Deterrence

[RamaY]

India does not retaliate against Pakistan due to nuclear weapons: US expert

"All the terrorism that Pakistan has supported against India has been carried out, secure in the knowledge that India cannot retaliate," Stephen Blank, Research Professor of National Security Affairs at the Army War College, said.

"If Pakistan had no nukes, if there were no nukes on the South Indian peninsula, India could retaliate and probably would. But their hand is stayed by the threat of nuclear war," Blank told a meeting of National Defense Industrial Association in response to a question

Nice ploy to make India nukes == Pakistan nukes. Kargil has proven that India can have a conventional conflict with Pakistan even under nuke-umbrella.

[ramana]

X-Post...

Apr, 2013 :: India Expects To Have Sub-Based Nukes By 2015-16

[ramana]

NewsInsight.net on the 15th anniversary of POK 2 tests:

After Pokhran

After Pokhran
A deterrent means nothing without political will for conventional military engagement.
By N.V. Subramanian (13 May 2013)


New Delhi: On the fifteenth anniversary of the Pokhran-2 explosions, it must be accepted that India is not more secure with the possession of nuclear weapons. History cannot be reversed. But it must be squarely faced that India has failed as a nuclear weapons’ state.

Since the 11 and 13 May 1998 test explosions, India has faced the brunt of a limited war in Kargil provoked by Pakistan under the cover of its deterrent and numerous incidents of Pakistani terrorism, including the 13 December 2001 Parliament attack, the earlier hijacking of an Indian Airlines aircraft from Kathmandu, blasts in Delhi, Bangalore, Varanasi and other places, and culminating in the 26 November 2008 Bombay carnage. Just days ago, China continued with its brazen intrusion into Indian territory in Eastern Ladakh, and only ended the standoff after extracting concessions from Delhi, whose details and contours remain a secret.

Besides China and Pakistan, there are the other states of South Asia that scorn India, care nothing for its nuclear weapons, and laugh at its alleged regional power status. Relations are fraught with Nepal, Bangladesh is going through an Islamist convulsion on which India has no determined policy far less any control, and Sri Lanka and the Maldives are breaking away from Indian moorings and drifting towards China, cocking a snook at India while at it. What has gone wrong with India as a nuclear weapons’ state?

First and foremost, a nuclear power does not exist in isolation. Gaining a deterrent is no guarantee of security, especially as it is a common and widespread strategic and military understanding that nuclear weapons cannot be used. Pakistan is not internally secure despite having more than one hundred atomic bombs. Rather, the terrorists want to capture the Pakistan state to grab its nuclear weapons, at which enterprise they may or may not succeed. But India faces a more classical problem in the implementation and enforcement of deterrent theory, and it is made worse by the extraordinarily weakened and hollowed-out Centre under Manmohan Singh. When Manmohan Singh has no say or control over his cabinet, and ministers come and go at the pleasure of Sonia Gandhi, India’s external security is affected. It tells enemies like China that India is weak and gives rise to the impression that the country cannot withstand external aggression.

Nuclear weapons cannot insulate a state against terrorism. This writer was clear about it right after the Pokhran explosions and fifteen more years have only bolstered that belief. Can India nuke Pakistan for a terrorist attack? Obviously not. The punitive measure must be conventional and well under the nuclear threshold. Does India have a determination of this threshold? Perhaps the military has, but the Indian government does not take military thinking and assessments seriously. The mindset of defensive defence limits India to clearing its territory of Pakistani intruders, and even this principle stands breached with respect to China after the Eastern Ladakh incident. So one doesn’t know where India stands with regard to its conventional military options. During the Kargil War, India did not enter Pakistani territory in any substantive way, and Operation Parakram provoked by the terrorist attack on Parliament House was an impotent exercise in military mobilization.

At the heart of it all is absence of political will. Political will to employ the conventional military option when it becomes necessary and unavoidable gives seriousness and weight to the nuclear option. When India has no will for employing conventional military options against Pakistan or China, how will the deterrent assist? Pakistan has gone a step further. Its terrorism and conventional military options against India are carried out under a nuclear overhang, for which India has found no solution. When a state like Pakistan weaker than India in all respects bleeds it by a thousand cuts, why should China respect India militarily at all, or pay heed to its deterrent? A deterrent ought to give confidence, immediately and impressively, but without tested and proven fusion weapons, and more particularly fusion warheads to put on long-range missiles, how does China come under India’s nuclear shadow? Why should it feel deterred? India’s deterrent systems, priorities and doctrines are in a mess fifteen years after Pokhran-2, and India’s failure to meet conventional security challenges adequately with conventional military means has neutralized its deterrent advantage, and rather exposed the country to more dangers.

And it has all been made worse by the weak, corrupt and incompetent government of Manmohan Singh. When the political leadership is strong, the country can overcome its economic and military shortcomings to make a forceful impact on the world, as Indira Gandhi proved decisively. Weapons, conventional or nuclear, can secure a country only to the extent that the political will exists and is strong and unshakeable. After the failure of Manmohan Singh, the country must understand the dire need to elect a prime minister with redoubtable political will. Without this understanding, India faces perilous times ahead.

I tend to disagree with the major premise of the above op-ed.

Nuke tests have prevented breakout of general war with either TSP or PRC. Both the challengers are forced to nibble/grab territory where the Indian military is not actively patrolling like in Kargil(1999) and Daulat Beg Oldi recently.

Prior to Operation Parakram, TSP was able to send Pakistani terrorists with impunity into India to attack at will. Now the majority of the terrorist attacks are by aleinated Indian Muslims with politcial patronage by INC stall warts(intentional spelling) like Digvijay Singh, the supposed mentor of INC second generation leadership.

Eventually even this will die down as Indian Muslims cast out the reptilian brain dominant terrorists among them if they get state support instead of the terrorists.

In the recent Boston bombing the deceased perpetrator was rejected by his community on US Muslims and buried in an unmarked grave in an unknown place. This was because the US Muslims in Boston knew that terrorist act was repugnant and attracts the widest condemnation and not the political patronage like Digvijay Singh the PM aspirant in India.

[ramana]

UK journal Nature:

US weapons get facelift

More like re-jigged/designed. Interestingly magazine is silent about France & UK efforts.

[Vayutuvan]

Also this was posted from SciAm - http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 5#p1453985

[Rudradev]

Chinese view of Indian Deterrence

Link doesn't seem to work. Is there another?

[ShauryaT]

Chinese view of Indian Deterrence

Link doesn't seem to work. Is there another?

Try this one.
http://claws.in/administrator/uploaded_ ... report.pdf

[SSridhar]

15 Years after Pokhran II, Deterrence Churning Continues - Vinod Kumar, IDSA

For over two decades, a dominant section of western analysts harped on the volatilities of the India and Pakistan nuclear dyad, often overselling the ‘South Asia as a nuclear flashpoint’ axiom, and portending a potential nuclear flare-up in every major stand-off between the two countries. The turbulence in the sub-continent propelled such presages, with one crisis after another billowing towards serious confrontations, but eventually easing out on all occasions. While the optimists described this as evidence of nuclear deterrence gradually consolidating in this dyad, the pessimists saw in it the ingredients of instability that could lead to a nuclear conflict. Though there is no denial of the fact that the three major crises since the 1998 nuclear tests – Kargil (1999), the Parliament attack and Operation Parakram (2001-2002) and the Mumbai terror strike (2008) – brought the two rivals precariously close to nuclear showdowns, not once had their leaderships lost complete faith in the efficacy of mutual deterrence. Fifteen years after the nuclear tests, it is relevant to examine if deterrence remains weak in this dyad or has consolidated towards greater stability.
A complex deterrence matrix

With its history of deep-rooted hostility, the South Asian binary went through a tumultuous evolution of deterrence structures and postures. The early years were marked by limited war and terror strikes literally validating the western notion of an unstable region. India’s perceptibly transparent no-first-use (NFU) doctrine was met with a policy of strategic ambiguity from Pakistan, which preferred to keep its nuclear first-use option open and at the same time refusing to declare its threshold(s). The proclaimed aim was to deter India at all levels of military action – sub-conventional, conventional or nuclear. India’s military might was cited as justification for such postural asymmetry. The unprofessed objective though was to carve out a space to sustain the low-intensity conflict (Kashmir insurgency and terror strikes in Indian heartland) while mitigating any Indian retaliation. With its nuclear brinkmanship behaviour fuelling global paranoia, the early years of nuclearisation and its primal instability was proving to benefit Pakistan with no decisive Indian challenge to its sub-conventional influx.

Many Indian analysts highlighted this as evidence of the doctrinal imbalance, with some questioning the efficacy of nuclear deterrence against Pakistan and a few others even demanding a review of India’s NFU posture. Though the Indian leadership upheld the NFU as sacrosanct, the need to challenge the status quo began to be felt after the 2001-2002 crises. Largely attributed to the ‘lessons’ of Operation Parakram (which proved to be a costly mobilisation effort with scope for rapid escalation), the Indian Army initiated a major doctrinal shift at the conventional level through what is termed as the ‘Cold Start’ strategy. With its plan for rapid battle-group thrusts into Pakistani territory without hitting its perceived nuclear tripwires, the military leadership conceived the possibility of calling Pakistan’s ‘nuclear bluff’ by taking its response to Pakistani soil. Though backed by an incipient belief that the space for a limited conventional war exists, Cold Start embodied India’s resolve to alter the deterrence landscape without disturbing the nuclear doctrinal framework.

Albeit the feasibility of this strategy was consistently doubted, its signalling spin-off was immense as Pakistan began to doubt the credibility of its brinkmanship behaviour and ability to sustain the LIC without inviting India’s retaliation. Through an assortment of political campaigns (by hyping the Cold Start as escalatory) and technological responses (Nasr tactical nuclear missile, Babar and Ra’ad cruise missiles), Pakistan struggled to project confidence in its deterrent. The lack of a unitary effort from the security establishment to promote the Cold Start and the Indian Army eventually having to disown it (by renaming as proactive strategy) largely denoted the efficacy of Pakistan’s campaign, aided in some measure by the western alarmists.

Yet, its introduction marked a complex game of deterrence: while one actor propagated a proactive nuclear posture to feed its sub-conventional plan, the other responded with a proactive conventional posture for a range of non-nuclear responses. The official silence on Cold Start matched by Pakistan’s refusal to brand the Nasr as a tactical nuclear response only added to this complexity, until the recent articulation by the Chairman of India’s National Security Advisory Board (NSAB).1 By clarifying that India will not differentiate between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and will consider any such use against its forces or territory as a first-strike (implicitly inviting nuclear retaliation), the security establishment has belatedly implied the existence of its proactive strategy. {This is not accurate. In its revised nuclear doctrine of c. 2003, it was clearly mentioned that any attack on Indian forces on a foreign soil with nuclear or chemical or biological weapons will invite massive retaliatory nuclear strikes from India. The Nasr weapon was not there with Pakistan at that time. the 2003 revision also withdrew any 'guarantee' of NFU on a NNWS that aligned with a state that launched a nuclear strike against India, thereby withdrawing the Negative Security Assurance to NNWS.}The next stage in this deterrence churning could come in the form of Pakistan’s response to the latest Indian posturing, even as western observers anticipate India’s proactive military plan to see action after the next major terror strike.

While its tryst with doctrinal realignments continues, India initiated a decisive new level of posturing, with greater implications for the deterrence calculus, by introducing ballistic missile defence (BMD) into the scene. Although India’s BMD programme originated out of concerns on Pakistan’s missile prowess and the China-Pakistan proliferation nexus, the rapid advances on India’s BMD platforms has emerged as a potent challenge to Pakistan’s deterrent. Despite the fact that interception technologies are still evolving and are yet to guarantee leak-proof protection, the Indian programme is geared towards developing an extended area defence capability, and possibly a nationwide shield, that could limit the damage from Pakistani (and Chinese) missiles, if not absolute destruction. With no technological counter of its own, but for the nascent cruise missile inventory (with limited engagement scope against BMD systems), Pakistan realises that India’s pursuit of a multi-tier interception network will negate its first-strike advantage, and could provide India with greater defensive depth, which it argues, could encourage India towards pre-emption. Besides the fact that even a failed first-use might invite Indian retaliation, the shift in the deterrence calculus is such that even a marginally-effective Indian BMD could diminish the combative edge of Pakistan’s strategic forces.

Similar to its response to the Cold Start, Pakistan is now projecting missile defence as causal for instability and had reportedly argued against its deployment at the recent talks on nuclear Confidence Building Measures (CBMs). Consequently, Pakistan attempted a weakly-devised signalling effort in May 2012 by declaring a survivable second-strike capability on its naval platforms. While the strategic component of its naval platforms remains unclear, the fact that Pakistan declared a second-strike alternative (after years of reliance on its first-strike posture) is intrinsically a reflection of its desperation on the Indian BMD. {That is why Pakistan is willing to concede so much to China, such as PoK, Gwadar, KKH, Indus Hwy etc to get an SSBN in return. With India being perceived by China as part of the emerging alliance to encircle it, it is only a matter of time before such a gift from China to Pakistan takes place. Pakistan is now the recepient of military grade Beidou signals. China is also set to launch a satellite for Pakistan and it will certainly have a payload for the military} However, with no takers for this signalling effort, Pakistan may now be left with fewer options, including: (a) developing its own BMD capability, which could be too costly for its sinking economy, and (b) seek technological assistance from China or acquisition of its air and missile defence systems.

What’s in store?

Fifteen years of nuclear South Asia was all about a paradoxical deterrence seesaw that was intense, yet not unstable enough to cause its failure. After the gains that Pakistan accrued from the initial asymmetry, the scales are now favouring India with its doctrinal rejuvenation and technological advances. Events like the Indo-US nuclear deal, the Abottabad operation and restoration of democracy in Pakistan have also impacted this turnaround. While Pakistan attempted to match India’s nuclear deal advantage by feverishly augmenting its fissile stocks, the Abottabad operation eroded the credibility of its Army and diminished its leverage in the India-Pakistan reconciliation process. With its leading political parties now favouring improved relations with India, there is scope for a postural balancing that could contribute to greater stability between the two nuclear neighbours. President Zardari’s suggestion for Pakistan’s adoption of a NFU posture is one such step that the new civilian government could consider in this direction.

However, as is a well known fact, it will be the Pakistani army which will have the final say on nuclear policy issues. Besides resisting any such proposal to alter its nuclear policy, the army will have the strongest urge to counter India’s recent gains by triggering newer crises. But with conditions no longer favouring any strategy of brinkmanship, the onus may now shift on to the civilian government to devise a postural transformation that could project Pakistan as a more responsible and rational nuclear power. This is an imperative forced upon Pakistan not just by the current strategic environment, but also will be a factor in determining its future status in the normative structures of the non-proliferation regime.

[ShauryaT]

India's nuclear amateurism

Secretary of state John Kerry reminded New Delhi that the United States expects India to toe its line on non-proliferation and get a move on in signing the Missile Technology Control Regime, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty. One hopes New Delhi will not give way on any of these issues even if membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group is the prize because, as it is, the Indian nuclear deterrent is grievously handicapped. First, by untested thermonuclear weapons with design flaws no amount of simulation can correct, whence resumption of testing becomes imperative, and secondly, matching this hardware deficiency are the “software” problems — doctrinal weaknesses and inadequate understanding in government circles of nuclear weapons and strategy.

The latter aspect was illustrated by Shyam Saran, convenor of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) and former foreign secretary, holding forth on May 3 on nuclear issues and, predictably, making a hash of it. Considering a Chinese military unit was holding Ladakhi real estate then, Saran went off on an anti-Pakistan tangent instead! It confirmed the suspicion that the government is unable to differentiate issues of strategic importance from lesser concerns and, as regards nuclear security, is all at sea. Informed Pakistanis promptly dismissed it as “bluster”, deeming India “a blundering nuclear power”.

At the heart of Saran’s talk was a wrong take on nuclear matters that has calcified into a strategic gospel in official quarters, courtesy the late K Subrahmanyam, starting with the belief that nuclear testing is incidental to the credibility of the deterrent, evident in his canvassing for India’s signature on CTBT in 1995-96 which Saran rightly said “would have permanently foreclosed (development of) a credible and fully tested nuclear deterrent”. Except, the problem of untested hydrogen weapons persists owing to the no-testing predicate of the India-US nuclear deal supported by Subrahmanyam and Co, and negotiated by Saran. It reflects the cavalier disregard for nuclear testing which is stark in the context of the field director of the 1998 tests, K Santhanam, recommending the re-testing of a rectified thermonuclear weapon design because the one that was tested failed.

Saran’s plea to “make public” the official nuclear doctrine, which he said was virtually the draft produced by NSAB in 1998, was of a piece with his asking for an annual numerical accounting of the country’s nuclear forces. He didn’t pause to wonder why no other nuclear weapon state to-date has disclosed its nuclear doctrine, and why China and Pakistan are unlikely ever to reveal their weapons inventory details. The public release of the draft-doctrine to win points for transparency with America and gain traction for the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP), was an appalling mistake by the BJP government that the Congress regime converted into the wrecking ball of the Indo-US nuclear deal, which destroyed the integrity of the country’s dual-use nuclear energy programme.

Ambiguity is at the core of nuclear deterrence and dissuasion. It isn’t advanced by making the doctrine an open document, even less by revealing weapons strength. Having disclosed the doctrine, however, the strategic initiative passed to the adversary states with the good sense to divulge nothing. China increased the “daunting uncertainties” for India by bringing conventional missiles under the control of its Second Artillery nuclear forces, and Pakistan developed the 60km Nasr (Hatf IX) guided rocket.

The dense fog of ignorance of nuclear deterrence matters blanketing Indian government circles has eventuated in a hollow strategy emphasising “massive retaliation” as response to tactical first use of nuclear weapon by Pakistan (on Indian armour, say, inside Pakistani territory). Promising massive nuclear destruction as retaliatory action, in the circumstances, only undermines the credibility of the Indian deterrent as it violates the principle of proportionality — the essence of “flexible response”. A version of this concept — “punitive response” — was central to the original NSAB draft-doctrine. Owing to the usual mix of abominable advice and mindless attitudinising lashed with deep illiteracy on these issues, “punitive response” was replaced by “massive retaliation”. All it did was spur accelerated production of weapons-grade plutonium, warheads, and missiles by Pakistan which an India, fixated on Pakistan and “minimum” deterrence, finds unable to match, what to talk of China! Truth is massive retaliation cannot doctrinally coexist with the “minimum deterrence” notion the Indian government seems wedded to. That is common sense but try telling it to the glib talkers in official quarters.

Much was also made by him of commentaries concluding India acquired nuclear weapons for status and prestige, not for security. But why is this conclusion wrong, considering India reached the weapons threshold with its plutonium reprocessing capability in early 1964 but did not weaponise after China exploded an atomic device in October that year, and with the military humiliation of 1962 as backdrop? Contrast this with the single-minded, no-nonsense, threat-propelled Chinese and Pakistani programmes to obtain meaningful nuclear arsenals fast, even as the Indian weapons programme meandered, its progress hampered by dreams of disarmament last manifested in the 1988 Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan.

That the Indian government has time and again veered off into the murk of nuclear power politics without being equipped for the task is due to the generalist diplomats and civil servants playing at nuclear strategists. Saran admitted that the country had suffered from bad advice to “defer the acquisition of a nuclear weapon arsenal as long as there was still hope that the world would eventually move towards a complete elimination of these weapons”, and that it was “undeniable” that “mistakes (were) made, sometimes opportunities (were) missed or our judgements were misplaced”.

The cumulative debilitating effect of such rank bad, and amateurish, counsel is reflected in the manner India is strategically handicapped today. It indicates a fool’s world our diplomats (especially, denizens of MEA’s Disarmament Division that Saran served in), senior civil servants, political leaders and increasingly senior military officers hewing to the government line, live in. Elimination of nuclear weapons, really?

Bharat Karnad is Professor at Centre for Policy Research and blogs at www.bharatkarnad.com

[ramana]

- Err many accounts show that the weapons designs were pursued right after the 1974 test. And even in 1987 after clear evidence of TSP weaponization the steps were taken to produce the weapons. And BK saab should look at the RV flashes for Agony missiles and try to see what they tell.

- The earlier flexible response of puny weapons encouraged the TSP to increase their arsenal and lower their thresholds. Now if they feel constipation they can threaten to nuke India.

- It is massive retaliation that made them pause and squeal.


Escalation control is valid for reasonable people who want to preserve status quo. TSP is not a status quo power and thinks it has an extended aresnal of the Chinese and the diplomatic support of the "stability uber alles" US who cant see any difference for they are blinded by their urge to preserve their top spot after WWII.

The TSP argument was high yeld and prevailing winds would preclude the Indian use in response to a TSP nuke strike. BTW this is the US view propogated by their NPA mules.

To this the early Indian counter was low yield flexible repsonse.

To this the TSP thought they could rope in the US to back them up after the first strike on India as they would still be around after a low yield tit-for tit repsonse.

Now SS articluated the new augmented doctrine of massive retaliation. Which means regardless of who you bring or front for in you wont exist.

BTW SSM had already in 2010 augmented the doctrine at the NDC convocation in presnece of the President and the military chiefs.

KS garu did get back to him on that.
And we spent a few pages discussing it.
------------

Also who was responsible for the decision to defer acquisition of nukes as long as there was chance for disarmament?

The old decsion making process is muddled and filled with fellow travelers and deluded idealists.

[Austin]

The Triad and Credibility ( Pg 46 - 54 )

http://www.geopolitics.in/july2013.aspx

[ramana]

The Triad and Credibility ( Pg 46 - 54 )

http://www.geopolitics.in/july2013.aspx

Its confused article. Too much text and the main message is lost.
And whats with grandoise title for the author?
Does he stay in India and monitor India for others?

For starters India has Tri-service nuke delivery system.
Not a triad which imples submarine based. And thats some ways off.
- Arihant has to sail
- Carry out tests to qualify the submarine and its weapon system
- Be on deterrent patrol
And do this routinely with replacements of its deterrent patrols. So not for another ten years.
Meantime its tri-service oly. Being ship based its not de-stabilizing. So get over it. No foreign policy issues there.

Credibility is not from the triad but from:
- Doctrine - statement of intentions backed by capability
- And who is to be deterred.
No plans to deter USA or FSU type of nuke powers.


So far from PRC responses to A-V test they are quite convinced.

TSP has started squealing after Shyam Saran's re clarification of massive retaliation. The old flexible escalation ladder was a non-starter for them as they were counting on US to come and stop India from retaliating.


So all these should be considered and not just write on India as if it exists in a vacuum.

[abhik]

Truth is massive retaliation cannot doctrinally coexist with the “minimum deterrence” notion the Indian government seems wedded to. That is common sense but try telling it to the glib talkers in official quarters

..
Now SS articluated the new augmented doctrine of massive retaliation. Which means regardless of who you bring or front for in you wont exist.

You are making the very same mistake that Bharat Karnad pointed out. India's “minimum deterrence” nuclear arsenal is simple not capable of "massive retaliation". The buzz word used ad-nauseum before was "Unacceptable Damage" (Of course what exactly "unacceptable" was completely undefined). Compare this to the cold-war where the belligerents aimed to almost completely destroy the other's civilian, industrial and military capabilities. Until you have the capability to follow through on your threat of "you won't exist", nobody is gonna take it seriously.

[ramana]

Thanks.

[Austin]

We just need deterrent that can guarantee damage of key cities and infrastructure of our known enemy , similar to China had versus US in Cold War , Couple of ICBM that can reach US and damage key cities just keeping them thinking even with massive asymetric capability that US has.

The rest is all pehelwan giri something we cannot afford and should not indulge in for false pride as we have other important priorities.

The problem for India is not really the potential or capability but the will , All such statement from Shyam Saran are worth as toilet papers if India cannot even deter conventionally against grave threats to national security as Nuclear Escalation would come if ever at the farthest end of escalatory chain.

[Surya]

Not sure if this was posted

posting in full as i don't have the Times of India link

not sure why BK mixes civil disasters and post nuclear strike



Unprepared for anything

Bharat Karnad
In The Times of India

Jul 12, 2013


There are three unalterable constants when natural and man-made disasters strike in India — there is almost always a prior alert or intelligence report that is ignored, local administration and police and government generally at all levels (local, state, and central) disappear from the scene, and the army fills the breach, the only orderly presence engaged in saving people and restoring a semblance of order.

The recent Uttarakhand floods featured the three constants as had the earlier natural disasters, such as the horrid cyclonic storms that lashed the Odisha coast in the late 1990s. The question is two-fold: Why are alerts and prior intelligence invariably disregarded by the government — as evidenced, once again, in the Bodh Gaya bombing — and why do official organisations dematerialise from the impacted areas at just the point in time when they are most needed?

The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) is, of course, a bad joke. Previously housed in the rundown public sector Centaur Hotel (near the airport) but now occupying a swanky blue glass building in South Delhi, it does little other than provide sinecures for politicians and post-retirement jobs for superannuated bureaucrats and the like. NDMA also guzzles public funds — to the extent of ` 864 crore in the last fiscal, makes paper plans for managing disasters, but once disasters actually happen, there is nary a hint on the ground of plans having been implemented, and the usual helter-skelter recovery efforts ensue leaving the NDMA trawling for excuses.

In the Uttarakhand case the NDMA chairman, Shashidhar Reddy, a Congress party honcho, blamed the agency’s failure on not getting the Doppler radars to detect the formation of cloudbursts! There being no system of accountability, excuses and finger-pointing is the norm in the wake of disasters.

Some disasters are wholly the product of the way the government system routinely (mal)functions. The 1999 hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Kandahar by way of Amritsar was preventable. Indeed, the military, paramilitary forces, and various civilian outfits had practised pre-empting just such an incident, including stationing a truck in front of the aircraft to prevent it from taking off, and thereafter mounting action by commandos to infiltrate the aircraft and rush the hijackers. This training exercise was code-named “Sour Grapes”. But when the plane landed for refuelling in Amritsar, the predictable happened. The lessons of the exercise were forgotten, and the emergency committee commandeered by then national security adviser Brajesh Mishra couldn’t communicate with Amritsar, the only order getting through was to the Army formation surrounding the Raja Sansi Airport to stand down, do nothing as the plane was refuelled and flew off with the Islamic extremists cocking a snook at the country.

The response to every new uncontained disaster is the same old bureaucratic solution — new committees and organisations to add to the layer upon layer of bureaucracy piled up over the years that gum up the works and complicate authority lines and decision-making. Thus the 26/11 episode was followed by the mooting of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre (of the kind the CIA has) as the apex body to co-ordinate, collate and process intelligence data streaming in from a plethora of agencies. Except the National Grid (Natgrid) was already established for this purpose.

It leads one to ponder the worst — the horrendous consequences and the aftermath of, say, a nuclear attack. Over the last 15 years, when addressing military audiences on nuclear doctrine and strategy, I have made it a point to bring up the little matter of the “No First Use” (NFU) principle embedded in the country’s nuclear doctrine.

It elicits knowing laughter when I tell the officers that for a country that is unable to handle a seasonal phenomenon, such as “a Monsoon strike” that can be predicted to the hour and reduces Indian cities to extended lakes, to imagine it can absorb a nuclear first strike, and retain its wit and wherewithal to launch a retaliatory counter-strike as decreed by the Indian nuclear doctrine is, beyond fantastical to, in fact, be delusional!

And yet, the NFU is one of the central pillars of India’s nuclear strategy requiring that, notwithstanding any intelligence of an adversary planning a surprise nuclear attack, Indian strategic forces will have to bide their time, wait patiently for the enemy to first vaporise an Indian metropolis, say, at his convenience, before a nuclear missile salvo is permitted to be fired in retaliation.

The country’s institutional/systemic weaknesses and the government’s inability to keep its head and nerve in a crisis of any kind, should have been factored into drafting the nuclear doctrine, and NFU discarded at that stage, but it wasn’t. The NFU, incidentally, was hotly debated by the doctrine drafting group in the National Security Advisory Board and incorporated anyway for all the wrong reasons and without reference to an absent civil defence system and infrastructure.

NDMA, incidentally, is tasked with drawing up plans for dealing with nuclear bombed Indian cities or, more plausibly, the triggering of radiation diffusion devices (“dirty bombs”). Hopefully, NDMA has stocked up on the anti-radiation potassium iodate pills and, perhaps, has made plans for evacuating people and, in case of alerts being available, of removing large parts of the population, for instance, to the tunnelled portions of the track on which the Metro trains run — such tunnels being perfect underground nuclear shelters. Except, such evacuation/safety measures will have to be repeatedly practised by the people and conducted by NDMA, with the tunnels being provisioned with sufficient food, medicines, etc.

But civil defence exercises to train city folk on what to do, where to go, and why to avoid mass hysteria, panic and pandemonium have not so far been undertaken by NDMA in any city, and the first time its plans will be rolled out is only post-nuclear attack. Then, it will be discovered that everything that works well on paper, in actual practice, will go horribly wrong. In the event, people will be left free to deal with the cataclysm the best they can, mostly on their own.

Bharat Karnad is Professor at Centre for Policy Research and blogs at http://www.bharatkarnad.com/
--

[ramana]

Not sure if this was posted

posting in full as i don't have the Times of India link

not sure why BK mixes civil disasters and post nuclear strike


Unprepared for anything

Bharat Karnad
In The Times of India

Jul 12, 2013


There are three unalterable constants when natural and man-made disasters strike in India — there is almost always a prior alert or intelligence report that is ignored, local administration and police and government generally at all levels (local, state, and central) disappear from the scene, and the army fills the breach, the only orderly presence engaged in saving people and restoring a semblance of order.

The recent Uttarakhand floods featured the three constants as had the earlier natural disasters, such as the horrid cyclonic storms that lashed the Odisha coast in the late 1990s. The question is two-fold: Why are alerts and prior intelligence invariably disregarded by the government — as evidenced, once again, in the Bodh Gaya bombing — and why do official organisations dematerialise from the impacted areas at just the point in time when they are most needed?

The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) is, of course, a bad joke. Previously housed in the rundown public sector Centaur Hotel (near the airport) but now occupying a swanky blue glass building in South Delhi, it does little other than provide sinecures for politicians and post-retirement jobs for superannuated bureaucrats and the like. NDMA also guzzles public funds — to the extent of ` 864 crore in the last fiscal, makes paper plans for managing disasters, but once disasters actually happen, there is nary a hint on the ground of plans having been implemented, and the usual helter-skelter recovery efforts ensue leaving the NDMA trawling for excuses.

In the Uttarakhand case the NDMA chairman, Shashidhar Reddy, a Congress party honcho, blamed the agency’s failure on not getting the Doppler radars to detect the formation of cloudbursts! There being no system of accountability, excuses and finger-pointing is the norm in the wake of disasters.

Some disasters are wholly the product of the way the government system routinely (mal)functions. The 1999 hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Kandahar by way of Amritsar was preventable. Indeed, the military, paramilitary forces, and various civilian outfits had practised pre-empting just such an incident, including stationing a truck in front of the aircraft to prevent it from taking off, and thereafter mounting action by commandos to infiltrate the aircraft and rush the hijackers. This training exercise was code-named “Sour Grapes”. But when the plane landed for refuelling in Amritsar, the predictable happened. The lessons of the exercise were forgotten, and the emergency committee commandeered by then national security adviser Brajesh Mishra couldn’t communicate with Amritsar, the only order getting through was to the Army formation surrounding the Raja Sansi Airport to stand down, do nothing as the plane was refuelled and flew off with the Islamic extremists cocking a snook at the country.

The response to every new uncontained disaster is the same old bureaucratic solution — new committees and organisations to add to the layer upon layer of bureaucracy piled up over the years that gum up the works and complicate authority lines and decision-making. Thus the 26/11 episode was followed by the mooting of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre (of the kind the CIA has) as the apex body to co-ordinate, collate and process intelligence data streaming in from a plethora of agencies. Except the National Grid (Natgrid) was already established for this purpose.

It leads one to ponder the worst — the horrendous consequences and the aftermath of, say, a nuclear attack. Over the last 15 years, when addressing military audiences on nuclear doctrine and strategy, I have made it a point to bring up the little matter of the “No First Use” (NFU) principle embedded in the country’s nuclear doctrine.

It elicits knowing laughter when I tell the officers that for a country that is unable to handle a seasonal phenomenon, such as “a Monsoon strike” that can be predicted to the hour and reduces Indian cities to extended lakes, to imagine it can absorb a nuclear first strike, and retain its wit and wherewithal to launch a retaliatory counter-strike as decreed by the Indian nuclear doctrine is, beyond fantastical to, in fact, be delusional!

And yet, the NFU is one of the central pillars of India’s nuclear strategy requiring that, notwithstanding any intelligence of an adversary planning a surprise nuclear attack, Indian strategic forces will have to bide their time, wait patiently for the enemy to first vaporise an Indian metropolis, say, at his convenience, before a nuclear missile salvo is permitted to be fired in retaliation.

The country’s institutional/systemic weaknesses and the government’s inability to keep its head and nerve in a crisis of any kind, should have been factored into drafting the nuclear doctrine, and NFU discarded at that stage, but it wasn’t. The NFU, incidentally, was hotly debated by the doctrine drafting group in the National Security Advisory Board and incorporated anyway for all the wrong reasons and without reference to an absent civil defence system and infrastructure.

NDMA, incidentally, is tasked with drawing up plans for dealing with nuclear bombed Indian cities or, more plausibly, the triggering of radiation diffusion devices (“dirty bombs”). Hopefully, NDMA has stocked up on the anti-radiation potassium iodate pills and, perhaps, has made plans for evacuating people and, in case of alerts being available, of removing large parts of the population, for instance, to the tunnelled portions of the track on which the Metro trains run — such tunnels being perfect underground nuclear shelters. Except, such evacuation/safety measures will have to be repeatedly practised by the people and conducted by NDMA, with the tunnels being provisioned with sufficient food, medicines, etc.

But civil defence exercises to train city folk on what to do, where to go, and why to avoid mass hysteria, panic and pandemonium have not so far been undertaken by NDMA in any city, and the first time its plans will be rolled out is only post-nuclear attack. Then, it will be discovered that everything that works well on paper, in actual practice, will go horribly wrong. In the event, people will be left free to deal with the cataclysm the best they can, mostly on their own.

Bharat Karnad is Professor at Centre for Policy Research and blogs at http://www.bharatkarnad.com/
--

The bolded parts should answer the question.
He is not sure that NDMA nor the civil adminstration will be able to cope with a nuclear strike of any kind given its track record in civil disasters. The more worrisome unstated factor is the Army will be called out to cope with the relief and how will it fight external forces that carried out the attack? So he suggestes discarding or amending the NFU to deter such an attack.


Shyam Saran already dropped the escalatory step-by step response to promise massive retaliation.

Misfortunately some people think India can't retaliate let alone massively.

[Surya]

Ramana

its one thing to clean up and run things afterwards

but that should not prevent a properly distributed channels for authorizing retaliation

[ramana]

No fear on that. There is "dead man's trigger" in place as was revealed by many GOI officials.


Read this thread only.

[Surya]

I have read it hence why I am saying this is a badly mixed up article

[ramana]

Interesting report on the German efforts and the lack of success. Also has lessons for India if one wants to learn:

Rotter, Andrew J. Hiroshima:The World's Bomb (Making of the Modern World) Oxford University Press.

Despite losing dozens of distinguished scientists as refugees from Naziism, Germany in the 1930s retained some of the best theoretical and experimental physicists in the world. Otto Hahn remained. Kurt Diebner led physics research at the Army Weapons Bureau and in the early years of the war took charge of uranium research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem. Paul Harteck, the physical chemist who predicted a powerful nuclear explosive in 1939, was at Hamburg; Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, whose father, Ernst, was the second-ranking official in the German Foreign Office, was at KWI, as were Erich Bagge and Horst Korsching (both of whom specialized in isotope separation), and the Nobel Prize winner Max von Laue, famous for his work on X-rays—though, as it turned out, someone who would evade weapons research during the war.14 Above all, Germany had Werner Heisenberg. He was one of the world’s great theoretical physicists, the man James Chadwick had called ‘the most dangerous possible German in the field because of his brain power’.

...

The researchers lacked neither imagination nor enthusiasm for their task. In the years following the war—in fact, from the moment German physicists learned of the bombing of Hiroshima—Werner Heisenberg, assisted by his colleague Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, cultivated a myth that he and others had conspired to subvert research toward a German atomic bomb. Opposed to Hitler’s murderous regime and to the moral enormity of nuclear weapons in Hitler’s hands or anyone’s, Heisenberg had slowed his work deliberately and pointedly failed to pursue leads that he suspected might provide breakthroughs in decoding the science of the bomb. In a September 1941 meeting in Copenhagen with the revered Niels Bohr, Heisenberg claimed he had asked, albeit somewhat clumsily, whether Bohr thought it possible that physicists everywhere might refuse to work on the bomb, as he implied he himself would do. Heisenberg also passed Bohr a drawing of the reactor he was working on. According to Heisenberg’s subsequent, rueful account, Bohr misunderstood him to say that he hoped Bohr would use his influence to get the Allies alone to cease bomb research. Bohr in any case bridled, concluded that Heisenberg was, wittingly or otherwise, promoting Naziism, and thereafter refused to trust the man who had once been his closest scientific confidant. Heisenberg returned in frustration to Leipzig.24

Already primus inter pares among German nuclear scientists, Heisenberg was to become even more central after July 1942, when he replaced Diebner as director of the KWI Institute of Physics. Thus, his ethical position on nuclear weapons, and on a German bomb in particular, has undergone exacting historical scrutiny and has generated enormous controversy since 1945. Mark Walker has divided commentators into two camps: the ‘apologists’, who accept Heisenberg’s version of the meeting with Bohr and thus proclaim his innocence, even his nobility in quietly resisting the demands of the Nazi state; and the ‘polemicists’, who insist that Heisenberg’s version whitewashes the truth of his own complicity with Naziism—that the German failure to build an atomic bomb had nothing to do with deliberate subversion and everything to do with Heisenberg’s incompetence.

...

The lack of coordination among laboratories was never remedied by the German government, which had its own disjointed relationship with nuclear science, and here is a second reason why the German program failed. Some in the regime were suspicious of nuclear physics because of its association with Einstein and other prominent Jews. Hitler wanted weapons, certainly, but he never understood the science and technology that produced them. When the distinguished Max Planck, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, approached the Führer in May 1933 to argue that Jewish scientists could contribute to the state and should not be driven off, Hitler became so apoplectic that Planck simply got up and left. (Einstein reported that Hitler had threatened during his tirade to throw Planck, who was 75, into a concentration camp.)

...

The work began with a largely unprofitable probe into Italy, then the dispatch to Switzerland of an extraordinary mission by the OSS agent Moe Berg, an enigmatic, multilingual, former baseball catcher with a creditable throwing arm and a deep knowledge of the game. Berg also had a basic understanding of nuclear physics. Berg’s assignment—given to him, apparently, by the OSS rather than by Groves directly—was to attend a physics lecture to be given in Zurich by Heisenberg in late December 1944. Berg carried a pistol in his suit pocket. If Heisenberg uttered a single sentence indicating that Germany was close to having an atomic bomb, Berg was to render him ‘hors de combat’, then and there, with a well-aimed gunshot or two. Heisenberg’s lecture proved to be sufficiently general in scope as to save his life.29

...

The Alsos mission revealed perhaps the single most important reason why the Germans failed to build an atomic bomb. For all the manifest brilliance of Heisenberg and his fellow scientists, and notwithstanding the limits of German resources and heightened pace of Allied attacks on German facilities after 1942, the Germans lost the first nuclear arms race because they did not fully grasp the science and technology required to build an atomic bomb. It was Heisenberg, the most eminent of the atomic scientists, who made two fundamental miscalculations. First, misunderstanding the fission process, he dramatically overestimated the amount of enriched U-235 needed to sustain a chain reaction, believing it to be a ton or several tons, rather than the 56 kilograms actually needed. As Jeremy Bernstein has demonstrated, even after the Farm Hall Germans got word of the Hiroshima bombing, Heisenberg failed to understand the physics of U-235.

Attempts to refine enough uranium to produce its readable form in the amount Heisenberg thought necessary proved time-consuming and frustrating. Second, the equally frustrating pursuit of many gallons of heavy water was the result of Heisenberg’s belief that it was the only possible moderator of a nuclear chain reaction. The Germans had tried experiments using graphite as a moderator; these had proved unavailing. But this was because the Germans had used industrial graphite contaminated with boron, a substance that, as Bernstein puts it, ‘soaks up neutrons like a sponge’. The Allies would understand the problem and demand pure graphite from their manufacturers. It was graphite that worked perfectly as a moderator in the atomic pile superintended by Enrico Fermi in a University of Chicago squash court in 1942.32

German scientists got a good deal of the bomb’s physics right: they experimented, for example, with creating a transuranic element that might be easier to use for a chain reaction than U-235 (plutonium, element 94, would be the basis for the Nagasaki bomb), seemed at times to grasp the proper scale of the bomb (Heisenberg may have told Albert Speer and others, in June 1942, that a bomb the size of a pineapple would be sufficient to destroy a city), and appeared to understand the difference between running a reactor and constructing a bomb (principally the speed of the chain reaction). But the miscalculation of the chain reaction’s critical mass and mistakes made in choosing a moderator for the reaction fatally undermined the Germans’ bomb project. These errors offer the simplest, and in this case the best, explanation of the German failure.

Above all the lack of a peer review group to critique the process an designs due to whatever reasons was the bigger error.


In Indic terms the difference between Brihaspati and Shukracharya should be understood.

[SaiK]

I think our brihaspati team did keep our shukracharya team with arms length distance. Or is it that our teams were only split after the experiments were over, and it was only about the yields. Still, we have big gaps in understanding if we have established production to satisfy MIRV/MARV requirements with matching yields and weights.

[Prem Kumar]

This "gem" of an article in where-else, but the Chindu, deserves a mention

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/nu ... 049435.ece

A memorable quote

The extra caution induced by the bomb means that the subcontinent’s nuclearisation raised the threshold of tolerance of Pakistan’s hostile mischief, like provocations on the Line of Control and cover for cross-border terrorism. Yet, India did not need to buy deterrence against China. The best available evidence shows that China’s nuclear weapons, doctrine, posture and deployment patterns are designed neither to coerce others nor to fight a nuclear war with the expectation of winning, but solely to counter any attempt at nuclear blackmail.

The author

Ramesh Thakur is director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Australian National University. The article is based on a paper presented at the “Arms Control and Strategic Stability” conference in Beijing, August 8–9.

With Indians (or PIOs) like Ramesh Thakur, Siddharth Varadarajan & the Chindu, who needs enemies?

[abhishek_sharma]

Nuclear weapons, costs and myths

[MurthyB]

Five Myths about India's Nuclear Posture--Vipin Narang

TWQ: Pakistan and Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Déjà Vu? - Summer 2013 -- Shashank Joshi

[sanjaykumar]

http://csis.org/files/publication/TWQ_1 ... Narang.pdf

Five Myths about India’s Nuclear Posture

Albeit written for obvious western sponsorship and audiences, this piece makes excellent sense of the BMD programme.

It is only logical if India is planning for a first strike against Pakistan.

But I thought India was a soft state....

To accept the blandishments by DRDO that it has no mandate from the GOI to develop MIRVs (or ASATs) is being disingenuous at best. Otherwise it discovers a complete lack of understanding (almost certainly wilful) of the political culture in India.

[abhishek_sharma]

Rotter, Andrew J. Hiroshima:The World's Bomb Oxford University Press.

8. Fissions: uranium and plutonium

The decision to assemble Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos, followed less than three weeks later by the chain reaction under Stagg Field, gave impetus and clarity to the project. There were many technical problems to be solved and strategic decisions to be made, but what Groves and Oppenheimer knew they needed, as soon as possible, was a fissionable core for the bomb. It could be made of U-235 or plutonium (Pu-239), with the precise amount of these materials needed remaining a matter of speculation, though not wild speculation. To produce both substances the project would need as much U-238 ore as Groves could put his hands on. Here was a task Groves readily understood, and he undertook it with his usual relentless determination. He believed, at first, that monopolizing the world’s uranium supply was possible. The Germans had Joachimsthal, but the United States had Sengier, who not only sold his Staten Island supply to Kenneth Nichols but who promised another 3,000 tons from the Congo. (In the end, the United States would amass some 6,000 tons of uranium during the war. The Congo was the source for 3,700 tons, Canada’s Great Bear Lake 1,100, and the rest came from the United States itself.) Groves also hoped to control the world’s supply of thorium, a radioactive element often contained in monazite sands, which were abundant in the Netherlands East Indies, Brazil, and especially the Travancore Coast of southern India. In all these gathering efforts he gained the cooperation of the British.36

Groves directed the Manhattan project.

[abhishek_sharma]

Rotter, Andrew J. Hiroshima:The World's Bomb Oxford University Press.

Throughout these developments, the Americans had played an uneasy game with their British scientific allies. Originally having been jolted out of their lethargy by British scientists, the Americans were at first eager to learn as much and as quickly as possible from the British. Having served as executor of the jolt in the summer of 1941, the British had then been standoffish toward the Americans. On 11 October 1941, two days after his pivotal meeting with Bush and Henry Wallace, Roosevelt had written to Winston Churchill: ‘It appears desirable that we should soon correspond or converse concerning the subject which is under study by your MAUD Committee, and by Dr Bush’s organization in this country, in order that any extended efforts may be coordinated or even jointly conducted.’ At this point, the British were ahead of the Americans in imagining and building a bomb, and possibly for that reason Churchill delayed replying to Roosevelt for two months; when Churchill did respond, he did so vaguely. Having thus delayed their pursuit of a joint effort, the British found that, by the time they decided to undertake it in mid-1942, the Americans had raced ahead and lost much of their enthusiasm for collaboration.

...

In fact, before they tested the bomb, the men who built it were not entirely sure how powerful it would be. At one point during the summer of 1942 Edward Teller estimated that a bomb might ignite the atmosphere’s nitrogen and thus destroy the world. Oppenheimer, briefly rattled, had rushed off to consult Compton, and the men agreed that, if Teller’s calculus held, the project must end. Hans Bethe ran the numbers again and found the chances of apocalypse to be a mere three in a million.

...

To what extent did the scientists who conceived and built the bomb and the civilian and military officials who authorized its use know that radiation from the weapon would kill human beings? They knew some things. The Frisch-Peierls Memorandum of 1940 had warned that a significant portion of ‘the energy liberated in the explosion’ would be in radioactive form, and that radiation might cling to the debris created by the blast and thus ‘be fatal to living beings even a long time after the explosion’. The MAUD Committee thereafter discussed radioactivity in some detail. Anyone exposed directly to the bomb’s fissions would die of blood damage. ‘The effects of radioactive products would be considerable,’ Margaret Gowing summarizes the Committee’s finding, and ‘they might or might not be of secondary importance’. The committee urged that the possible impact of the bomb’s radioactivity be thoroughly studied before the weapon was used. The committee’s interest seems to have been technical, not moral. And the MAUD report itself, which would transform the American weapon project, made scarce mention of the radioactivity issue. ‘Perhaps... we should have considered whether radioactivity was a poison outlawed in spirit by the Geneva Convention,’ one of the MAUD scientists later reflected. ‘But we didn’t.’ Neither did the Americans, at least to any great extent. Compton was concerned enough to implement safety measures at the Met Lab by the middle of 1942, calling in medical experts to check employees’ levels of radiation exposure and issuing radiation-sensitive badges to those who worked in the most vulnerable areas. One of Groves’s nightmares was runaway radioactivity after the Trinity test in July 1945; he prepared evacuation plans for the surrounding ranches and communities just in case.51

But, like the MAUD Committee members, scientists working on the Manhattan Project never dwelled on the bomb’s radioactivity, and tended to avoid conjecture that they were producing a dirty weapon. This was partly because they did not believe, or would not let themselves believe, that radioactivity would cause damage beyond the enormous blast area of the bomb. Briefing the Los Alamos scientists, Robert Serber estimated that radiation would kill everyone within 1,000 yards of the blast center—but that it wouldn’t matter because the blast itself would kill everyone within 2,000 yards. Norman Ramsey, the Columbia physicist who served as science adviser to the Air Force on Tinian Island, whence the atomic bombers took off for both their missions, affirmed that ‘the people who made the decision to drop the bomb made it on the assumption that all casualties would be standard explosions casualties... Any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first.’ Oppenheimer himself told the membership of the Interim Committee, formed to advise President Truman on how (not whether) to use the atomic bomb, that the ‘neutron effect of the explosion would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile’—an assertion more open-ended than those made earlier by Serber and later by Ramsey, but one that nevertheless implied that radiation damage would be circumscribed by the scope of the blast. Groves claimed, in his postwar memoir, that he ‘had always insisted that casualties resulting from direct radiation and fallout be held to a minimum’, and that he had decided on an airburst, above the target cities, for that reason; the radioactivity from the bomb would disperse in the air, rather than spreading over the ground or pushing into the earth, like H. G. Wells’s Carolinum, and thus contaminating much of the surrounding area.52

[abhishek_sharma]

From the book cited above:

Groves, then, was well aware of the potential impact of radioactivity, and the Interim Committee, whose members included not only Secretary of War Stimson but Bush, Conant, near-future Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, heard Oppenheimer’s judgment about the ‘neutron effect’. Stimson briefed Truman on committee deliberations. But it is not clear how much Truman, or for that matter his predecessor, knew about the potential for human damage by radioactivity from the bomb. In his 1961 memoir, Clement Attlee, who became British Prime Minister in late July 1945, claimed that neither he nor Churchill nor Truman knew anything about ‘the genetic effects of an atomic explosion’ or about ‘fall-out and the rest of what emerged after Hiroshima’. Attlee’s view is not authoritative, since he hardly knew about the bomb until he became Prime Minister, and it is telling that he conflates radioactivity’s ‘genetic effects’ with ‘fall-out and the rest’. These are not the same thing. There were, in fact, several ways in which bomb-borne radioactivity could injure or kill human beings. First, radiation could affect those who were not killed by blast or fire; Serber and the others were wrong to think that the blast would cover more ground than the radioactivity. This was ‘direct radiation’. It was possible, second, that radioactivity could remain in the bombed area, potent enough to sicken those who came into it hoping to help or in search of loved ones in the days after the bomb had been dropped; this was ‘indirect radiation’. Finally, either those immediately exposed or those affected later might, while remaining alive, carry cellular radiation damage to children as yet unborn or conceived.

Gowing finds little evidence that scientists anticipated the genetic effects of radiation on a bombed population. She notes that experiments had shown, in 1928, that radiation distorted the genes of plants and insects, but the studies apparently stopped there. With one exception: during the war a British doctor raised the possibility that human mutations would occur should the Germans attack Britain with ‘radioactive fission products’ in some form. It would not have been a great intellectual leap to the conclusion that an atomic bomb might produce the same effects. Evidently, no one made the leap. The first volume of the official account of the atomic bomb, written on behalf of the US Atomic Energy Commission and 655 pages long, contains but a single paragraph on radioactivity, and it concerns Compton’s worries about exposing Met Lab workers.53

Were the scientists and statesmen ignorant about radioactivity? Probably so. To what extent was their ignorance willful, predicated, that is, on a desire not to know about the harm that radioactivity could do? That is a harder question to answer. To read about the men who built the bomb is to feel some sympathy for them. They thought carefully about their place in the world and were not slaves to an arbitrary authority. They read the Bible (Compton), Shakespeare (Edward Condon), and the Bhagavad Gita (Oppenheimer, in Sanskrit). They hiked, fished, played music, drank, punned, and played jokes on each other. They loved their wives and children.

They were enraptured by their technically sweet and Promethean mission to build the bomb. And they hated Nazi Germany. The moral implications of what they were doing, especially with regard to the insidious killing power of radioactivity, paled unto disappearance when they contemplated the evil of Naziism. Qapan, as we will see, was for some of them another story.) They willed away their scruples because they came to believe that anything that would destroy Hitler’s Germany was morally admissible. The world had rushed to condemn the use of poison gas after the First World War, and in the early 1940s most continued to regard it as abhorrent, a touchstone of the inconceivable even in a world gone mad with otherwise-total war. In December 1941, just as the United States entered the war, the Princeton physicists Henry DeWolf Smyth and Eugene Wigner issued a report in which they compared radiation to ‘a particularly vicious form of poison gas’. The comparison proved an inspiration to Edward Teller, who, in the spring of 1943, contemplating the worrisome prospect that an atomic bomb might not be possible, suggested instead spraying fission products from Hanford over 100 square miles of German territory, killing its inhabitants and leaving the area a no man’s land. Enrico Fermi also raised with Oppenheimer the possibility of using radioactivity as a weapon against Germany; Oppie replied, casually, that plans existed to poison ‘food sufficient to kill a half million men’, though how he planned to prevent women and children from dying instead he did not say. Ernest Lawrence embraced radiological warfare after 1945 as a way to make war more humane. Bands of radioactivity, he declared, would create a ‘cordon insanitaire’ around the people and territory one wished to protect.54

Convinced of their rectitude, absorbed by the project and hope of saving lives by quickly ending the war, willing to work on behalf of the US military and the government if not always on the military’s terms, their minds at least temporarily closed against moral doubt, the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, supported by thousands of men and women in Chicago, Berkeley, Oak Ridge, and Hanford, built the bomb between 1943 and 1945. It was America’s bomb, of course, authorized by the President and paid for, albeit unwittingly, by American citizens. It was also the world’s bomb. Its fabricators and components, the ideas that enabled it, came from everywhere. Its victims would be mainly Japanese, but also Koreans, Chinese, and even some Americans, luckless enough to be caught in Hiroshima in early August 1945. Like the republic of science that produced it, and like the radiation that issued from it, the bomb’s impact would respect no boundaries.

[Christopher Sidor]

^^^
Ironic isn't it? A bomb made out of loathing of Hitler and this Nazi empire was used not against the Nazis but against another entity. If one see the entire history of the nuclear bomb, one can repeatedly find references on how the US was allegedly supposed to get it before the Nazis mastered it so as to make the "civilized" world safe. And just like Iraq in the first decade of 21st century, after the WWII it was found that the Nazis were no closer to building the bomb than were the Nipponese.

In the end by the time the nuclear explosive was weaponized, WWII was practically over. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria showed how weakened the IJA and IJN had become. It took the Soviets only one week to run over a country the size of Western Europe with the complete annihilation of the famed Kwantung Army. This begs to question, why was the bomb eventually used and especially on Japan?

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

The second statement comes from a more familiar source: Harry S. Truman, who became President of the United States following Franklin Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945 and was in office when the bombs were dropped and the war against Japan ended. More than anyone, Truman made the decision to use atomic bombs, though a search for a particular document or statement by Truman actually authorizing the bombings is curiously unfulfilling. In any case, it was to his president that Samuel McCrea Cavert, the general secretary of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, wrote on 9 August, just after the second atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Many Christians, Cavert wrote, were ‘deeply disturbed over [the] use of atomic bombs against Japanese cities’; the weapons were ‘indiscriminate’ and set an ‘extremely dangerous precedent’. Truman replied tersely on the nth. ‘My dear Mr Cavert,’ he began:

Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was frankly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.

When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.

Vengeance, then, was part of Truman’s motive: the Japanese had attacked first, and treacherously, and had mistreated American prisoners. Evidently, too, the Japanese were impervious to reason, understanding only force, war’s lingua franca. And, most memorably, there is Truman’s description of the Japanese as ‘a beast’, vicious, violent, less than human. Atomic bombs were necessary, according to this logic, and they were legitimate, because no one cared that or how a beast was exterminated, least of all the beast.2

Statement three comes from Truman’s successor as President, Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is actually two comments, combined as many other historians have combined them, but in fact recorded in two different places. In 1945 Eisenhower was commander of Allied Forces in Europe, and in this role he attended the conference at Potsdam, where the Big Three—Truman, Joseph Stalin, and (temporarily, as it turned out) Winston Churchill—discussed the fate of Central and Eastern Europe and the endgame of the war against Japan. In the first volume of his memoirs, published eighteen years later—that is, after his presidency—Eisenhower recounted that Secretary of War Henry Stimson had told him at Potsdam that the atomic bomb would be dropped on Japan. The general recalled his reaction:

I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’.

Then, the quotable coda, which appeared not in the memoirs but in Newsweek in November 1963: ‘It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.’3

The passages suggest, in the first place, the possibility that a leading American general distinguished between the use of a nuclear weapon and other forms of warfare, judging the first ‘unnecessary’ and ‘awful’, more awful at least than other weapons already being used. More significantly, it suggests that there may have been reasons other than the quest for swift and sure victory why Truman decided to use bomb(s) anyway. Surely Stimson would have taken seriously the military judgment of his general (Japan was looking to surrender); surely he would have accepted Eisenhower’s logic that the atomic bomb was not necessary to win the war. That he apparently did neither of these things—that he did not refrain from recommending use of the bomb—must therefore mean that Stimson had other reasons to want his president to use it. Revisionist historians, indeed, have found in the Eisenhower quotations evidence that, for Stimson, Secretary of State James Byrnes, and Truman, the real target of the atomic bomb—Japan being, as Eisenhower said, all but defeated without it—was the Soviet Union. If atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, the war would end more quickly, depriving the Soviets of much involvement in the war’s endgame and thus of a prominent place in the postwar occupation authority in Japan. And if the United States dropped atomic bombs, the Soviet leadership might be intimidated by American power and become more agreeable in negotiations on the political future of Germany and Eastern Europe, already a matter of friction between the Allies.4

One more statement, this from Stimson himself. Henry Stimson, who was 77 years old in 1945, was a dedicated public servant who played a critical role in the drama of the atomic bomb. It was he who told Truman, hours after Truman became President, of the existence of’a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power’ then under development, who chaired the secret Interim Committee that advised the President about how to use the bomb, and who removed the city of Kyoto from the bombs’ target list, overriding the objections of Leslie Groves. By early 1947, as the Cold War intensified, there were rumblings in US policy circles and in the American press that the bombs had been aimed primarily at the Soviets, not the Japanese, and had thus been militarily unnecessary. Stimson responded, in the February issue of Harper’s magazine, with ‘The Decision to Use the Atomic Weapon’, a piece meant to disarm critics by revealing the inside version of official deliberation in the months leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima. Why, then, did the United States drop the bomb?

My chief purpose [Stimson wrote] was to end the war in victory with the least cost in the lives of the men in the armies which I had helped to raise. In the light of the alternatives which, on a fair estimate, were open to us I believe that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.

The bomb, according to Stimson, was not used for some nefarious or secret reason, but because it promised to end the war sooner and thus save lives. It was American lives that Stimson cherished and mentioned in the passage, but in his following paragraph he noted that, by ending the war, the atomic bombs ended the firebombing of Japanese cities and the blockade of Japan by US ships and thus saved Japanese lives too. The atomic bomb was justified as the most humane way to prosecute, then terminate, the atrocious war.5

It will be noted that all four of these statements were made after the bombs had been dropped: Truman’s within a couple of days, Stimson’s over a year later, Eisenhower’s nearly two decades and Wilson’s a quarter of a century afterwards. Perhaps Truman had not had much time to think before sending a response to Samuel Cavert, but the others had had plenty of time, and were surely conscious that they were setting down their positions for posterity on a subject fraught with controversy. During the war itself, in the heat of battle, most scientists, generals, and statesmen had neither the time nor the inclination to ask themselves whether the atomic bombs should be used. The modifier ‘most’ is essential here, since, as we will see, there were those (not Eisenhower) who urged at the time that the bombs not be dropped, that an alternative be found to end the war that did not involve using nuclear weapons against undefended cities. These arguments were either ignored or considered and rejected. The context in which they were made was that of total war against an enemy widely regarded as ruthless and disinclined to surrender unless utterly defeated. Franklin Roosevelt had insisted early in 1943 that Germany, Italy, and Japan surrender without condition; not only the capacity of the Axis nations to make war but their ideological tendency to do so must be expunged. Harry Truman accepted the demand for unconditional surrender as part of his predecessor’s legacy. Defeat alone was insufficient; the enemy must be destroyed. Atomic bombs would facilitate his destruction.

[member_27444]

As Christopher sider ji says
It is ironic but in the overall context US leadership ever since the beginning of the country, one understands that the leadership does not believe half measures the will go all the 9 yards.

Also what it's leaders say for public consumption is only to cynically exploit the situation with onion like structure outer most layer is national interests then followed by other prior tied including staying in power, prestige and glory

[ramana]

Also dont forget that Truman et al all are from the Bible generation and we don't know how much they believed in the Noah's three races (Japhatic and Semitic, Hamatic) concepts.

[svinayak]

^^^
Ironic isn't it? A bomb made out of loathing of Hitler and this Nazi empire was used not against the Nazis but against another entity. If one see the entire history of the nuclear bomb, one can repeatedly find references on how the US was allegedly supposed to get it before the Nazis mastered it so as to make the "civilized" world safe. And just like Iraq in the first decade of 21st century, after the WWII it was found that the Nazis were no closer to building the bomb than were the Nipponese.

This begs to question, why was the bomb eventually used and especially on Japan?

Several things were happening during the last days of 1945 WWII

The growing strength of Soviet army and expansion of the Red army was the danger that they would take over Asian landmass.
THis was more of show of strength to the SU than just defeating a smaller nation in Asia.

The PRC going communist in 1949 is another event which will define the WWII. Soviet Union and its growing mil strength and its communist influence spreading due it is victory was frightening

[abhishek_sharma]

Somewhat OT. Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was already softened by bombs and fire

The target was to be Tokyo. LeMay selected as a site for the incendiaries an area of roughly 12 square miles in eastern Tokyo encompassing the Asakusa ward. It had a population density of 103,000 per square mile. (Deliberately excluded from the target zone was the Imperial Palace; the sight and smell of nearby burning would be enough to send a message to its leading resident, the Emperor Hirohito.) On the evening of 9 March, B-29S took off from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, rendezvoused, and headed west, 334 in all. Each bomber carried up to 6 tons of napalm, phosphorous, and oil-based incendiaries. Japanese radar detected the force and sounded an early warning at 10.30, but inaccurately reported that the attackers had headed off over the sea. The first of the incendiaries—napalm, so as to illuminate the target for the second wave of bombers—came down just after midnight, followed by M-69 magnesium cluster bombs that burst just above the ground. Japanese air defense broadcast an attack warning belatedly at 12.15. The fires spread rapidly, enveloping the target area and an additional 4 square miles besides. Back on Guam, LeMay was uncharacteristically nervous. ‘I’m sweating this one out myself,’ he told his public information officer. ‘A lot could go wrong. I can’t sleep. I usually can, but not tonight.’ He was worried about his crews. There were flak and some interceptors over the city, but the biggest danger the Americans faced was from turbulence, the result of the powerful updrafts caused by the fires below them. Crew members donned oxygen masks to block the stench of napalm and burned flesh. Nearly all the B-29S returned safely to their bases. (One B-29 crew claimed they had monitored Radio Tokyo during the attack, and insisted they had heard the American songs ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘My Old Flame’.)20

The 25 February attack and others ostensibly on industrial targets meant that the people of Tokyo were no strangers to the B-29S—indeed, one of the nicknames given them was ‘regular mail’. But they were unprepared for the waves of bombers that set fire to the city after midnight on 10 March. What anti-aircraft batteries they had were deployed near major factories and were aimed not by radar but by searchlights. Tokyo had trenches and some tunnels, but citizens who managed to reach these found them no protection from the oxygen-sucking heat of the incendiary fires. Houses were made of wood and paper and tightly packed together; efforts to cut fire lanes between them had foundered on labor shortages that had left in place the wooden remnants of structures that had been demolished. Police, firefighters, and hospital workers were unable to cope with the scope of the disaster they faced. ‘To fight ultramodern incendiary bombs’, wrote Robert Guillain, a French journalist who was in Tokyo during the attack, ‘the populace’s basic weapons were straw mats soaked in water, little paper sacks of sand and, in quantity, water buckets that had to be filled from the cisterns at each house’. Families had been told that, in case of an attack, they were to protect their homes and avoid panic.21

Mostly, people ran. They wrapped themselves in hooded air-raid cloaks, thickly padded with cotton, gathered together what family they could, and ran, hoping to find a way out of the flames, certain that they would not survive if they stood still. Whipped by a strong wind, the akakaze or ‘red wind’ off the Tokyo plain, the flames ignited the cloaks and trapped their wearers. Water was their hope. Firefighters tried to douse running people with water, hoping it would protect them from the blaze, or people threw themselves into barrels of water that the parsimonious had placed by their houses to fight fires. People ran to fetid canals and immersed themselves, with only their mouths and noses above the water line. But many of them died anyway, gulping at the deoxygenated air, trampled by others frantically seeking relief from the fires, or boiled by the superheated shallow water in which they stood. Others made it to the Sumida River, only to be swept away by the swift current or drowned as the tide rose: fire or water, they chose their fate. Some ran up rises toward bridges, only to find that the bridge they sought had collapsed, and only then to be crushed or pushed into the water by the crowd that had followed them up the fruitless approach. Or they made it onto an undamaged steel bridge, placed their hands in relief on its railing—and twisted off in agony as they were burned by the scorching metal. The Buddhist temple to Kwan-yin, survivor of the great earthquake and fire of 1923, burned with its monks and refugees and its famous tall gingko trees. In the red light district of Yoshiwara men died with their prostitutes; residents of Nihombashi, funneled by police to the imposing Meiji Theater, tried to protect themselves from the flames by lowering the great steel stage curtain, only to suffocate when toxic fumes penetrated the curtain, which had stuck in place.

As the dawn came in Tokyo, survivors of the bombing were caught in a paralysis of wonder, shock, and nausea. The city stank with the ‘sickeningly sweet odor’ of melted, rotting flesh. A reporter found ‘long lines of ragged, ash-covered people struggl[ing] along, dazed and silent, like columns of ants’. Nearly everyone remarked on the astonishing quiet of the eastern part of the city, the silence broken only by the sound of people coughing or calling out to loved ones. Dedicated as they were, policemen, doctors, and civic officials quailed at the task of collecting the dead. ‘In the black Sumida River countless bodies were floating, clothed bodies, naked bodies, all as black as charcoal. It was unreal,’ recounted Dr Kuboto Shigenori. ‘These were all dead people, but you couldn’t tell whether they were men or women. You couldn’t even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood.’ A police official explained that he was told to report on the situation in the city. ‘Most of us’, he said, ‘were unable to do this because of horrifying conditions beyond imagination... I was supposed to investigate, but I didn’t go because I did not like to see the terrible sights.’ (His interviewer noted that at this he laughed, uncomfortably.) Many of those who survived the attack felt guilty and apologetic, no matter how badly wounded they were or how much they had lost.

...

‘Hell could be no hotter,’ concluded Guillain. No one knew, or knows, how many died that March night. Some bodies were no doubt uncounted because they were consumed by fire; others were quickly buried in mass graves so as to eliminate stench and prevent an epidemic; still others who might have been registered as dead may have left the city prior to the bombing, unbeknownst to relatives or (more likely) the only survivors in their families. Gordon Daniels quotes estimates made by officials in Tokyo of between 76,000 and 83,000 killed, though his own guess is closer to 90,000. That roughly 40,000 were injured by the bombing—that is, about half the number killed—suggests something of the fire’s intensity.23

[abhishek_sharma]

Continuing ...

Before the March raid on Tokyo, Curtis LeMay might have convinced himself that he was going after military targets; in retrospect he claimed that all one had to do was ‘visit one of these targets after we’d roasted it, and see the ruins of a multitude of tiny houses, with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage’, in order to understand what little distinction existed between industrial and residential areas. As Little Boy and Fat Man were prepared for use that summer, Harry Truman reassured himself that the bombs would be dropped only on military targets. Both LeMay’s and Truman’s claims were delusional. But they represented the decay that had for some years rotted away the barricade separating soldiers and civilians as targets placed in the cross hairs by combatants.25

Two years after the war had ended, David Lilienthal, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, reflected on the end of the distinction between soldiers and civilians:

Then we burned Tokyo, not just military targets, but set out to wipe out the place, indiscriminately. The atomic bomb is the last word in this direction. All ethical limitations of warfare are gone, not because the means of destruction are more cruel or painful or otherwise hideous in their effect upon combatants, but because there are no individual combatants. The fences are gone.

The atomic bombs provided an exclamation point at the end of a continuous narrative of atrocity.26

And yet—again; the very subject of the atomic bomb inspires topic sentences that reverse the story’s course. The men and women who imagined then built the bomb thought they were doing something different from what other makers of weapons did, thought they were engaged in something special. No one recalls the names of those who developed napalm and other incendiaries. No other single weapon project received $2 billion in government funds. (Radar cost more, but it was not a weapon as such.) Knowing what they knew about the power of a nuclear chain reaction, and whatever they may have guessed about the impact of radioactivity beyond the perimeter of the blast, some scientists and some government policymakers felt a need to think especially hard about how, and against whom, the atomic bomb was used. Curtis LeMay was permitted by Air Force strategic doctrine to firebomb Tokyo with many tons of incendiaries, but he made the decision to launch the attack himself. There were no high-level meetings to discuss the use of napalm. The opposite, of course, was true for the atomic bomb.

[chandrabhan]

Nowadays, i dont post too much due to paucity if time and the warning i got last time from Admin. However, I lurk everyday and read. One thing more than any other that strikes is the time we waste on criminalising war & Physical violence. I am sorry that it may come as OT here..
At the end of the day, As Bhishma Pitamah said, "Feet of king is the feet of Elephant, all feet must fit & dissolve into that space" while talking about Rajdharma. This narrated in Shanti Parva. For indics to feel disgusted at violence is a result of too much of Ahimsa (Buddha, Ashok, Gandhi) doctrine that has taken hold of collective conscience. When Veerbhadra was busy killing Daksha Prajapati, Vishnu prayed to Shiva saying this will lead to destruction of life and civilisation. Shiva said that destruction & creation are cycles. They complete each other and cant be seen in isolation.
Which civilised nation has not brought horrors of destruction on other civilisations to decry violence today? May be Indics only. We have not survived 1400 hundred years of Islamic onslaught by rolling over, Our ancestors have fought and shed blood. Glorifying peace is fine but remembering peace needs support of your ability of enforcing violence too.

[Johann]

In the end by the time the nuclear explosive was weaponized, WWII was practically over. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria showed how weakened the IJA and IJN had become. It took the Soviets only one week to run over a country the size of Western Europe with the complete annihilation of the famed Kwantung Army. This begs to question, why was the bomb eventually used and especially on Japan?

CS,

The Soviet conquest came the day *after* the bombing of Hiroshima.

Also, the IJA in China was weak because resources had been shifted to the defence of the home islands.

For some sense of what it would have taken to subdue the Japanese on their own home turf, consider the battle for tiny islands like Iwo Jima or Okinawa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa

This was far more intense than the resistance the Germans put up even on their soil.

Certainly the Allies had no problems killing huge numbers of Germans if it was necessary to secure total victory - the fire bombings of Dresden and Hamburg horrifically illustrate that.

Except for the scientific community which was beginning to grasp the long term effects, the senior politicians, bureaucrats and brass regarded atomic weapons as an extension of the existing doctrines of total war and strategic bombing. They saw the atomic bomb as a more efficient way to deliver the same, massive amounts of death and destruction already being rained on German and Japanese cities.

It is only after the Allied occupation of Japan and the extensive nuclear testing of the 40s and 50s that views really began to change. The PTBT banning atmospheric testing was only signed in 1963 after 4 years of negotiation - a sign that the dangers of radioactive fallout were finally starting to be internalised by nuclear powers.

[ramana]

...
For some sense of what it would have taken to subdue the Japanese on their own home turf, consider the battle for tiny islands like Iwo Jima or Okinawa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa

This was far more intense than the resistance the Germans put up even on their soil.

Certainly the Allies had no problems killing huge numbers of Germans if it was necessary to secure total victory - the fire bombings of Dresden and Hamburg horrifically illustrate that.

There are difference between the two campaigns: Bombing Dresden and Hamburg was long distance remote war by both US and British, while Iwo Jima was hand to hand combat face to face with the Japanese by the US only.

....It is only after the Allied occupation of Japan and the extensive nuclear testing of the 40s and 50s that views really began to change. The PTBT banning atmospheric testing was only signed in 1963 after 4 years of negotiation - a sign that the dangers of radioactive fallout were finally starting to be internalised by nuclear powers.

Also techonological advances of scaling weapons with Under Ground Testing along with missile systems delivery accuracy was mainly responsible for the PTBT banning atmospheric testing.* Even then PRC still went on to atmospheric testing till they got or mastered underground testing. Still they would test full yield weapons and didn't rely on scaling till much later when they got computer codes from self interested powers.

* Making Weapons Talking Peace, Herbert York.

[Prem Kumar]

Johann: I dont buy the theory that the atomic bombs were dropped to minimize U.S casualties or bring an early end to the war. Japan's military was on its last legs. Even if a demonstration of the atomic bomb's power was needed, the U.S could have dropped one as a demo near an uninhabited island near Japan or in the sea. Or even granting that Hiroshima was necessary (which I dont grant), Nagasaki was definitely not.

Reasons for dropping the atomic bomb

a) Show the world who the new daddy was
b) The need to validate a new, awesome weapon in real life conditions & study its impact

Why Japan & not Germany

a) The war in Germany had ended
b) Race. There is no way the U.S would have dropped an atomic weapon on Western Civilizaton (even if the situation were reversed - i.e. Japan had surrendered but Germany hadnt). There were & still are lots of people of German descent in the U.S. Who better than the Japs as guinea pigs (not that the Japs were saints)
c) Geographic isolation. I dont buy the theory that the atomic bombs' radioactive effects werent well known. Even if every last effect wasnt known entirely, an overall idea of the long term impact was quite well known. We are talking the creme de la creme of 20th century physicists here. Half life, Curie's death were all well known. The U.S political establishment, military & the scientists definitely knew that the bomb wasnt "yet another weapon". A-bombing Germany would potentially expose Europe to the radioactive fallout. The only time U.S might have A-bombed Germany would have been if the Nazis had developed the A-bomb and threatened to use it.