in future conflicts. The quickness between targets would say as much as well: this is just another bombing run no different than an incendiary run a few days apart from another. After all, that's exactly what MacArthur intended to do in Korea. They were probably desperate to ensure their miracle weapon, one that took so much investment and effort and had so many careers staked in its success, would not end up like chemical weapons where it was verbotten to use even by the nazis.
I think you’ve made reasonable points. I think of it like this: the US was already firebombing Tokyo which was actually much worse than the nukes, they did likely see it as a continuation of the existing firebombing campaign
Yeah I don't think that comes up too much in the defense because it requires admitting the the US was already doing some pretty horrendous things to civilians outside the atomic bombs which is a rough datum to raise when you're defending dropping the atomic bombs. "Well it's good we dropped them because among the alternatives was a continued firebombing campaign." Kind of feeds into the argument that the very least the US weren't the the unambiguous Good Guys just the Better Guys in a lot of ways. (And lets be clear it's not exactly hard to be better than Imperial Japan....)
If the need was /just/ to demonstrate the existence of a second bomb implying a continuous pipeline/supply, that didn't have to happen in a city.
If they can’t build high speed rail along the corridor then surely they cannot geo engineer it either!
Below ground nuclear geoengineering should be legally much simpler especially if it's deep enough to not significantly impact mineral rights claims.
That feels very optimistic.
Nothing nuclear is easy. People will want to make sure you are not going to contaminate the atmosphere, or the aquifers. Not just on the day of the explosion, but long term. They will want to know your plans about how you will contain the nuclear contamination for thousands of years.
And then everyone and their uncle will sue you for any property damage they think they suffered as a result of your engineering. Which can be everyone who owns real estate for hundreds of miles?
But apart from those things there are really no major legal problems with it.
Who said anything about engineering... Do it the American way -- mine the entire fault with nukes, set them off simultaneously, broadcast the entire thing live and sell ad time!
So possible in less regulated countries but not in the US. Here I think it would be far too much of a legal liability.
It's been theorized and allegedly attempted - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tectonic_weapon
Project Plowshare says hello:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
The soviets reportedly used nukes to cap uncontrolled leaking oil wells - https://www.npr.org/2010/06/04/127473704/stopping-a-spill-th...
Such ambition! Hey, there's a mountain in the way. Let's blow it up! The audacity to reshape the world in such a way that it suits ourselves has been lost. Why shouldn't we green the Sahara? Why can't we make a new continent?
Never, fer get it, in a word, insurance.
Sounds like a plot for a Superhero movie ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_(1978_film)
Dibs on Otisburg.
More like a bond villain plot. Nefarious under the guise of altruism. And a volcano lair.
Not exactly a superhero movie, but The Core (2003) is kinda related
Personally I was thinking of the Bond movie "A View To Kill" (the plot to destroy Silicon Valley through activating the San Andreas fault).
That might be tempting if the techbros achieve their post-democracy ideal... ;-)
nuclear acupuncture
Imagine if they trigger the California Big One and all of LA, San Diego and the SF Bay (and innumerable towns) are swallowed "because of man-made actions", I wouldn't want to be the Governor or President to approve that one lol
Reminds me of a display at Chabot in the bay area. A bubbling volcano covered by a stable mass stays bubbling underneath, but shaking up the mass gives little bubbles a bath up and they break way for the big bubbles leading to a volcanic eruption. If you fragment a he soil at some point in the mantle of earth and there is pressure anywhere below, you could get yourself a new volcano.
The long delay is the interesting part to me. How do they distinguish earthquakes triggered by the test from normal background seismicity?
Sounds like climate change induced disasters, and why it’s so easy to not take responsibility.
Curious how we never get articles about the harm caused by western countries nuclear tests...
Well, they haven't conducted any since 1996.
> Since the treaty's opening for signature in 1996, only sixteen nuclear tests have been conducted, all by non-signatory states: Pokhran-II by India and Chagai-I by Pakistan in May 1998, and six tests by North Korea from 2006 to 2017.
Why were nuclear explosions harmless before 1996?
They weren't. Hence the treaty.
because they're not doing them anymore
Basically, they gave their land Atrial Fibrillation through strong extrasystoles.
It isn't geological destabilization. They've awakened Godzilla.
*They’ve awakened Pulgasari: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulgasari
Is this safer overall? Should we give kids a day off from school and detonate a midsized nuclear device near Los Gatos?
I always wondered where and how my country would test nukes if it developed them. Basically there is an expectation that you have to explode at least one.
It was much easier in colonial times when everyone owned a desert or remote island
20 km isn't that far away but still shocking. (No pun intended.)
So does that mean the Korean Peninsula is no longer a geologically safe region from earthquakes going forward? That's scary.
Never has been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_South_K...
There have always been earthquakes in Korea. They are just typically quite weak. Though the south region that is closer to Japan has experienced some intense ones, but nothing like the massive ones they have in Japan.
The entire Pacific region was full of volcanoes already. It's not a place you want to go if afraid of tectonic activity.
Endless captcha loop for me, is there an archive? (archive.ph etc. has the same issue for me)
sure, https://archive.is/xjmvA
That is the same site as archive.ph with the same issue :/
Also they are known for abusing javascript on client browsers to DDoS someone they didn't like.
On Chrome, blocking javascript for each of these worked for me: [.]archive.fo [.]archive.is [.]archive.li [.]archive.md [.]archive.ph [.]archive.today [*.]archive.vn Also, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...?
Leaving aside for the moment the DDoS issue, that link is currently working for me. Archived pages on that site are puzzling, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, I'm not sure what accounts for the difference.
If you keep tickling the lamp.. dont be surprised when the genie pops out.
Or better put:
Fuck with pachamama.. and she will have the last laugh
People are critical of North Korea - very understandable since the Juche ideology is absolute rubbish nonsense and North Korea remains hostile to South Korea. However had, with the USA becoming a rogue country now, I think it is time that many more countries will need a small, defensive nuclear arsenal: South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Canada, the whole EU (that is, all EU members need protection on their own; the USA can not be trusted anymore, Trump made that clear while serving Putin as agent Krasnov).
One can say that more nukes are bad; that's true. However had, the big old countries CONSTANTLY abuse smaller countries. This happens again and again and again. So, since they don't stop their own nuclear abuse and blackmail, the only response that is logical is to more fairly distribute nukes. Of course a much better option would be for all countries to give up nukes; perhaps that will happen one day in the future though probably not, since when one refuses, others would have to follow suit and also get nukes. So the only viable long-term strategy is to have nukes, while also working much harder to improve diplomacy.
I don't see how anyone can argue that North Korean decision making has NOT been vindicated.
Personally: let everybody who needs one have a few instead of relying off the caprices of others. It's not like a small country wouldn't still be having a death sentence if they chose to nuke a big one. But it provides psychological security, as well as deep mutual interest to never let any crazy network have access to a bomb through mutual complicity.
> let everybody who needs one have a few instead of relying off the caprices of others
I don't think this is the solution.
We have a huge number of people willing to press a button and cause pain. And it's escalating. I don't want more of those.
Instead, we should isolate countries that tend to be the aggressors. The Iranians, the Israelis, the Americans, the Russians. Because we have long pretended to not see or found excuses for those aggressions.
Needless to say, we also need to get rid of systems that concentrate too much executive power in a single person. Authoritarian governments are the first, but presidential and semi presidential republics come second.
Geopolitics is very complex, but at least those bigger states have a lot to lose. Under mass proliferation I can see a small country with an ideological nemisis deciding to just nuke them.
I've been thinking about nukes lately (way too much, in fact). And, IMO, the only people who want nuclear weapons are national leaders. If the US invaded North Korea tomorrow, then NK has three options:
1) Launch nukes at the US. The minute those missiles leave their silos, the US will launch theirs. Even assuming the best case of no other nations joining in, most residents of NK and many residents of the US are either dead or going to die soon. The leaders of NK are probably dead.
2) Fight a conventional war. NK will probably hold out fairly well using drones. If they learned from Iran's diffuse decision-making in the military, they'll do even better. They might hold off the US long enough for peace talks. Leadership has a chance to survive, more so if they flee to China or Russia.
3) Capitulate immediately. Leadership flees to China or Russia, and the US probably lets them. The citizens aren't massacred or conscripted into a massacre, and they go on living their lives.
For NK citizens, the order from best to worst is scenario 3, 2, then 1 (if NK had good human rights, the order would be 2, 3, then 1). For pragmatic leadership, it's 2, 3, then 1. For crazy leadership, it's 1, 2, then 3. In the long run, every country will have a crazy ruler.
And that applies to any two countries. If Russia invaded the US tomorrow, I'd prefer we put up a good fight with conventional weapons, and then surrender if that fails. No nukes. I would rather live a mean life under Putin than watch my family suffer radiation poisoning. At least there's a chance of improvement and rebellion with the former.
Thinking more about it, is there any good circumstantial evidence that nukes have deterred war? Conventional war between any major powers would be devastating to everyone's economy. When the USSR was falling apart, they knew it was because of their own system and choices. Was would have just made things worse. The US goes to war with weaker nations and still leaves before winning, because we're a democracy and wars are very unpopular.
The North Koreans would find it easier to smuggle nuclear weapons in by boat.
imagine the decades of quakes US will set off with the bunker buster they are now developing for Pickaxe Mountain (Iran, solid granite rock, one mile deep)
billions more drained from our economy and I bet the irony is it will be nuclear somehow
That headline is tabloid tier bs. They haven't established anything close to causation. Do better, science.org.