I stood at ground zero of the Hiroshima Bomb some 23 years after it's detonation and it was amazing, after all the horrendous descriptions and scares I'd been raised with. That same day I had taken a gondola ride to a lookout over the bowl of the blast and while taking pictures, a group of 7/8yr old school children decided to all line up and pose for me in front of the view. During that same year I was part of a Special Weapons Crew that loaded a Nuke on an Aircraft kept in the hanger bay on standby, ready to be launched off the coast of N. Korea. Then I was again in Japan the day of the Moon Landing, the result of the arms race with USSR for rockets that could launch nukes world-wide and the control of space around the Earth.

The juxtapositions were intense. It was much later that I saw the documentary on the Dresden fire bombing and was able to compare that to the nuclear strikes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Except for the radiation after affects, they were eerily similar in destructive results, though the amount of planes and bombs required to ignite the fire storm at Dresden was immense. It was then I realized that the fate of those two cities in Japan and much of the rest of Japan was already written, with or without an A Bomb. At least, the Bombs saved the rest of Japan the same fate. The US fully intended to and would have utterly destroyed Japan.

I often wonder the alternate universe if the US had been led by other than the egomaniacal FDR and had simply ended the war, then gone back home with it's Bomb and left Europe to solve it's own problems rather than making it very difficult for them to re-arm again and bring their conflagrations to the world again, and had left Japan conquered and faced with continued reparations for their part in the war--what would the world be today.

I think Rand's perspective on the development, use, and meaning of the Bomb would have been wonderful to see and compare to at least my own thoughts on it.

A lot of things about the development of the atomic bomb and their use was never widely disseminated.

I actually got a chance to meet General Tibbetts and talk to him for a couple of hours about the Hiroshima mission in the Enola Gay. He had written a book about it and was having a signing at a local air show. A very interesting encounter. I saw virtually none of the air show, the history from his perspective was far more compelling.

The main thing to understand about that time, was that atomic weapons were a new and untried technology.

When that mission was flown, they literally were not at all sure that they would reach Hiroshima carrying a bomb that large and heavy. They were not sure the weapons would work when they dropped them. They didn't know if they would survive the detonation either. But they persevered in spite of the unknowns. Then a different plane and crew did the same thing again at Nagasaki with yet another type of bomb using a different detonation process.

My how things have changed. Do you think America could sustain that kind of massive effort for ANYTHING that we did in WW2?

I do agree with Rands ultimate assessment. We should take the same view in regards with the development of the internet. Gore nor government had anything remotely to do with it. My best friend worked in the testing of the original computer to computer communications with the Army in 1973.

If you understand what Rand wrote and put it in the proper context you cannot say she was a bomb lover or hater. She was For winning the war at the least cost to us. I was only 11 but even then, I would have agreed with her.

My father, a PhD. electrical engineer, worked at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, conducting above ground A-bomb tests in the southern Nevada desert, then worked for the Los Alamos lab for over thirty years, eventually running its engineering division. I grew up in Los Alamos. My next book has an extensive section on the bomb. One conclusion I've reached: granting, for argument's sake, Rand's thesis that the bomb was a triumph of free enterprise, it was also a massive failure of statism in the US. Unfortunately, the latter undercuts the former.

One of the mysteries surrounding the atomic bomb is why leading physicist Werner Heisenberg, of the Uncertainty Principle, did not emigrate to the US from Germany and join the effort. Thomas Powers proposed a novel, and I think well supported, hypothesis in his book, Heisenberg's War. He stayed in Germany, according to Powers, to spike the German bomb effort. One of the great "surprises" at the end of the war was the rudimentary nature of that effort; it was practically nonexistent. When the German bomb was first considered, Heisenberg told Speer and Hitler that it would be an enormous and costly undertaking on both the scientific and industrial fronts, would take years, and was probably doomed to failure. Hitler wasn't interested and the effort received little funding or support. Interestingly, the Los Alamos physicists vanished from the scientific journals around 1943, and Heisenberg and other German physicists strongly suspected they were involved with a US-British bomb development project.

Both the US and British intelligence agencies were aware of the state of the German bomb program, although General Leslie Groves was not entirely convinced. This intelligence was undoubtedly kept from the Los Alamos scientists (with the possible exception of Oppenheimer). Many of them had strong moral qualms about the bomb, but were refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe and participated out of fear of a German bomb.

By the time the US dropped the bombs, most of Japan was in ruins, its cities destroyed. It was difficult to find two suitable targets. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastation was not materially different from that experienced by several dozen Japanese cities from incendiary bombing. In fact, it may not have been the atomic bomb that prompted the Japanese surrender, but rather the prospect of a Soviet invasion (see Foreign Policy, "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan...Stalin Did," 5/29/15).

Roosevelt was an enthusiastic backer of the bomb. Given his personality, I would suggest the bomb was as much about making the US the dominant world power at the end of the war as it was to win that war. Truman's motivation was similar, and the bombs dropped on Japan were more about demonstrating that dominance--especially to Stalin--as they were about defeating Japan, whose leaders were already suing for peace.

The dream for US dominance should have got its comeuppance when the Soviet Union detonated its first bomb in 1949. Not only did it have the bomb, but it had penetrated US security to obtain it. The next seven decades--Korea, Vietnam, the abandoment of the gold window in 1971, disastrous forays into the Middle East--should have obliterated the myth of the US government's omnipotence, but it is still tightly embraced by a substantial segment of the population. We may not be able to imagine the scale of the disaster necessary before it will be discarded. However, the myth's cause is well-served by the conventional narrative of the development of the atomic bomb, which Rand did nothing to challenge, and which is demonstrably at odds with the facts.

I knew for some time Rand pattered Robert Stadler on J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The argument for the atomic bomb: to annihilate foreign aggressors. The argument against the atomic bomb: to be annihilated by foreign aggressors. Most would say the arms race continues to pervade global society. But politically, there is no such entity. There are states, or nations, each with a certain degree of development. Now, hierarchically, the individual is the only entity with rights. A nation has no right, only the express function to protect the lives, rights, and properties of the individuals composing it. Those states which use force in retaliation to the unpreventable initiation of force are justified in doing so. A caveat: If the US government knew about Pearl Harbor, it would implicate the decision makers who knew about that.

John David Lewis' book,'Nothing Less Than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History'

has a chapter(seven - 'Gifts From Heaven': The American Victory over Japan, AD 1945 p.237) that changed my perspective on the propaganda that declared the use of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki immoral,etc.

The argument that those two bombs were supremely MORAL because they broke the will of the Japanese to continue supporting their leadership's war efforts, and in the process saved countless American and Japanese lives.

I must agree with the term "the greatest moral crime" half way, since we all know that at the time a war was going on that fell out of proportions and, well, the result of this "bomb" was still quite unknown. Matter of fact, it was so secret that very few could actually estimate the damage it would cause; and I´m sure the administration at the time had no real clue for its outcome more than (it would save american lives). It did.

What is inmoral, the other half; is the fact that it unleashed what I like to call WWIII, and what we know as the cold war. True, maybe no more cities were destroyed so radically with the innocent lives it takes; but the psychological effect on the world was that of constant uncertainty and "doomsday at hand" fear for decades and, if this goes on; probably centuries to come. Now that´s perverse, for this morbid reasoning keeps justifying the wrath of war, the construction of weapons of mass destruction and the architecture of agression. That´s inmoral, that´s what´s pure evil about this. The subtle drive to feed the war machine till kingdom come...

The link isn't working for me. What DuckDuckGo returned is the same broken link. Did they retract the post?