With the first 2 bombs, there was only 1 country that had nukes, and the rate of production was slow.
After Japan’s surrender, no democratic country is going to want to initiate a whole new war of a similar scale to wipe out other countries. Countries make bad decisions sometimes it’d still be insane to do that, if for no other reason than the public would disapprove.
Fast forward a few years, you had multiple countries building up nuclear stockpiles, hydrogen bombs that were orders of magnitude more powerful were invented, and you had development of ICBM’s that were difficult to intercept and could reach anywhere on Earth in 30 minutes
Had Japan not surrendered, we had another nuke en route (The demon core was around already, we just had to slap it into the mechanism), and could have had a fourth reasonably quickly. (We had processed a huge chunk of the fuel for the fourth pit before we dropped our first bomb) It was just after that where the US couldn’t just keep setting them off because the timescales to generate the plutonium was measured in several weeks.
Last Podcast on the Left did a decent, though immensely gory, series on the Manhattan Project recently.
With the first 2 bombs, there was only 1 country that had nukes, and the rate of production was slow.
After Japan’s surrender, no democratic country is going to want to initiate a whole new war of a similar scale to wipe out other countries. Countries make bad decisions sometimes it’d still be insane to do that, if for no other reason than the public would disapprove.
Fast forward a few years, you had multiple countries building up nuclear stockpiles, hydrogen bombs that were orders of magnitude more powerful were invented, and you had development of ICBM’s that were difficult to intercept and could reach anywhere on Earth in 30 minutes
Had Japan not surrendered, we had another nuke en route (The demon core was around already, we just had to slap it into the mechanism), and could have had a fourth reasonably quickly. (We had processed a huge chunk of the fuel for the fourth pit before we dropped our first bomb) It was just after that where the US couldn’t just keep setting them off because the timescales to generate the plutonium was measured in several weeks.
Last Podcast on the Left did a decent, though immensely gory, series on the Manhattan Project recently.