Re[2]: Hiroshima observes 55th anniversary of bombing

[Vincent.King@doegjpo.com (Vincent King)]

     Of course, now the inevitable complaint will arise from someone 
     that no one else really had a chance to 'win' the race to build the 
     first bomb, that the war would have ended soon anyway, that the 
     U.S. really had no reason to build the bomb, and that by going 
     ahead, the U.S. opened the door to the arms race, let the nuclear 
     genie out of the bottle, etc. etc. 
     
     To build upon what Tom and Tosh have stated: 
     
     (1) it was wartime, and everyone did what they could not to lose; 
     and 
     
     (2) Someone, somewhere was going to develop the bomb in time. Those 
     who put this guilt trip on the U.S. ignore the fact that the 
     physics of nuclear weapons have always existed.  The discovery of 
     these laws and the development of the technology to exploit them 
     was inevitable, if not by the U.S. in the 1940's, then by someone 
     else a few years later. 
     
     To make the development of nuclear weapons someone's 'fault' seems 
     as pointless to me as to trying to pin blame on the first alchemist 
     who discovered gunpowder.  It seems we would be better off putting 
     our energies into making the world rational enough that no one is 
     tempted to use them (and the irrational ones can't get them).
     
     Vincent King
     vincent.king@doegjpo.com 


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Hiroshima observes 55th anniversary of bombing
Author:  "Tosh Ushino" <tushino@icnpharm.com> at Internet
Date:    8/8/00 1:12 PM


In response to Tom Savin's question:

>The one question for everyone I have is that do they remember that Germany and
Japan
>during WW II were developing their own capability for nuclear destruction. If
those >oppressive dictators had achieved the technology first what state would
the world be in?  >Food for thought.

I recall reading an interview of Akio Morita (late chairman of Sony) years ago.
He was a young engineer in the Japanese Imperial Navy during WW-II. He said that
part of his job was to study US technology by examining the wrecked US
aircrafts. Their conclusion was that they were technically on par with US. They
just didn't have the resource to build new aircrafts with such technology in
quantity. They knew about the technical feasibility of nuclear weapons, but had
no resource to even begin thinking about building one. He said that when they
heard of the bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their first question was, how
did US accumulate so much fissile uranium?

As for the second question, my father (who was a cadet at the Imperial Army
Officer School in Hiroshima at the time) told me, if the Japanese military
dictators had access to such a weapon, he has no doubt that they would have used
it.

Tosh Ushino

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Toshihide "Tosh" Ushino, CHP                  Tel: (800) 548-5100 x2413
Product Development Manager                   Fax: (714) 668-3149
Dosimetry Div., ICN Biomedicals, Inc.         Email:  tushino@icnpharm.com
3300 Hyland Ave., Costa Mesa, CA  USA 92626           tushino@hotmail.com


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