Maybe I'm falling victim to ex post rationalization, it strikes me that it was pretty much inevitable that the US would use the atomic bomb once it had it.
The thing that saved us from a nuclear war beyond the two bombs dropped in Japan is that it took the US until the early 1950s to get its nuclear weapons production line working smoothly enough to assure sustained high production levels of weapons, and by then the USSR had nuclear weapons as well. The US had originally aimed at being able to produce three weapons a month after August 1945, gearing up to ... (read more)
Maybe I'm falling victim to ex post rationalization, it strikes me that it was pretty much inevitable that the US would use the atomic bomb once it had it.
The thing that saved us from a nuclear war beyond the two bombs dropped in Japan is that it took the US until the early 1950s to get its nuclear weapons production line working smoothly enough to assure sustained high production levels of weapons, and by then the USSR had nuclear weapons as well. The US had originally aimed at being able to produce three weapons a month after August 1945, gearing up to ... (read more)