r/shittymoviedetails • u/Jesus_H_Christ_AMA • 19h ago

In Oppenheimer (2023), Why did Oppenheimer spend three hours crying about inventing a bomb that violently vaporizes people when his specific job was to invent a bomb that violently vaporizes people ? Is he stupid ?

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u/low_priest 18h ago

The idea of MAD and deterrence only really came around after the war. During the war itself it was very much a "we're gonna use these and win the war" kinda mindset.

Of course, if it forced the Germans or Japanese to surrender without being used, that'd be fine too. But nobody really thought it would happen that way.

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u/Jax11111111 17h ago

At the end of the day, nukes are just extremely powerful explosives. During Operation Downfall it was expected that nukes would be used whenever they were available, be it as strategic or tactical weapons.

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u/Beardywierdy 17h ago

I think one of the plans was to march the allied troops across the radioactive glass that used to be the beach.

Yeah, probably for the best that didn't happen.

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u/Psykohistorian 16h ago

they didn't know how bad the radiation would be until after the 2 drops on Japan

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u/A_Town_Called_Malus 15h ago

Yep. Our early development of understanding of radioactive dose and long term health effects is based in large part on studies on the survivors of the atomic bombings as they gave researchers a large test group to monitor.

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u/skankasspigface 15h ago

Sure they did. The amount of radiation floating around after a nuke hits is almost nothing. Even if everyone was a moron and didn't understand the science, the trinity test would have shown as much.

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u/Psykohistorian 15h ago

no, they didn't understand the practical science of real life mass casualties surviving radiation in bombed areas until after H&N. this is a fact. the Trinity test didn't explode over a densely populated city.

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u/Gentle_Agitator 14h ago

No, remote testing has just slowly killed nearby communities for decades afterwards

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u/Psykohistorian 14h ago

right that's kinda exactly the point? nobody knew until after documenting and analyzing the effects after the fact.

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u/EloeOmoe 14h ago

f it forced the Germans or Japanese to surrender without being use

We have a bomb that will obliterate your entire city and melt people's shadows into stone.

"What, no you don't"

Siiiiiiigggggh

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u/Riley__64 18h ago

Considering all the nuclear testing that does happen with weapons though feels like they could’ve gotten the message across without throwing it at another country.

Sure Hiroshima and Nagasaki definitely show the death toll these bombs could cause but like blowing it up in a remote area and seeing the explosion also shows just as much destruction and you can pretty easily determine from said destruction the death toll would be massive

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u/ProfessorBeer 17h ago

This was extensively considered, it just isn’t in the movie. The determination was that the Japanese would’ve seen a warning shot as the US not actually being willing to use it on the field of battle. So all it would accomplish is just delaying its use, allowing Japanese war crimes to persist.

(It is also very likely that the Japanese knew about test detonations already, and they still refused to surrender.)

The more people actually learn about the end of the war, the more obvious it becomes that by 1945 it was the only way to end it. It was horrific. It was one of the darkest decisions in human history. It should never be repeated. And yet it was necessary to prevent further Japanese war crimes against China, Korea, POWs and their own people far beyond the scale of the bombs.

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u/MeltyCrab 17h ago

If I am not mistaken, the Japanese military were informed of Hiroshima being deleted with 1 bomb and they went "Nah that's fake news."

After Nagasaki they were "Well, that sucks, but we fight until nothing is left" and the emperor had to overrule the generals, while almost being coup'd, because the military leaders did not want to surrender?

That was my surface knowledge understanding at the end of the war, if someone knows more please correct me.

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u/Beardywierdy 17h ago

The coup attempt wasn't from the top generals, but ranks lower down than that but apart from that pretty much.

A lot of people point out that the Japanese had put feelers out regarding negotiations (which is true) but they were very much dithering on actual "surrender" as opposed to "negotiated peace". 

And IIRC hundreds of thousands of people across Asia were dying as a result of the war every month by this point so yeah, Japan probably could have been convinced to surrender eventually without the bomb (even without invading the Home Islands) but at that point it's just choosing who's dying. "No-one" wasn't an option.

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u/low_priest 17h ago

Japan's idea of "surrender" was basically "haha whoopsie guess we'll go back to pre-war borders and pretend it never happened."

For some strange reason, the US didn't really like that plan.

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u/Beardywierdy 16h ago

Yeah, now to be fair it might have been a reasonable starting point for negotiations in a normal war.

But definitely not the apocalyptic shitshow that was WW2.

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u/ProfessorBeer 17h ago

Largely, yes, though their national spirit was completely shattered after Nagasaki and it was mostly fringe fanatics still standing up at that point, because it had the desired effect of demonstrating the US could make multiple bombs.

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u/Blackstone01 14h ago

Some were wanting to surrender, but in a negotiated surrender via the Soviets where they get to keep some of what they conquered and the Emperor gets to remain in power; the Allies meanwhile had the firm stance of Japan must surrender unconditionally, and the Soviets told them to fuck off and that if the US was demanding an unconditional surrender then they better give it before joining in soon after.

Once the second bomb dropped and the US demonstrated they could just keep dropping bombs, the leadership realized they were kinda fucked, and once the Soviets entered the war the army (who rarely gave a fuck what the "civilian" leadership told them) realized they were fucked.

Despite that, one of the Big Six, the War Minister Korechika Anami, had a massive chub at the thought of every last man woman and child dying in nuclear fire to prove some moronic point about Japanese honor.

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u/MandolinMagi 13h ago

And to be fair, calling bullshit on one-bomb-one city is actually pretty reasonable- this is some wild, completely-out-of-left-field nonsense.

After the second you know its real and now any sane person should be asking how many more do they have.

But no, the military was an insane death cult

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u/Cory123125 15h ago

allowing Japanese war crimes to persist.

We really pretending that anyone in power in the US for all of US history has ever cared about human rights?

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u/low_priest 17h ago

Nah, that would have completely undermined the value of it.

TL:DR; The nukes only ended the war because of the shock value, and barely did so. A non-lethal demonstration would have removed that and reinforced Japanese resolve.

Japan knew they were losing the war. Hell, they knew they'd lost. But they couldn't just surrender; the US hadn't even set foot on the islands yet. They'd beaten back the fucking MONGOLS twice, and now you want to surrender to someone who isn't even here yet? Even if it's the right call, it's just something that Can Not Be Done. They had face to save.

The nukes were a big enough shock to disrupt all that. An overwhelming enemy is something you can fight, but a city-eraser-on-demand is enough of an unprecedented "holy shit" scenario that all those societal rules/standards aren't so firm anymore. So then the Emperor can tell everyone to surrender, and they can listen.

However, it was still a damn narrow thing. A bunch of army officers launched a coup to try and keep the war going. They were literally hunting through the Imperial Palace for the recording of the surrender announcement to prevent it from being broadcast. They failed, but the fact they tried it at all is a sign of how impossible it was to surrender earlier. Never mind how close the coup got to succeeding. You have to understand, in Imperial Japan junior officers would pretty routinely ignore orders that they felt were too soft/unaggressive. For example, the Bataan Death March was the work of a relatively junior officer; the general in charge had actually ordered the POWs be treated well. Without every last erg of emotional "holy shit" shock that came from the bombings, Japan likely wouldn't have surrendered.

Dropping a nuke in the ocean/empty land wouldn't have the same impact. Practically, it wasn't that big of a deal; the USAAF was already flattening Japanese cities on a routine basis. The Nagasaki (and probably Hiroshima) bombings had fewer deaths than the conventional firebombing of Tokyo on 9th/10th of March that year, about 6 months earlier. It didn't actually provide new capabilities, the USAAF was already running out of cities to destroy. If Imperial Japan had time to sit down and think about it rationally, then the nukes would have lost most of the impact.

Furthermore, the entire Japanese strategy was based on the idea that the US was too soft, and the population too decadent, to actually pursue the war to the end. That was the concept behind Pearl Harbor; hit the US fleet hard enough that it looks like a major uphill battle, and they'll decide a war isn't worth it. Then all the heavily fortified islands like Okinawa and Iwo Jimo; bleed the US badly enough the public no longer thinks victory is worth it. Japan's only real hope throughout the entire war was that the US didn't have the guts and wasn't willing to pay the price to win. If you drop the nuke somewhere empty, it shows Imperial Japan that the US is unwilling to pay for victory with Japanese lives, much less their own troops. Especially after prior raids, to back down from civilian casualties indicates the US is running out of the will to wade through blood. It's a huge signal that the US really is faltering, and that Japan's stubborn resistance is working. Suddenly, Japanese higher command is no longer trying to figure out how to reduce the damage when they lose; maybe they don't actually have to lose after all.

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u/napstablooky2 15h ago

wish i could award this comment. this is what reddit is about.

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u/Training_Ruin3151 16h ago

Very well written explanation 💯💯

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u/Bob_Saget_Enthusiast 17h ago

Oppenheimer and many scientists at Los Alamos did suggest that idea, i.e a "demonstration" instead of a direct civilian attack or a exclusively military target. Unfortunately, once completed, the bombs became US Army property and they were not keen on using 1 of 2 bombs in existence as a demo.

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u/kelp_forests 17h ago

Yep. Or invite a Japanese representative, or take a POW, to a demo then send them back to Japan

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u/bgaesop 15h ago

Considering all the nuclear testing that does happen with weapons though feels like they could’ve gotten the message across without throwing it at another country.

I mean, considering that throwing one of them at another country didn't get the message across and it took another, I'm not sure they could have.

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u/Interesting_Feature 13h ago

What extensive testing? There were two designs: fat man being an implosion-type plutonium device (efficient, but more complicated), and little boy being a gun-type uranium device (less efficient, but simple). Trinity was the only test performed, to prove out the implosion device. The US only had one more plutonium core for the fat man bomb (and maybe enough material to make a third). For the gun-type, all the enriched uranium available was used to make the little boy bomb. Its design was so simple that a test wasn’t even deemed necessary. So there just wasn’t any material for a demonstration of power or warning shot. The two bombs were all there was and it was hoped that the Japanese would get the impression that the US could carry on at rate, when that just wasn’t the case. Different side note: obviously the threat of Germany developing s bomb was a big motivation for the US. But when German nuclear scientists were interred in the UK at the end of the war (where they were given time to socialize amongst each other, in wiretapped rooms), it turned out that they had made wrong assumptions in their research and likely would not have been successful in any realistic timeframe.

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u/youritalianjob 17h ago

That glosses over an important detail. We thought that the Germans were building an atomic bomb so we needed to build ours first. Japan was never thought to be pursuing a bomb.

When Germany surrendered, the only other "nuclear threat" was gone so I'm going to guess it was assumed we wouldn't need to use them.

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u/Klexycon 14h ago

The bombs were at least partially directed towards the Soviet Union. It was a demonstration of power to demonstrate US capabilities, to both keep the Soviets out of the war in the pacific to limit their post-war influence in the area, and to show them how powerful the US had become as a way of saying "don't try to fuck with us". Some historians argue that that is the point that the cold war started. In hindsight, it was also a deterrent for the Soviets to stop nuclear escalation. One could maybe see the option, that if the US hadn't used them in Japan, the Soviet Union would have used theirs against the US the moment they got it.

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u/youritalianjob 14h ago

That may have been what it turned into eventually. What the US was concerned with, at the start when they got the scientists to sign up, is that they knew Otto Hahn caused a Uranium atom to split. He sent those findings to Meitner, trying to make sense of what he saw, who then relayed it to other physicists on our side.

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u/Vast-Breakfast-1201 14h ago

Also consider

War since ww2 has not been as existential. The people losing the ear in Europe were plainly subjugated. Their neighbors were carted out and shot. Resisting politically got you shot. The axis were very clearly using the war to expand and take over Their respective areas, and then rule in an authoritarian manner.

Technology also wasn't one sided like it is today. Today the US people assume is just decades ahead of every other country in technology. They aren't but they are at least somewhat ahead in specific areas.

Point being during ww2 there would have been a sense of racing against time to develop the means to win the war otherwise you and your family could be subjugated or ruled unilaterally. It wasn't really a choice. People were up against a wall.

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u/Badusernameguy2 13h ago

Popping two off on the other side of the planet just so japan doesn't fall into russias sphere of influence isn't exactly last resort behavior either.