Re: The "From" bug strikes yet again

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

>    Can you imagine an alternative world history in which the last
>phase of World War II was
>    not marked by Hiroshima and Nagasaki but by totally unforeseen
>atomic bombs on Los
>    Angeles and San Francisco?

I've stayed out of this discussion so far, but I thought I'd chime on this
one.

Building a nuclear weapon is one thing. Delivering it to a target on the
other side of the planet is a separate problem, one that Japan could not
have overcome in the later stage of the war. US property would not have been
at risk if the Japanese have developed a bomb - the Pacific fleet would have
been the obvious target. Even then, their inability to hit the fleet with
conventional bombs (an extraordinarily small fraction of the suicide attacks
actually got through to the carriers they wanted) suggest they probably
could not have used the weapon effectively if they had been able to build
one.
============================
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu


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