Military Buffs I need your help.

[Chronon]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
i suppose i should find a good history book or two and add it to my mental note to reread up on physics and astronomy one of these days. any suggestions?

On the diplomatic reasons for dropping the bomb try Martin J. Sherwin "A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance." It's an excellent history of atomic policy within the United States, and the beginning of the Cold War. Some would call it a "revisionist history," but I think it's a very cogent argument. Martin Rhodes has a number of good (but huge) books about building of the bombs. You could also try Lawrence Badash "Scientists and the Development of Nuclear Weapons," a very readable account of the science behind the bomb, the making of the bomb, and the scientific community.

"Revisionist history," by the way, is usually what historians' whose arguments are being superceded (and/or contradicted) by more recent work tend to call the new arguments. Often it has pejorative connotations.

As Erax has so eloquently pointed out, it is misleading to judge the decision to drop the bomb using our current assumptions about nuclear weapons. When exploring historical questions, the context is all important.

Historical context is the main reason why I, sadly, cannot agree with you Atrocities about history being 20/20. Historians are human, and like everyone else (including scientists, by the way) we are influenced by the culture in which we live (the historical context). Historians working in the immediate post-war period were living in an extremely nationalistic culture, had very little access to secret documents, and were loath to criticize the government. It is no surprise that they followed the party line on the bomb. It took some time for the documents to become available, and when they did the history of the bomb was "revised." This is natural; historians are constantly working out new interpretations of past events, based on new evidence and more extensive exploration of historical cultures.

This is not to say that any one interpretation (traditional or revisionist) is definitively correct. On most large historical questions there are no truly right answers, but different interpretations of the events. This can be frustrating but it's what makes debates about the bomb (and evolution and eugenics, to name a few others) so interesting. We can have alot of fun arguing about them for a long, long time.