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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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The US had the atom bomb which the Soviets didn’t - together with no Lend Lease this would have made the USA unbeatable.

I don't think that the US atomic bomb production was at that point at the phase where they could produce more than an occasional bomb, and in any case - as the movie Oppenheimer showed - a huge amount of the folks related to the weapons development in this arena were in it specifically to beat the Nazis and would have pulled brakes on the programme hard if the US had suddenly palled with the Nazis to attack the Soviets.

The United States basically had plans and the means to produce one A bomb a month basically indefinitely in 1945.

Indeed they had zero bombs for a few months after V-E day -- I'm sure they could have managed to stall or otherwise create chaos for a while, but it would have been an awfully big risk to take on that basis considering that hardly anyone even knew about the thing, and those who did couldn't really be sure that it would work.

It may make sense militarily but how in the hell do you sell it politically?

How do you not look like a duplicitous bastard of a nation for the next century? Let alone justify the horror if prolonging the most destructive war of all time for a good few years?

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