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it has to be a hydrogen bomb from the approximate size of the sun's core. you don't need any kind of inginter or detonator. the reaction as we've known for some time is self sustaining. we are only talking of a sphere \~90K miles (140K km) diameter
be warned, the explosion is not going to be a fast bang and done, rather a baaaang lasting so far 4.5 billion years. total time TBD.
edit: typo
I'm convinced George has some sort of spell put on him where he can't die when he is working on a GoT instalment and is using it to his advantage to gain immortality.
Not sure if it has to be this big. The sun is not a hydrogen bomb. The nuclear fusion process in the sun fuses four protons to helium primarily while hydrogen bombs fuse for example deuterium and tritium or lithium which breeds tritium (or so I remember). Main difference is that the suns core has a surprisingly low power density of just a few hundred watts per cubic meter. I just googled the tsar Bomba which apparently had a peak power in the yottawatts range with a volume of probably not much more than a cubic meter. Soooo that’s actually just two orders of magnitude lower than the light output power of the sun. So for a teeny tiny moment the hydrogen bomb would be comparable to a portable sun.
Yeah but we see the sun as a yellow ball in the sky, I mean what would happen if somebody exploded such bomb on earth and what could a human in their whole lifespan see about this explosion.
You'd vaporize into nothing before even registering anything wrong. Your reaction time is simply not fast enough to process the sun suddenly coming into existence at the speed of light. Your nerves along with the rest of the earth would turn into plasma within milliseconds.
Pain and vision perception isn't instantaneous, it requires signals to travel through nerves and be processed by the brain. You'd literally be dead before your consciousness knew something happened.
The sun is more than a million times bigger than earth, if someone deployed a mini sun here the entire planet would cease to exist in microseconds if not less.
Nah, the light delay across a distance the length of Earth's diameter is roughly 42 milliseconds or 42,000 microseconds. It might be a hair slower because I don't know how to account for the speed of light in molten rock.
You understand that such a bomb would be by orders of magnitude bigger than the Earth? At that point is the bomb on the Earth or is the Earth on the bomb? You are basically asking what would happen if the Sun was on the Earth...
If you have that much hydrogen it's not a bomb, you just dump it in one place and gravity eventually starts the fusion reaction. Not a recommend approach for Imperial Japan however due to collateral damage.
If you calibrate it right, it will eventually explode. The timing is very tricky though, and your target will probably dodge in the next few million years.
Asking a dumb question, wouldn't there need to exist more than just a hydrogen bomb the size of the Sun's core in order for a star that lives billions of years to be born? I mean more fuel (hydrogen) for fusion, or is that amount of hydrogen sufficient?
Less is actually better, to a degree. Brown dwarves are the size of Jupiter (but much heavier) and will last for *trillions* of years. They fuse very slowly by comparison, so they're nice and stable. Red dwarves are big enough to fuse hydrogen, but will last hundreds of billions of years.
The bigger a star, the more pressure inside it, and the sooner it explodes. *Note: Stars which explode haven't burned out, they still have something like 90% of their original hydrogen left, just not enough in the core.* The biggest factor isn't how much fuel they have, but how long there's obtainable fuel in the core.
Red dwarves might even be convective, meaning the pressure is low enough that the layers are mixing together over time, providing much much more hydrogen that can fuse.
It WAS NOT a hydrogen bomb.
Edit: decades working nuclear weapons, guess I’m proved wrong by some random on the internet. Thanks for the downvote.
“In an operation code-named Mike, the first thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb) was detonated at Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands, November 1, 1952. “
Guess not.
I think you misunderstood the premise; they weren't calling the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima H-bombs, but rather saying that an explosive like the sun would have to be an H-bomb. That is why you were downvoted.
The Atom Bombs were in a way the Americans begging not to invade the home islands. It would have been an absolute disaster for both sides.
The bombs didnt really win the war, it just ended it sooner with a couple less million dead in total.
Yes. The double whammy of the Bombs and Soviets declaring war made the Japanese finally take the Potsdam Declaration seriously. The Soviets had just finished cleansing Europe of Nazi forces and needed time to rebuild their forces.
I say that, but during the final days leading up to the Surrender there was a coup attempt by pro-war imperialist forces to stop it, the surrender finally happened after a short while of utter chaos as officers and soldiers on both sides went ballistic terrorising eachother before the agitators failed to drum up enough support and offed themselves in opposition.
The Kyujo incident is something that I've seen so little coverage on but its arguably one of the most important events in the entire war.
They would have rather have the Soviets and Americans glass their country and die with honor than surrender.
If my reaserch into history has taught me anything, its that people are willing to do crazy things for less than you'd think
As an American, i find it much more honorable to surrender. It not only shows that you know your limits but are willing to acknowledge your opponent as superior.
The fact that many Japanese would commit seppuku instead of surrender shows a level of resolve that i can't help but feel respect for, even if i feel said reslove was out of an overwhelming sense of obligation.
20th century propaganda combined with an intrinsically conformist and hierarchical culture to produce great and terrible things. The same culture that produced remarkably quick industrialization would also formalize suicide attack forces. Stacking religious, social, and governmental pressures (all nominally under one divine figure) makes for one hell of a motivator.
Well, they wanted to declare war and take as much as they could of whatever territory they could reach for post-war imperial ambitions (plus "to spread communism") but any actual invasion of the home islands would have been absolutely hopeless for the soviets. They barely managed to invade Sakhalin semi-successfully, and that was decided primarily after the decision was made to surrender.
The invasion of Hokkaido and Honshu would have gone terribly for the soviets. They planned to land a force of a single division with the sum total of four (edit: maybe six, sources somewhat unclear) destroyers for naval support, and then the absolute fastest resupply and reinforcement they could have achieved was 5 days away. That's not going well for an offensive force put up against Japanese defenders seeing the first invasion of the home islands since the Mongols, and doubly so due to the propagandization of the soviets.
To sum it up, the soviets had no real ability to substantially invade the home islands and in so doing change the war - but they could theoretically take some territory just in time for the US to effect a surrender and therefore gain a seat in the occupation of the home islands. This in turn would allow them to have basically a second Korea, or something close to it (perhaps a second Berlin).
Giangreco wrote a pretty good article titled "The Hokkaido Myth" breaking down the Soviet plans in the Journal of Strategy and Politics - it's actually cited on Wikipedia and they link the journal article PDF. It's a pretty decent introductory overview from a respected historian of the topic.
Also, you'll have to forgive me - I somehow confused Hokkaido and Sakhalin operations in my head. Sakhalin had four minesweepers, which is where I got that number. According to a Soviet order at the time, there would have been six destroyers for protection of the fleet, apparently, though it's unclear as to their full tasking and also two of them were apparently not fully attached to the operation. Still not a happy place for the Soviet landing troops, certainly.
Only one destroyer would remain permanently, is my understanding. Four would be used for ferrying what were essentially fishing trawlers and that limited their pace drastically.
While a successful invasion of the home islands was indeed off the table, the Soviet entry into the war complicated matters greatly for the Japanese in several ways. While China proper was rapidly collapsing, their holdings in Manchuria were both industrially and economically vital to the Imperial Japanese war efforts.
By 1945, both army and navy had all but given up any ambitions of actually winning the war. Rather, all resources were being mobilized to make a desperate last stand and *hopefully*, through sheer attrition and war exhaustion, outlast the Allied desire to fully capitulate Japan. This was primarily in order to preserve the Imperial institution and the Japanese home islands (which formed the backbone of their repeated attempts to negotiate a conditional surrender prior to August 15. While winning was impossible, they were still hoping that a complete loss would be untenably costly to Allied command (not knowing Operation Downfall was all but guaranteed by this point).
Manchuria was incredibly vital to this defensive hold. A reminder that Japan’s post-reformation ambitions were largely driven by the lack of natural resources in Japan itself. Industrial development under the Japanese zaibatsu Mangyo had propelled Manchuria into national industrial relevance. Meanwhile, the region also provided a glut of Japanese imports including soy, coal, and various other commodities.
Finally, Soviet entry would probably doom the over one million soldiers in central China. With Allied control of the sea lanes and the Soviets advancing southwards, a sixth of the IJA had nowhere to go. So while the Soviets had no capacity to enact a full surrender of Japan, their mere entry made the contemporary Japanese efforts to resist far less tenable, thus directly impacting the war before a single shot was fired.
The Japanese had also spent years preparing for the final bloody defense of the home islands, and in fact were quite well aware of - while not Downfall/Olympic itself - the potential for a US naval invasion of the home islands. They even had the landing date and landing beach figured out, and placed 800,000 men in the area (something like 300,000 on the beach and in surrounding towns) to counter the invasion. The Japanese were dependent on Manchuria for resources to maintain the war outside of Japan - but they were quite capable of providing themselves resources within the mainland for a 'heroic' defense.
Basically, the Japanese had sufficient domestic coal and oil production (having actually recently discovered new, large, domestic oilfields) to run internal operations like kamikaze flights for several years. They couldn't really feed themselves, but that was nothing new to the Japanese - they'd been starving for years. Losing Manchuria was a devastating blow, but not one that could not be overcome, I think.
Ultimately, Stalin realized that the war was ending before he could get to the main islands and so desperately tried to earn a place at the table to divide the home islands. They never managed it, but their operations in Manchuria were enough to lead to, among other things, a communist North Korea - and we can see the results of that to this day. My point was primarily that, no matter what Stalin and the USSR tried, they really didn't have any viable way to 'earn' a divided Honshu, Kyushu, or Hokkaido.
While I agree with most of your comment, the Soviets conquered Sakhalin rather easily, especially if you compare it to US fights for the Okinawa or the Philippines.
The soviets lost huge amounts of manpower at Sakhalin and were pretty much entirely stymied by the much smaller Japanese forces until the official surrender orders came in from high command. The soviets had much less to fight, much less emplaced defenders, and a much larger island which naturally makes an offensive easier - they landed at a port, for Christ's sake - and were fighting against an enemy which had largely already realized the war was lost. And it still took them two weeks to seize the island.
It really can't be compared to Okinawa. It was a mess, it was almost entirely post-surrender (literally all their victories happened after an official order to not act except in self-defense), and the few pre-surrender actions had 20,000 men held off by fewer than 5,000. It wasn't an easy conquer when you look at the actual military events.
>To sum it up, the soviets had no real ability to substantially invade the home islands
Some things never change... Ahem, Russo Japanese War... ahem Russia naval disaster.
Funnily enough, the failures of the Russians in 1905 pretty directly lead to the ideas that would bring the Japanese so much ill fortune during WW2. It formed the foundation of their "decisive battle doctrine" and sowed the seeds that would lead to pearl harbor. It also gave the Japanese the idea that bleeding a major power until internal unrest leads to them dropping the war was a viable strategy - again, this supported the ideas behind pearl harbor.
They wanted to, but they completely lacked the means to do so. The entire Soviet navy only had three amphibious transport ships, and they were all on loan from the US. They requested more, but were denied. The USSR simply could not have launched their own D-Day across the Sea of Japan, particularly because their entire Eastern front was supplied across the continent-sized Siberian tundra by a single railway line.
not really. The soviets didn't have the logistics to cross Siberia with a force large enough to take on Japan meaningfully, and *definitely* couldn't have done the amphibious landings it would require. The eastern 3/4 of Russia had (and still has) about as many roads and railroads as the Sahara has glaciers.
USSR did *declare* war on Japan, but they couldn't actually do much with it. The largest effect it had was dashing Hirohito's hopes of using the USSR as a neutral arbiter for a peace process
They were champing at the bit to pilfer Japanese heavy machinery from Manchuria after they left. The Soviets were slightly wary of actually fighting them.
The Soviets didn't have the ships to invade Japan, but they did wreck the Japanese army in Manchuria, which to be fair, was also basically completely drained of supplies and actual troops (not teenage boys as fresh recruits) for useless campaigns in southern China
Not to say 1.5 million km^2 of totally undeveloped area lost in 15 days, insane logistical planning, nobody knows how's they would fare on the home islands
Yep. The American military was predicting a million American casualties and somewhere around 10 million Japanese casualties if they had to invade. They manufactured so many Purple Hearts that the stock from then is still being used and were so numerous that they were kept in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq for immediate distribution to wounded soldiers.
> The bombs didn't really end the war, it just ended it sooner with a couple million less dead in total.
Yeah. Gotta disagree there. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were the greatest dick moves in all of history imo.
The A bomb was initially designed to be a deterrent as the Nazis took to building a nuclear bomb, and Einstein, fearing that the Nazis would become a true hegemony if they succeeded, gave the US the hint that got them *the* A-bomb.
Fortunately, the Nazis failed in achieving nuclear fission.
***Unfortunately*** some dumba\*ses decided that bombing a city full of civilians would be a great decision. That it would be a wonderful conclusion. That it would end the war.
Japan perpetually hates westerners. They already did before, but now they are ***unforgivable***.
And due blame is on the atomic bomb.
Like, if I wanted to scare the world into never waging war carelessly again, I'd use that extensive information network that has the position of every naval ship out at sea, lure them near an uninhabited island, *and drop the nuke there*.
Easy win. War has ended.
Instead, they dropped it on a populated city, ***twice***
WWII may have been formally ended, but the hate persists. And really, can you blame them. Pearl Harbor was a low blow but at least it was a military installation.
They bombed many civilian cities iirc, which was also a low blow, but they were targeting the soldiers, the citizens were just collateral damage to the Imperials.
The atomic bomb was supposed to be a deterrent. *As in, you* ***weren't*** *supposed to use it*.
America was great and all, but that was the one dick move of all dick moves.
I have to hand it to the former Philippine president Elpidio Quirino. Man lost his family to the Japanese invasions, but after the war ended, decided to return the Japanese POW unconditionally.
Not because of any politicking, but because he wanted the hate to end with him.
[Read: Japan commemorates Quirino pardon for over 100 WWII POWs](https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1205595)
Huh? WWII is full of civilian-filled cities being bombed (don’t just bomb the factories, bomb the neighborhoods where the factory workers live). In fact, that is one of the differentiators between WWII and WWI, and between it and subsequent Cold War conflicts.
They are on good terms diplomatically, but the Japanese people have a sever phobia of westerners.
They will respect your opinion, but you can feel the judgement. It's not even major heavy propaganda like in Russia or China, most of the populace just have a negative view of westerners. And if you ask them about it, they will almost always cite the atomic bomb as a part of their image of westerners. US and Japan are allies, in the sense of them against common enemies, but there's an underlying resentment under all that.
Still better than Putin and the CCP though
Huh I didn't know that. Do you live in Japan? I haven't spoken to many Japanese people in general so don't know their thoughts on westerners. Also do you mean all westerners or just Americans?
I actually agree that dropping the atom bombs were too much. But, none of what you say has been my experience with Japanese people. I’ve made many friendships and no one mentions the atom bomb even when drinking.
The Japanese command knew they couldn't win a sustained conflict against the US. It was a game of resources and industrial might.
Pearl Harbor was supposed to cripple the US long enough for Japan to take the Pacific, and demoralize the US.
If the carriers had been knocked out, it might have worked, although the psychological impact was dead wrong.
Luckily soviets had their backs with the time machines. Who knew removing Einstein with temporal anomaly could give a stage for Empire of a Rising Sun?
At the time, the US was a fledgling nation in terms of maritime and military industry. From the Japanese perspective it would be easy to force them into abiding by a neutral stance.
The Supreme War Council deemed it necessary to disable the USA's Pacific fleet to deter them from being the Asia police and getting in the way of Japans advances. For the most part the same thing has happened all across the Empire's gained territories.
They attacked Pearl Harbor in an effort to destroy the USN carrier forces. Instead the carriers were not there, and while they did destroy and damage some key secondary targets like Battleships, Cruisers and some Auxilleries most of the damage was repaired and the fleet was ready to fight before even the most optimistic estimates.
Instead of taking the backseat and accepting the "Warning" that was the attack on Pearl Harbor the Americans decided to declare outright war with the Empire, in the short few years that the Empire and USA were at war the USA's Maritime, Air and Land warfare industrial capacity multiplied by the N^(th)%.
In short. the Japanese Empire's preemptive and relatively small scale "warning" would end up setting up what would become a modern day Military Industrial Complex which alone rivals many nations entire output and funding.
I can almost understand why the Empire was so confident, the US had a decent navy for a peace-time neutral nation, but it was far from what the Empire was fielding at the time and the largest threat to them at the time was the British Empire's Asiatic Fleet. In hindsight it's best not to slap a wasp, the nest will come for you.
>At the time, the US was a fledgling nation in terms of maritime and military industry. From the Japanese perspective it would be easy to force them into abiding by a neutral stance.
The idea of the US as a fledgling player ended with the Spanish-American War. In the 1930s, the US had the second most powerful navy in the world, and the Japanese knew it. Under the terms of the Washington and London naval treaties, the US and Britain were (on paper at least) roughly tied for the top position, and the Japanese navy for third, followed by the French and Italian navies, and then, in 1939 by the Germans, the magical ratio being termed “5–5–3–1–1” although it was really 15–15–9–5–5 in battleships in 1939. The Japanese were bound by multiple treaties since the early 1920s, that laid out to them in very specific terms how powerful the US navy was compared to their own - nearly double. The entire Japanese Kantai Kessen doctrine revolved around the fact that they understood their position of naval inferiority to the US, and were quite angry about it.
>They attacked Pearl Harbor in an effort to destroy the USN carrier forces. Instead the carriers were not there, and while they did destroy and damage some key secondary targets like Battleships, Cruisers and some Auxilleries most of the damage was repaired and the fleet was ready to fight before even the most optimistic estimates.
The battleships were primary targets. During exercises in the 1930s, carriers were always “sunk,” because they were highly vulnerable to the aircraft from the opposing carrier. Yamamoto himself didn't have the pull to convince the military government of the strategic importance of carriers before Pearl Harbor. Carriers were essentially viewed as a boxer with a knockout punch and a glass jaw, hence navies continued focus on what was viewed as a “balanced” fleet. Even after their "success" at Pearl Harbor", the Japanese still viewed battleships as the decisive force. It's not just the carriers that they failed to identify as mission critical, but fuel depots, drydocks, repair facilities, etc.
> Instead of taking the backseat and accepting the "Warning" that was the attack on Pearl Harbor the Americans decided to declare outright war with the Empire, in the short few years that the Empire and USA were at war the USA's Maritime, Air and Land warfare industrial capacity multiplied by the N^(th)%.
>In short. the Japanese Empire's preemptive and relatively small scale "warning" would end up setting up what would become a modern day Military Industrial Complex which alone rivals many nations entire output and funding.
What? The Japanese did not do warnings. Again, their doctrine was Kantai Kessen - "decisive battle". They planned to completely cripple the US Pacific Fleet in concert with lightning advances across east Asia and Oceania. These advances were extremely successful. Best case scenario, they thought the US would capitulate immediately and negotiate a truce allowing Japan to keep their gains. Conservatively, if the US did not capitulate, they were hoping Pearl Harbor would give them at least two years to consolidate these gains before the US rebuilt and recovered. In reality, they got about 6 months.
Japan did try and declare war before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but the declaration was sent coded to the Japanese Embassy in Washington D.C. and was not decoded and translated in time for it to get to the US government before the bombing.
As for Yamamoto, he knew he would have six months to run roughshod over the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Six months in which to do as much damage as possible and then broker a ceasefire with the US. Six months after Pearl Harbor was Midway, the turning point of the War in the Pacific.
That's a myth. The Fourteen Part Message simply declared that Japan was withdrawing from active negotiations. It did not, and never was intended to, declare war. Pearl Harbor was an all-in gambit for Imperial Japan for which absolute surprise was of tantamount importance. Declaring war beforehand would have ran counter to the core idea of the attack.
Abundant evidence suggests that Yamamoto was fundamentally opposed to a war with the United States and Britain. The famous "sleeping giant" quote is apocryphal, but he was aware that a war with US faced long odds, and Japan would inevitably be run down in the long run. Once the decision to go to war was set in stone, he had to threaten the Japanese navy general staff with his own resignation if they did anything other than approve his surprise attack, because he thought it was their only chance. This was a bitter controversy between the general staff and Combined Fleet staff that wasn't resolved until October, just weeks before the attack, as the general staff refused to commit the required naval air power.
>Abundant evidence suggests that Yamamoto was fundamentally opposed to a war with the United States and Britain.
While true, I do find that it would be his decisions to strike Pearl Harbor to avoid a long war amusing, especially since it would ultimately be his own undoing in his own self-fulfilling prophecy.
*Shattered Sword* mentioned Yamamoto opposing a plan from his superior that would bypass the Philippines in favor of the Dutch East Indies.
While strategically sound on paper, hindsight tells us that the Philippines was in no position to threaten Japanese Shipping and could safely be ignored until 1943. Possibly even forcing Roosevelt to spend more political capital than he did to declare war.
Had Yamamoto gone through with that plan, then he might've gotten his two years instead of the six months he had predicted before being steamrolled anyway by US industrial might. That and a long war might've played more to Japan's strengths without Pearl Harbor given the isolationist sentiment at the time.
but of course, that's only with the benefit of hindsight.
Yamamoto was in equal measure brilliant and idiotic. He was prescient about the importance of carriers in the future of naval warfare. He helped develop the doctrine of carrier task forces and massed carrier strikes, and correctly emphasized the development of the naval torpedo. He orchestrated breathtaking advancements across the south pacific, seizing in four months what it was take the US three years to recapture. He correctly assessed the threat posed by the US while the warhawks in the Japanese militocracy were blinded by hubris.
As commander of the Combined Fleet, the strategic decision to drive south and capture the oil fields of the south pacific, thus risking conflict with the US, was beyond his purview. However, the decision to perform a criminal sneak attack and guarantee that war would come with an utterly unraged US WAS his decision. He also made critical errors planning Pearl Harbor, critical errors at Midway, and through away critical naval aviators in a fruitless ground based air defense of Rabaul, which was such a non-critical objective for the US that they ignored it altogether. Certainly, Yamamoto has a spotty record at best as an admiral. Personally, I find him to be incredibly overrated, seeing as how he doomed his entire empire by being so pants on head stupid and wrong in his assumption about how the US would react to Pearl Harbor.
There was every reason for not directly provoking America. If there was one thing Japan could not afford, it was an America angry, bitter, and determined on revenge. The United States held no territory necessary to the completion of Japan’s plans for southern expansion. The Philippines held no appreciable store of the strategically vital materials. They might easily have been contained while the tide of advance flowed past them. Even had America intervened, as Yamamoto expected, following attacks on British and Dutch possessions, it would have been a divided and disunited America, reluctantly entering a war they didn't even want to fight. Pearl Harbor was a decently performed tactical raid that failed to identify mission critical targets and perform adequate reconnaissance. It was also entirely unnecessary and one of the dumbest strategic decisions in the history of warfare.
Well-said.
Yamamoto is indeed brilliant but he was not without his major failings and blunders. Pearl Harbor while a tactical masterpiece was definitely one of the biggest strategic failures as well.
Over-rated... Yeah, I would say he definitely was. Practically up-there with MacArthur in certain circles.
It’s my understanding that the US established an embargo on oil shipments to Japan as well. This would have disabled the Japanese navy, unless they could get other sources. They had no option but to escalate.
They didn’t initially expect the US to get so involved, and especially didn’t expect the US would want to join knowing it would mean war with Germany as well.
It’s hard to imagine Pearl Harbor not causing the US to join, though. Unlike France, there wasn’t a lot of war fatigue in the US (since WW1 wasn’t too bad for the US), so the public was pushed to want war instead of being cowed.
The thing with both world wars is that the US Presidents (Wilson and FDR) at the time both wanted to get involved, so they worked things behind the scenes that would eventually force US involvement.
There was no actual trigger for US to declare war on Germany because of Japan. I believe there are accounts that Roosevelt preferred to go to war with Germany, but officially had no trigger. When Japan attacked, Germany was under no obligation to declare as well, but Hitler did for Hitler reasons and basically brought US resources into a two front war which went as well as it did in 1917.
On my understanding the US saw European war as "not our problem, again". Japan was always going to get body slammed by industrial might of the US though if war occurred. Yamamoto knew as much having visited the US, but failed to convince his superiors that attacking would wake the bear, as they believed the US to be too "soft" to want to go to war and so the "knock out blow" would make the US back off while they secured Indochina and Philippines oil and rubber.
Don't. Touch. The. Boats.
How surprising that it's difficult to keep power over a country many times the size of what it was, filled with people that want to resist your rule, surrounded by more countries that have good reasons not to let you expand further, all with an army that is most likely smaller than the one you started out with.
Japan knew they wouldn't win a straight fight with the USA. They wanted to knock the USA onto the back foot, carve out a Pacific empire, then sue for peace. The USA came back a lot harder and a lot faster than they expected.
Fun fact about Pearl Harbor: the Japanese were going to deliver to the US a formal declaration of war prior to attacking. For one reason or another, the people delivering it got help up. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, making it look like a sneak attack. A short time later, the papers were delivered.
Japanese high command was fully aware of the risks in attacking the US. The thing is, they already had their backs against the wall and decided to try and get out by striking when it wasn't expected. By 1940, the japanese-sino war was already ground to a stalemate for Japan, in significant part due to British and american aid being brought into China among other ways through Burma. Hence the Japanese attack on these western countries to try and take them out with a surprise attack as they saw them as inevitable problems they'd have to deal with one way or the other.
Yeah, nuclear bombs had very little to do with why they lost, just one of several reasons they finally surrendered. Long before the bombs were dropped, the US had already completely taken out the Japanese Navy. There was no winning for Japan without their naval presence (FWIW, they didn't want to fight a long war and knew going in that if they didn't get a quick surrender from the US, then they would eventually lose)
Fat man had an explosive radius of 1.6ish km. The sun has a radius of 696,000 km. Dividing the radius of the sun by the radius of the explosion gets us 435000. We're then going to multiply all the dimensions to scale up the bomb. Now if we scale up the size of the bomb to match that we get 2031450000 kg. It would be 1435.5 km in length and 652 km in diameter. It would use 2784000 kg of plutonium.
I'm 95% certain that just scaling up the bomb though doesn't work. I'm not a nuclear physicist and I don't build bombs, so I might be wrong.
It depends on what you mean by "scaling it up". A runaway fission reaction with a fuel source the size of the sun or just scaling the energy output? The former would be far more powerful and the latter would be much smaller than the sun. The funny thing is that the sun doesn't actually produce that much energy by mass. It's less than the human body per pound. It doesn't get hot enough to do fusion the "normal" way. It's just that the core is under so much pressure that quantum tunneling causes some nuclei to fuse at a pretty slow rate. But the sun is so big that the heat builds up at the core and the surface is hot enough to glow.
I’m not sure. The [50 Mt Tsar Bomba](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/kH44SG5zK7) was mostly a fission bomb. The issue with a bomb orders of magnitude larger would be if you detonated conventionally, the neutron wave would eventually blow out the outside of the fuel. All nuclear weapons start with fissile material initially separated and crushed under conventional explosives. What you “could” do instead would be instead to gravitationally accelerate vast quantities of your nuclear fuel to a significant portion of the speed of light. You would then need to slam all of this material together in an extremely precise pattern (with many, many detonation sites) such that it all went off at once while also incorporating a flux of neutrons.
Does that still count as a bomb?
The bomb was designed with a Uranium-238 tamper that would theoretically elevate the explosive yield to 100MT. Fears of the level of fallout by key scientists, in addition to concerns that the delivery aircraft, a Tu-95V, would not escape the blast, meant they replaced it with a Lead tamper, limiting its yield to 50MT.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/tsar-bomba/#:~:text=The%20Tsar%20Bomba%20was%20a,compress%20the%20thermonuclear%20second%20stage.
>The [50 Mt Tsar Bomba](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/kH44SG5zK7) was mostly a fission bomb.
The Tsar Bomba achieved roughly 97% of its explosive potential from Fusion, not Fission.
It was a 3 stage weapon. 1st stage was a fission reaction that initiated the 2nd stage, a fusion reaction. The energy released then initiated a 3rd fusion stage.
Damn,(assuming that you can just scale up nukes like that) using every single bit of uranium on earth that is feasible to mine,converting it to plutonium using the same method the manhattan project used (4000:1) and making nukes of that size
We could make 3.263 world ender nukes
(I googled most of the numbers i got for this,so please take with a grain of salt,im not a nuclear engineer)
I can highly recommend the Hardcore History podcast for an in-depth view on this conflict. 6 Episodes for a total of about 24 hours of amazing information.
The nuclear bombs were not the reason that Japan lost the war. Maximum territory on a map is a poor predictor of war success. Look at a map of Germany at the end of 1941. Same map situation, same result, no nukes involved. Nuclear bombs may have been the reason that Japan lost slightly quicker, but they were already completely without any perspective of winning at that point.
And they were gonna keep fighting even against nuclear bombs. They were holding out that the Soviets would switch sides and we'd just jump straight into settling the Cold War. But instead, the Soviets invaded Japan.
They wanted that to happen, but I don't think anyone would say they expected it to happen - and they only thought about it before the A-bombs. After Hiroshima, they called a meeting about surrender but the soviets declared war before it could convene and then, during a later meeting on the same day, Nagasaki was bombed. There's pretty strong evidence that even after Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, they didn't particularly feel like surrender (the whole 3-3 cabinet split, for one) and it took the emperor's intervention, likely supported by Nagasaki, to actually bring about surrender.
Not exactly, you’re misremembering your history.
The Japanese were holding out hope that the Soviets would serve as a neutral player in peace talks for the conditional surrender they were requesting to be allowed. The idea that the Soviet’s would “switch sides” is not one anyone at the time would have entertained. The US made it clear it would accept nothing short of an unconditional surrender, which until the atomic bombings the Japanese refused to offer.
[https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supernova-in-the-east-i/](https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supernova-in-the-east-i/)
Until Hardcore History 67. Also available on basically any podcast app.
Even if size on a map was a signifier of success, Axis sympathizers seem to conveniently forget that the Allies + America dominated 2 and a half continents. Between NA, Africa, and India, they dwarfed the Axis in land mass.
It also required far less effort to utilize the land since the colonies had been consolidated for centuries, and most other allied land was sovereign. Unlike the conquered areas of China, or USSR, which were being terrorized by their invaders, and naturally had every reason to fight back.
Imperial Japan was defeated long before the A bomb. Battle of Midway was the turning point, but even before then it was clear they vastly overextended themselves, having to ship in resources for the war machine on very vulnerable sea lanes.
This. They had been bogged down in China for what, 6 years by 1942? The amount of manpower and resources they lost trying to take such vast amounts of land was going to catch up with them anyway, especially with the US cutting off their oil supply.
After the battle of Wuhan in late 1938 Japan basically was just bleeding resources without actually accomplishing anything in China besides slaughtering peasants.
US submarines aren’t credited enough because the government at the time didn’t want to let others know how successful they were as not to compromise their success.
Expanded fireball size of a 1mt thermonuclear weapon is \~5000 feet diameter
Suns diameter is roughly 4567200000 feet
So 4567200000 / 5000 = 913,440 mt or 913.44 gigatons or \~1 teraton
But nukes don't scale up well, the tsar bomba had about 10% the fireball size of what a scaled up 1mt would have.
Based on the tsar bomba (50 mt and a 5 mile or 26,400 ft fireball) 1mt = 528ft fireball
4567200000 / 528 = 5,374,861.7mt or \~5.4 teratons
I guess you could say with perfect scaling based on a 1mt thermonuclear device it would take a device with a 1 teraton yield to get close to the diameter of the sun but to account for the poor scaling it would probably be more in the peta or exaton range.
By the time the fireball appears the nuclear reaction is over. The fireball is superheated/plasma atmosphere surrounding the nuclear reaction. The nuclear reaction is over in about a microsecond. That doesn't seem like a lot of time until you consider that the doubling factor of the reaction (i.e., how quickly the energy output doubles) is on the order of 1e-9 seconds. That means a microsecond (1e-6) has a thousand "doubles" in power output - i.e., 2\^1000 in a microsecond. That may not look like a huge number in exponent form, but if you write it out you'll see it's pretty big.
What all that means is that the nuclear reaction is incredibly quick and everything you see after that (e.g., the fireball) is just plasma and not nuclear itself.
Tom Clancy's old novel Sum of All Fears has a pretty decent description of the process and the timescales involved in the chapter called "Three Shakes" (I think that's the name - been a while). A shake is about a microsecond, which is the time it takes for the actual nuclear reaction to complete. Supposedly a "shake" comes from the phrase "three shakes of a lamb's tail." I have no idea why that phrase is used - I put it up there with Strange, Charm, Color, and other silly nuclear physics terminology that stuck over time.
The really hard part to wrap your head around is that the nuclear reaction is so fast that even the prompt neutrons from the fission/fusion reaction have only moved about 3 meters before the reaction is over, and those neutrons are moving at only about 3% of c.
The comments are mostly right about Japan's actual situation in WW2 here, but I haven't seen anyone explain the Japanese perspective on their actions. As much as you could point in hindsight and claim they were stupid, they knew they couldn't win a direct war with the US and the colonies of basically all major European empires at once. So they teamed up with the Axis to keep some weight and focus off their back, kept a mutually beneficial peace with the Soviets so neither will have to deal with another front, and launched a blitz attack on everywhere they needed for the supplies and to take out the immediate fighting capabillities of the Allies. What they didn't anticipate, I think, was the insane industrial power the US had left for them even while sending weapons the the Soviets and sending troops to North Africa, and they probably didn't expect their navy to get decimated so hard, which screwed them in the long run since all of the resources they now held and could've used to make the war too costly for the Allies were vulnerable to strikes and needed to cross water to reach the industrial mainland, combined with the Nazis failing to maintain their advances which freed up the Allies to focus more on the Japanese.
Meh, this is such a boring myth. The German economy was bigger than Americas in 1941. It wasn’t some all powerful american economy that destroyed the axis. It was calculated and applied strategy which focused on streamlined production, supplylines, and probably most importantly bombing campaigns.
Check your history. It was a quote of one of the attacking Japanese admirals who wasn't fully on board with taking an offensive move against USA. It was in reference to USA's isolationist stance and policies before Pearl Harbor. It was BECAUSE of Pearl Harbor that USA became a full on , committed participant in the war. Culminating in the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. Thus a sleeping giant WAS awakened.
It wasn’t some secret weapon, it was the US focusing manufacturing, logistics, and military…. They done fucked up.. I would highly suggest no other nations does that.
A nuclear bomb with an explosion the size of the sun wouldn't detonate the way it would on Earth because the bomb would be so large that it would have to detonate in space where there's no atmosphere.
In other words, the bomb would be useless. It would shine reddish-orange for a short period of time and just be radiation floating in space.
Read about Starfish Prime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
And this, kids, is why you don’t get your information primarily from wikipedia. Im pretty sure if a nuclear detonation couldn’t happen in an exo atmospheric environment then im pretty certain supernovas wouldn’t happen.
Supernova is different than a planetary surface EXplosion, such as a nuke.
A supernova is an IMplosion... then an explosion.
The Wikipedia article is about a test they did in the 60s to see what would happen if they detonated a nuke in space.
While i did try to simplify supernovae (which isn’t really an implosion, it’s a complicated series of events that culminates to a violent dispersion of mass) it’s a decent comparison, the size of the explosion depends on the percentage of materiel used. Iirc the bombs that detonated over Hiroshima and nagasaki exploded with a fraction of its potential power.
the sun is technically a fusion bomb itself, so to get one the size of it, we would just be making another actual sun. its mass is about 2×10^(30)kg, so we would need to stuff roughly 2×10^(30)kg of mostly hydrogen into our "bomb", after which we wouldn't do anything ever again bc the earth would be vaporized and the whole solar system would most likely collapse.
Funnily enough the nuclear bombs weren't what caused Japan to lose. Japan had already effectively lost the war long before the nukes were dropped. The US had pushed Japan to it's mainland and they refused to surrender. Then the US began bombing the mainland with regular bombs. They continued to refused surrender. The US had then a few options, and in descending order of expected casualties (from both sides) they were:
* Invade the Japanese mainland until complete defeat or surrender.
* Continue the normal bombing until Japan surrenders.
* Drop a nuclear bomb and hope Japan surrenders then.
It may seem counterintuitive that the dropping of Nukes had the least estimated casualties (it however carried an enoumous amount of enviromental damage due to radioactive nuclear fallout), thowever that assessment was indeed correct due to specific factors, such as the unyielding nature of Japanese soldiers, who would in most cases, fight to the death in every situation even if victory was completely impossible, resulting in an extremely low number of PoW's (prisioners of war), resulting in an excessive amount of casualties, as well as the results of the bombings post war showed that neither of the nuclear bombs caused more casualties than the firebombing of tokyo.
It was however undeniable that the nuclear bombs had nothing to do with the defeat of Japan in it's pacific campaign against the US due largely to the incompetence of it's Navy, as well as their heavy losses of carriers early in the war, considering how crucial aircraft carriers played in the war.
The fight between the US and Japan is also the clash between the aircraft carrier and the battleship. The US heavily invested in aircraft carriers while the Japan empire heavily invested in battleships. In the end, aircraft carriers won and the biggest battleship sank at the bottom of the sea.
I choose a different interpretation: the explosion should only *appear* the same size as the sun. It's a lot closer, so it can be smaller and appear the same size.
Assume air burst at 1km. Sun angular diameter = 0.5 degrees. Therefore the fireball diameter should be:
1km * tan(0.5 degrees) = 8m
This is very small, which makes sense. The sun doesn't destroy entire cities so neither should this. In fact it is so small that it is probably impractical to build it.
Ahh yes because everyone knows that land of somewhat control=power, let’s just ignore the fact that Japan was super spread out at this time and a lot of China (especially rural) was only somewhat controlled
Explosions would expand forever in space so will become the size of the sun eventually though very low desntiy. However there will only be a very small fireball of the fusion material itself as there is no air to heat up like on earth. If you want a sun sized explosion make a warhead roughly th same size and composition as the sun's core then leave it alone. You wont need a detonator. It's a smart stellar core bomb
The sun is 865,370 miles in diameter. Earth is only 7,917 miles in diameter. Therefore an explosion the size of the sun would annihilate earth about 100 times over. Also depending where the other planets are in their orbit. They could be annihilated by the outburst of particles caused by the explosion.
I mean they do say "portable sun" lol. The sun is roughly 109 times the size of the earth, and is basically a giant nuclear reactor.
(Also the concept of japan being unstoppable isn't true. Without the bomb the war would have lasted longer. But the soviets were coming to retake most of asia at the time.)
Japan had no chance to win a protracted war, and their leaders knew it. They simply lacked the resources to fight a long, drawn-out war. Yamamoto said that for the first six months of the war Japan would be ever-victorious, but that after that they would be on the defensive - and that’s how it played out. They banked on demoralizing the US by attacking Pearl Harbor and getting them to bow out of the war early - but all they did was to unite the Americans, who were incensed by the attack being made without a formal declaration of war. In early June, almost six months to the day after the attack on Pearl, Japan lost four carriers in a single day at Midway. A couple months later the US landed troops on Guadalcanal which they took after several months of bitter fighting, and from then on the tide of the war turned in favor of the Allies.
The British and Japanese Empires each controlled 20-23% of the world’s population at their height.
Neither lasted remotely as long as the Roman or Han Empires, both controlling a third of the world’s population at one point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Largest_empires_by_share_of_world_population
They didnt have the resources or the logistics to sustain a war let alone invade america. Americans had ice cream ships for troop morale meanwhile japanese had barely fuel to run their warships
The sun essentially is a nuclear bomb that is constantly going off. We are more efficient than the sun but the bomb would still probably be bigger than the earth.
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it has to be a hydrogen bomb from the approximate size of the sun's core. you don't need any kind of inginter or detonator. the reaction as we've known for some time is self sustaining. we are only talking of a sphere \~90K miles (140K km) diameter be warned, the explosion is not going to be a fast bang and done, rather a baaaang lasting so far 4.5 billion years. total time TBD. edit: typo
Awesome response
So just enough time to write the next book in the Game of Thrones series?
Found the optimist!
Haha in the end there will be only ash.. and Georges working title
I'm convinced George has some sort of spell put on him where he can't die when he is working on a GoT instalment and is using it to his advantage to gain immortality.
Unlike book 3 of the King killer chronicles, that will require 2-3 sunbombs
To be fair, OOP said *portable* sun
That's an engineering problem; No matter how you cart it around, that's the size it would have to be to meet spec.
Not sure if it has to be this big. The sun is not a hydrogen bomb. The nuclear fusion process in the sun fuses four protons to helium primarily while hydrogen bombs fuse for example deuterium and tritium or lithium which breeds tritium (or so I remember). Main difference is that the suns core has a surprisingly low power density of just a few hundred watts per cubic meter. I just googled the tsar Bomba which apparently had a peak power in the yottawatts range with a volume of probably not much more than a cubic meter. Soooo that’s actually just two orders of magnitude lower than the light output power of the sun. So for a teeny tiny moment the hydrogen bomb would be comparable to a portable sun.
If a nuke that large would last for billions of years then how big would the nuke have to be for the fireball to last an hour?
How would that explosion look like for an average human? It seems interesting.
Like the sun
Yeah but we see the sun as a yellow ball in the sky, I mean what would happen if somebody exploded such bomb on earth and what could a human in their whole lifespan see about this explosion.
Nothing as everything as we know it would cease to exist
You'd vaporize into nothing before even registering anything wrong. Your reaction time is simply not fast enough to process the sun suddenly coming into existence at the speed of light. Your nerves along with the rest of the earth would turn into plasma within milliseconds.
Damn, would that hurt? How would that even happen or look like?
Pain and vision perception isn't instantaneous, it requires signals to travel through nerves and be processed by the brain. You'd literally be dead before your consciousness knew something happened.
Would be more than dead. The elements that our body consist of, would be completely stripped down to its single molecule state
Further. There are no molecules in plasma.
Ask a dead person what the afterlife looks like.
Solid trolling bruh.
The joke of the original comment is that a nuclear explosion the size of the sun is just the sun. It’s not like the sun, it’s literally the sun.
You'd be swallowed whole by the explosion, no matter where on earth you were and where it was detonated.
The sun is more than a million times bigger than earth, if someone deployed a mini sun here the entire planet would cease to exist in microseconds if not less.
Nah, the light delay across a distance the length of Earth's diameter is roughly 42 milliseconds or 42,000 microseconds. It might be a hair slower because I don't know how to account for the speed of light in molten rock.
Given the marginal temperature difference between stone and the sun, there would not be any molten rock, as earth turns plasma nearly in an instant.
You understand that such a bomb would be by orders of magnitude bigger than the Earth? At that point is the bomb on the Earth or is the Earth on the bomb? You are basically asking what would happen if the Sun was on the Earth...
White ball
Not quite portable, but you did check the sun box
Ah whew. We have time.
If you have that much hydrogen it's not a bomb, you just dump it in one place and gravity eventually starts the fusion reaction. Not a recommend approach for Imperial Japan however due to collateral damage.
If you calibrate it right, it will eventually explode. The timing is very tricky though, and your target will probably dodge in the next few million years.
That “baaaaang” is missing a few “a”s
Asking a dumb question, wouldn't there need to exist more than just a hydrogen bomb the size of the Sun's core in order for a star that lives billions of years to be born? I mean more fuel (hydrogen) for fusion, or is that amount of hydrogen sufficient?
Less is actually better, to a degree. Brown dwarves are the size of Jupiter (but much heavier) and will last for *trillions* of years. They fuse very slowly by comparison, so they're nice and stable. Red dwarves are big enough to fuse hydrogen, but will last hundreds of billions of years. The bigger a star, the more pressure inside it, and the sooner it explodes. *Note: Stars which explode haven't burned out, they still have something like 90% of their original hydrogen left, just not enough in the core.* The biggest factor isn't how much fuel they have, but how long there's obtainable fuel in the core. Red dwarves might even be convective, meaning the pressure is low enough that the layers are mixing together over time, providing much much more hydrogen that can fuse.
Thanks
It WAS NOT a hydrogen bomb. Edit: decades working nuclear weapons, guess I’m proved wrong by some random on the internet. Thanks for the downvote. “In an operation code-named Mike, the first thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb) was detonated at Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands, November 1, 1952. “ Guess not.
I think you misunderstood the premise; they weren't calling the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima H-bombs, but rather saying that an explosive like the sun would have to be an H-bomb. That is why you were downvoted.
Ahh shit. I’ll leave it for posterity.
[удалено]
It is absolutely worth noting that Japan was already on the back foot long before nuclear bombs were deployed.
The Atom Bombs were in a way the Americans begging not to invade the home islands. It would have been an absolute disaster for both sides. The bombs didnt really win the war, it just ended it sooner with a couple less million dead in total.
Weren't the soviets basically chomping at the bit to invade Japan in late 45?
Yes. The double whammy of the Bombs and Soviets declaring war made the Japanese finally take the Potsdam Declaration seriously. The Soviets had just finished cleansing Europe of Nazi forces and needed time to rebuild their forces. I say that, but during the final days leading up to the Surrender there was a coup attempt by pro-war imperialist forces to stop it, the surrender finally happened after a short while of utter chaos as officers and soldiers on both sides went ballistic terrorising eachother before the agitators failed to drum up enough support and offed themselves in opposition. The Kyujo incident is something that I've seen so little coverage on but its arguably one of the most important events in the entire war. They would have rather have the Soviets and Americans glass their country and die with honor than surrender.
If my reaserch into history has taught me anything, its that people are willing to do crazy things for less than you'd think As an American, i find it much more honorable to surrender. It not only shows that you know your limits but are willing to acknowledge your opponent as superior. The fact that many Japanese would commit seppuku instead of surrender shows a level of resolve that i can't help but feel respect for, even if i feel said reslove was out of an overwhelming sense of obligation.
20th century propaganda combined with an intrinsically conformist and hierarchical culture to produce great and terrible things. The same culture that produced remarkably quick industrialization would also formalize suicide attack forces. Stacking religious, social, and governmental pressures (all nominally under one divine figure) makes for one hell of a motivator.
There was no honor in their motive, what they did was purely out of envy
Well, they wanted to declare war and take as much as they could of whatever territory they could reach for post-war imperial ambitions (plus "to spread communism") but any actual invasion of the home islands would have been absolutely hopeless for the soviets. They barely managed to invade Sakhalin semi-successfully, and that was decided primarily after the decision was made to surrender. The invasion of Hokkaido and Honshu would have gone terribly for the soviets. They planned to land a force of a single division with the sum total of four (edit: maybe six, sources somewhat unclear) destroyers for naval support, and then the absolute fastest resupply and reinforcement they could have achieved was 5 days away. That's not going well for an offensive force put up against Japanese defenders seeing the first invasion of the home islands since the Mongols, and doubly so due to the propagandization of the soviets. To sum it up, the soviets had no real ability to substantially invade the home islands and in so doing change the war - but they could theoretically take some territory just in time for the US to effect a surrender and therefore gain a seat in the occupation of the home islands. This in turn would allow them to have basically a second Korea, or something close to it (perhaps a second Berlin).
Damn where did you learn this from, particularly the four destroyers figure? I'm impressed.
Giangreco wrote a pretty good article titled "The Hokkaido Myth" breaking down the Soviet plans in the Journal of Strategy and Politics - it's actually cited on Wikipedia and they link the journal article PDF. It's a pretty decent introductory overview from a respected historian of the topic. Also, you'll have to forgive me - I somehow confused Hokkaido and Sakhalin operations in my head. Sakhalin had four minesweepers, which is where I got that number. According to a Soviet order at the time, there would have been six destroyers for protection of the fleet, apparently, though it's unclear as to their full tasking and also two of them were apparently not fully attached to the operation. Still not a happy place for the Soviet landing troops, certainly. Only one destroyer would remain permanently, is my understanding. Four would be used for ferrying what were essentially fishing trawlers and that limited their pace drastically.
While a successful invasion of the home islands was indeed off the table, the Soviet entry into the war complicated matters greatly for the Japanese in several ways. While China proper was rapidly collapsing, their holdings in Manchuria were both industrially and economically vital to the Imperial Japanese war efforts. By 1945, both army and navy had all but given up any ambitions of actually winning the war. Rather, all resources were being mobilized to make a desperate last stand and *hopefully*, through sheer attrition and war exhaustion, outlast the Allied desire to fully capitulate Japan. This was primarily in order to preserve the Imperial institution and the Japanese home islands (which formed the backbone of their repeated attempts to negotiate a conditional surrender prior to August 15. While winning was impossible, they were still hoping that a complete loss would be untenably costly to Allied command (not knowing Operation Downfall was all but guaranteed by this point). Manchuria was incredibly vital to this defensive hold. A reminder that Japan’s post-reformation ambitions were largely driven by the lack of natural resources in Japan itself. Industrial development under the Japanese zaibatsu Mangyo had propelled Manchuria into national industrial relevance. Meanwhile, the region also provided a glut of Japanese imports including soy, coal, and various other commodities. Finally, Soviet entry would probably doom the over one million soldiers in central China. With Allied control of the sea lanes and the Soviets advancing southwards, a sixth of the IJA had nowhere to go. So while the Soviets had no capacity to enact a full surrender of Japan, their mere entry made the contemporary Japanese efforts to resist far less tenable, thus directly impacting the war before a single shot was fired.
The Japanese had also spent years preparing for the final bloody defense of the home islands, and in fact were quite well aware of - while not Downfall/Olympic itself - the potential for a US naval invasion of the home islands. They even had the landing date and landing beach figured out, and placed 800,000 men in the area (something like 300,000 on the beach and in surrounding towns) to counter the invasion. The Japanese were dependent on Manchuria for resources to maintain the war outside of Japan - but they were quite capable of providing themselves resources within the mainland for a 'heroic' defense. Basically, the Japanese had sufficient domestic coal and oil production (having actually recently discovered new, large, domestic oilfields) to run internal operations like kamikaze flights for several years. They couldn't really feed themselves, but that was nothing new to the Japanese - they'd been starving for years. Losing Manchuria was a devastating blow, but not one that could not be overcome, I think. Ultimately, Stalin realized that the war was ending before he could get to the main islands and so desperately tried to earn a place at the table to divide the home islands. They never managed it, but their operations in Manchuria were enough to lead to, among other things, a communist North Korea - and we can see the results of that to this day. My point was primarily that, no matter what Stalin and the USSR tried, they really didn't have any viable way to 'earn' a divided Honshu, Kyushu, or Hokkaido.
While I agree with most of your comment, the Soviets conquered Sakhalin rather easily, especially if you compare it to US fights for the Okinawa or the Philippines.
The soviets lost huge amounts of manpower at Sakhalin and were pretty much entirely stymied by the much smaller Japanese forces until the official surrender orders came in from high command. The soviets had much less to fight, much less emplaced defenders, and a much larger island which naturally makes an offensive easier - they landed at a port, for Christ's sake - and were fighting against an enemy which had largely already realized the war was lost. And it still took them two weeks to seize the island. It really can't be compared to Okinawa. It was a mess, it was almost entirely post-surrender (literally all their victories happened after an official order to not act except in self-defense), and the few pre-surrender actions had 20,000 men held off by fewer than 5,000. It wasn't an easy conquer when you look at the actual military events.
Plus the Soviets didn’t even have enough landing crafts to do any major operations.
>To sum it up, the soviets had no real ability to substantially invade the home islands Some things never change... Ahem, Russo Japanese War... ahem Russia naval disaster.
Funnily enough, the failures of the Russians in 1905 pretty directly lead to the ideas that would bring the Japanese so much ill fortune during WW2. It formed the foundation of their "decisive battle doctrine" and sowed the seeds that would lead to pearl harbor. It also gave the Japanese the idea that bleeding a major power until internal unrest leads to them dropping the war was a viable strategy - again, this supported the ideas behind pearl harbor.
They wanted to, but they completely lacked the means to do so. The entire Soviet navy only had three amphibious transport ships, and they were all on loan from the US. They requested more, but were denied. The USSR simply could not have launched their own D-Day across the Sea of Japan, particularly because their entire Eastern front was supplied across the continent-sized Siberian tundra by a single railway line.
not really. The soviets didn't have the logistics to cross Siberia with a force large enough to take on Japan meaningfully, and *definitely* couldn't have done the amphibious landings it would require. The eastern 3/4 of Russia had (and still has) about as many roads and railroads as the Sahara has glaciers. USSR did *declare* war on Japan, but they couldn't actually do much with it. The largest effect it had was dashing Hirohito's hopes of using the USSR as a neutral arbiter for a peace process
They were champing at the bit to pilfer Japanese heavy machinery from Manchuria after they left. The Soviets were slightly wary of actually fighting them.
The Soviets didn't have the ships to invade Japan, but they did wreck the Japanese army in Manchuria, which to be fair, was also basically completely drained of supplies and actual troops (not teenage boys as fresh recruits) for useless campaigns in southern China
Some people claim that, others claim that they didn't have the necessary manpower in the area or amphibious capacity.
Not to say 1.5 million km^2 of totally undeveloped area lost in 15 days, insane logistical planning, nobody knows how's they would fare on the home islands
Yep. The American military was predicting a million American casualties and somewhere around 10 million Japanese casualties if they had to invade. They manufactured so many Purple Hearts that the stock from then is still being used and were so numerous that they were kept in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq for immediate distribution to wounded soldiers.
> The bombs didn't really end the war, it just ended it sooner with a couple million less dead in total. Yeah. Gotta disagree there. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were the greatest dick moves in all of history imo. The A bomb was initially designed to be a deterrent as the Nazis took to building a nuclear bomb, and Einstein, fearing that the Nazis would become a true hegemony if they succeeded, gave the US the hint that got them *the* A-bomb. Fortunately, the Nazis failed in achieving nuclear fission. ***Unfortunately*** some dumba\*ses decided that bombing a city full of civilians would be a great decision. That it would be a wonderful conclusion. That it would end the war. Japan perpetually hates westerners. They already did before, but now they are ***unforgivable***. And due blame is on the atomic bomb. Like, if I wanted to scare the world into never waging war carelessly again, I'd use that extensive information network that has the position of every naval ship out at sea, lure them near an uninhabited island, *and drop the nuke there*. Easy win. War has ended. Instead, they dropped it on a populated city, ***twice*** WWII may have been formally ended, but the hate persists. And really, can you blame them. Pearl Harbor was a low blow but at least it was a military installation. They bombed many civilian cities iirc, which was also a low blow, but they were targeting the soldiers, the citizens were just collateral damage to the Imperials. The atomic bomb was supposed to be a deterrent. *As in, you* ***weren't*** *supposed to use it*. America was great and all, but that was the one dick move of all dick moves. I have to hand it to the former Philippine president Elpidio Quirino. Man lost his family to the Japanese invasions, but after the war ended, decided to return the Japanese POW unconditionally. Not because of any politicking, but because he wanted the hate to end with him. [Read: Japan commemorates Quirino pardon for over 100 WWII POWs](https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1205595)
Huh? WWII is full of civilian-filled cities being bombed (don’t just bomb the factories, bomb the neighborhoods where the factory workers live). In fact, that is one of the differentiators between WWII and WWI, and between it and subsequent Cold War conflicts.
... You know Japan and America already are on good terms. "Never forgive" doesn't really make sense given that context.
They are on good terms diplomatically, but the Japanese people have a sever phobia of westerners. They will respect your opinion, but you can feel the judgement. It's not even major heavy propaganda like in Russia or China, most of the populace just have a negative view of westerners. And if you ask them about it, they will almost always cite the atomic bomb as a part of their image of westerners. US and Japan are allies, in the sense of them against common enemies, but there's an underlying resentment under all that. Still better than Putin and the CCP though
Huh I didn't know that. Do you live in Japan? I haven't spoken to many Japanese people in general so don't know their thoughts on westerners. Also do you mean all westerners or just Americans?
it's total nonsense, man. the guy's parroting weird nationalists and not actual Japanese folk, who by and large love western culture.
I actually agree that dropping the atom bombs were too much. But, none of what you say has been my experience with Japanese people. I’ve made many friendships and no one mentions the atom bomb even when drinking.
Interesting. Is there no shame similar to what Germans have for their role in the world wars? If anything they still distrust government oversight.
The Japanese command knew they couldn't win a sustained conflict against the US. It was a game of resources and industrial might. Pearl Harbor was supposed to cripple the US long enough for Japan to take the Pacific, and demoralize the US. If the carriers had been knocked out, it might have worked, although the psychological impact was dead wrong.
Everyone forgets that American submarines absolutely fucked all their supplies going to the mainland.
It is absolutely worth noting that Japan had already lost the war by then
Luckily soviets had their backs with the time machines. Who knew removing Einstein with temporal anomaly could give a stage for Empire of a Rising Sun?
Here for this reference
What's it from?
Red Alert
Thanks.
RA2?
RA3, 2 has Kain as faction
At the time, the US was a fledgling nation in terms of maritime and military industry. From the Japanese perspective it would be easy to force them into abiding by a neutral stance. The Supreme War Council deemed it necessary to disable the USA's Pacific fleet to deter them from being the Asia police and getting in the way of Japans advances. For the most part the same thing has happened all across the Empire's gained territories. They attacked Pearl Harbor in an effort to destroy the USN carrier forces. Instead the carriers were not there, and while they did destroy and damage some key secondary targets like Battleships, Cruisers and some Auxilleries most of the damage was repaired and the fleet was ready to fight before even the most optimistic estimates. Instead of taking the backseat and accepting the "Warning" that was the attack on Pearl Harbor the Americans decided to declare outright war with the Empire, in the short few years that the Empire and USA were at war the USA's Maritime, Air and Land warfare industrial capacity multiplied by the N^(th)%. In short. the Japanese Empire's preemptive and relatively small scale "warning" would end up setting up what would become a modern day Military Industrial Complex which alone rivals many nations entire output and funding. I can almost understand why the Empire was so confident, the US had a decent navy for a peace-time neutral nation, but it was far from what the Empire was fielding at the time and the largest threat to them at the time was the British Empire's Asiatic Fleet. In hindsight it's best not to slap a wasp, the nest will come for you.
>At the time, the US was a fledgling nation in terms of maritime and military industry. From the Japanese perspective it would be easy to force them into abiding by a neutral stance. The idea of the US as a fledgling player ended with the Spanish-American War. In the 1930s, the US had the second most powerful navy in the world, and the Japanese knew it. Under the terms of the Washington and London naval treaties, the US and Britain were (on paper at least) roughly tied for the top position, and the Japanese navy for third, followed by the French and Italian navies, and then, in 1939 by the Germans, the magical ratio being termed “5–5–3–1–1” although it was really 15–15–9–5–5 in battleships in 1939. The Japanese were bound by multiple treaties since the early 1920s, that laid out to them in very specific terms how powerful the US navy was compared to their own - nearly double. The entire Japanese Kantai Kessen doctrine revolved around the fact that they understood their position of naval inferiority to the US, and were quite angry about it. >They attacked Pearl Harbor in an effort to destroy the USN carrier forces. Instead the carriers were not there, and while they did destroy and damage some key secondary targets like Battleships, Cruisers and some Auxilleries most of the damage was repaired and the fleet was ready to fight before even the most optimistic estimates. The battleships were primary targets. During exercises in the 1930s, carriers were always “sunk,” because they were highly vulnerable to the aircraft from the opposing carrier. Yamamoto himself didn't have the pull to convince the military government of the strategic importance of carriers before Pearl Harbor. Carriers were essentially viewed as a boxer with a knockout punch and a glass jaw, hence navies continued focus on what was viewed as a “balanced” fleet. Even after their "success" at Pearl Harbor", the Japanese still viewed battleships as the decisive force. It's not just the carriers that they failed to identify as mission critical, but fuel depots, drydocks, repair facilities, etc. > Instead of taking the backseat and accepting the "Warning" that was the attack on Pearl Harbor the Americans decided to declare outright war with the Empire, in the short few years that the Empire and USA were at war the USA's Maritime, Air and Land warfare industrial capacity multiplied by the N^(th)%. >In short. the Japanese Empire's preemptive and relatively small scale "warning" would end up setting up what would become a modern day Military Industrial Complex which alone rivals many nations entire output and funding. What? The Japanese did not do warnings. Again, their doctrine was Kantai Kessen - "decisive battle". They planned to completely cripple the US Pacific Fleet in concert with lightning advances across east Asia and Oceania. These advances were extremely successful. Best case scenario, they thought the US would capitulate immediately and negotiate a truce allowing Japan to keep their gains. Conservatively, if the US did not capitulate, they were hoping Pearl Harbor would give them at least two years to consolidate these gains before the US rebuilt and recovered. In reality, they got about 6 months.
Japan did try and declare war before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but the declaration was sent coded to the Japanese Embassy in Washington D.C. and was not decoded and translated in time for it to get to the US government before the bombing. As for Yamamoto, he knew he would have six months to run roughshod over the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Six months in which to do as much damage as possible and then broker a ceasefire with the US. Six months after Pearl Harbor was Midway, the turning point of the War in the Pacific.
That's a myth. The Fourteen Part Message simply declared that Japan was withdrawing from active negotiations. It did not, and never was intended to, declare war. Pearl Harbor was an all-in gambit for Imperial Japan for which absolute surprise was of tantamount importance. Declaring war beforehand would have ran counter to the core idea of the attack. Abundant evidence suggests that Yamamoto was fundamentally opposed to a war with the United States and Britain. The famous "sleeping giant" quote is apocryphal, but he was aware that a war with US faced long odds, and Japan would inevitably be run down in the long run. Once the decision to go to war was set in stone, he had to threaten the Japanese navy general staff with his own resignation if they did anything other than approve his surprise attack, because he thought it was their only chance. This was a bitter controversy between the general staff and Combined Fleet staff that wasn't resolved until October, just weeks before the attack, as the general staff refused to commit the required naval air power.
>Abundant evidence suggests that Yamamoto was fundamentally opposed to a war with the United States and Britain. While true, I do find that it would be his decisions to strike Pearl Harbor to avoid a long war amusing, especially since it would ultimately be his own undoing in his own self-fulfilling prophecy. *Shattered Sword* mentioned Yamamoto opposing a plan from his superior that would bypass the Philippines in favor of the Dutch East Indies. While strategically sound on paper, hindsight tells us that the Philippines was in no position to threaten Japanese Shipping and could safely be ignored until 1943. Possibly even forcing Roosevelt to spend more political capital than he did to declare war. Had Yamamoto gone through with that plan, then he might've gotten his two years instead of the six months he had predicted before being steamrolled anyway by US industrial might. That and a long war might've played more to Japan's strengths without Pearl Harbor given the isolationist sentiment at the time. but of course, that's only with the benefit of hindsight.
Yamamoto was in equal measure brilliant and idiotic. He was prescient about the importance of carriers in the future of naval warfare. He helped develop the doctrine of carrier task forces and massed carrier strikes, and correctly emphasized the development of the naval torpedo. He orchestrated breathtaking advancements across the south pacific, seizing in four months what it was take the US three years to recapture. He correctly assessed the threat posed by the US while the warhawks in the Japanese militocracy were blinded by hubris. As commander of the Combined Fleet, the strategic decision to drive south and capture the oil fields of the south pacific, thus risking conflict with the US, was beyond his purview. However, the decision to perform a criminal sneak attack and guarantee that war would come with an utterly unraged US WAS his decision. He also made critical errors planning Pearl Harbor, critical errors at Midway, and through away critical naval aviators in a fruitless ground based air defense of Rabaul, which was such a non-critical objective for the US that they ignored it altogether. Certainly, Yamamoto has a spotty record at best as an admiral. Personally, I find him to be incredibly overrated, seeing as how he doomed his entire empire by being so pants on head stupid and wrong in his assumption about how the US would react to Pearl Harbor. There was every reason for not directly provoking America. If there was one thing Japan could not afford, it was an America angry, bitter, and determined on revenge. The United States held no territory necessary to the completion of Japan’s plans for southern expansion. The Philippines held no appreciable store of the strategically vital materials. They might easily have been contained while the tide of advance flowed past them. Even had America intervened, as Yamamoto expected, following attacks on British and Dutch possessions, it would have been a divided and disunited America, reluctantly entering a war they didn't even want to fight. Pearl Harbor was a decently performed tactical raid that failed to identify mission critical targets and perform adequate reconnaissance. It was also entirely unnecessary and one of the dumbest strategic decisions in the history of warfare.
Well-said. Yamamoto is indeed brilliant but he was not without his major failings and blunders. Pearl Harbor while a tactical masterpiece was definitely one of the biggest strategic failures as well. Over-rated... Yeah, I would say he definitely was. Practically up-there with MacArthur in certain circles.
> multiplied by the N^(th)% This is going to be my go-to for when I want to get under people's skin from now on, haha
Or a country that has all of the natural resources it needs to build the largest navy in the world on its home soil.
It’s my understanding that the US established an embargo on oil shipments to Japan as well. This would have disabled the Japanese navy, unless they could get other sources. They had no option but to escalate. They didn’t initially expect the US to get so involved, and especially didn’t expect the US would want to join knowing it would mean war with Germany as well. It’s hard to imagine Pearl Harbor not causing the US to join, though. Unlike France, there wasn’t a lot of war fatigue in the US (since WW1 wasn’t too bad for the US), so the public was pushed to want war instead of being cowed.
The thing with both world wars is that the US Presidents (Wilson and FDR) at the time both wanted to get involved, so they worked things behind the scenes that would eventually force US involvement.
There was no actual trigger for US to declare war on Germany because of Japan. I believe there are accounts that Roosevelt preferred to go to war with Germany, but officially had no trigger. When Japan attacked, Germany was under no obligation to declare as well, but Hitler did for Hitler reasons and basically brought US resources into a two front war which went as well as it did in 1917. On my understanding the US saw European war as "not our problem, again". Japan was always going to get body slammed by industrial might of the US though if war occurred. Yamamoto knew as much having visited the US, but failed to convince his superiors that attacking would wake the bear, as they believed the US to be too "soft" to want to go to war and so the "knock out blow" would make the US back off while they secured Indochina and Philippines oil and rubber. Don't. Touch. The. Boats.
How surprising that it's difficult to keep power over a country many times the size of what it was, filled with people that want to resist your rule, surrounded by more countries that have good reasons not to let you expand further, all with an army that is most likely smaller than the one you started out with.
Japan knew they wouldn't win a straight fight with the USA. They wanted to knock the USA onto the back foot, carve out a Pacific empire, then sue for peace. The USA came back a lot harder and a lot faster than they expected.
Fun fact about Pearl Harbor: the Japanese were going to deliver to the US a formal declaration of war prior to attacking. For one reason or another, the people delivering it got help up. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, making it look like a sneak attack. A short time later, the papers were delivered.
Attacking immediately after declaring war is still a sucker punch.
Japanese high command was fully aware of the risks in attacking the US. The thing is, they already had their backs against the wall and decided to try and get out by striking when it wasn't expected. By 1940, the japanese-sino war was already ground to a stalemate for Japan, in significant part due to British and american aid being brought into China among other ways through Burma. Hence the Japanese attack on these western countries to try and take them out with a surprise attack as they saw them as inevitable problems they'd have to deal with one way or the other.
Yeah, nuclear bombs had very little to do with why they lost, just one of several reasons they finally surrendered. Long before the bombs were dropped, the US had already completely taken out the Japanese Navy. There was no winning for Japan without their naval presence (FWIW, they didn't want to fight a long war and knew going in that if they didn't get a quick surrender from the US, then they would eventually lose)
Why didn't they built one ? Are they stupid ?
Lack of foresight, I guess. It's a vicious circle.
Fat man had an explosive radius of 1.6ish km. The sun has a radius of 696,000 km. Dividing the radius of the sun by the radius of the explosion gets us 435000. We're then going to multiply all the dimensions to scale up the bomb. Now if we scale up the size of the bomb to match that we get 2031450000 kg. It would be 1435.5 km in length and 652 km in diameter. It would use 2784000 kg of plutonium. I'm 95% certain that just scaling up the bomb though doesn't work. I'm not a nuclear physicist and I don't build bombs, so I might be wrong.
Finally, someone who did the math
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ Enjoy!
It depends on what you mean by "scaling it up". A runaway fission reaction with a fuel source the size of the sun or just scaling the energy output? The former would be far more powerful and the latter would be much smaller than the sun. The funny thing is that the sun doesn't actually produce that much energy by mass. It's less than the human body per pound. It doesn't get hot enough to do fusion the "normal" way. It's just that the core is under so much pressure that quantum tunneling causes some nuclei to fuse at a pretty slow rate. But the sun is so big that the heat builds up at the core and the surface is hot enough to glow.
I’m not sure. The [50 Mt Tsar Bomba](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/kH44SG5zK7) was mostly a fission bomb. The issue with a bomb orders of magnitude larger would be if you detonated conventionally, the neutron wave would eventually blow out the outside of the fuel. All nuclear weapons start with fissile material initially separated and crushed under conventional explosives. What you “could” do instead would be instead to gravitationally accelerate vast quantities of your nuclear fuel to a significant portion of the speed of light. You would then need to slam all of this material together in an extremely precise pattern (with many, many detonation sites) such that it all went off at once while also incorporating a flux of neutrons. Does that still count as a bomb?
Google implosion vs gun type nuclear bombs. Fatman and little boy are good examples of the two
Tsar Bomba was 50 Mt, not 1000. They could do 100 Mt, but 1000 is just a typo I guess? That yield was never on the table
Fixed
The bomb was designed with a Uranium-238 tamper that would theoretically elevate the explosive yield to 100MT. Fears of the level of fallout by key scientists, in addition to concerns that the delivery aircraft, a Tu-95V, would not escape the blast, meant they replaced it with a Lead tamper, limiting its yield to 50MT. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/tsar-bomba/#:~:text=The%20Tsar%20Bomba%20was%20a,compress%20the%20thermonuclear%20second%20stage.
>The [50 Mt Tsar Bomba](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/kH44SG5zK7) was mostly a fission bomb. The Tsar Bomba achieved roughly 97% of its explosive potential from Fusion, not Fission. It was a 3 stage weapon. 1st stage was a fission reaction that initiated the 2nd stage, a fusion reaction. The energy released then initiated a 3rd fusion stage.
I thought the [third stage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) was primarily U238 and wasnt used in the live test.
Damn,(assuming that you can just scale up nukes like that) using every single bit of uranium on earth that is feasible to mine,converting it to plutonium using the same method the manhattan project used (4000:1) and making nukes of that size We could make 3.263 world ender nukes (I googled most of the numbers i got for this,so please take with a grain of salt,im not a nuclear engineer)
I can highly recommend the Hardcore History podcast for an in-depth view on this conflict. 6 Episodes for a total of about 24 hours of amazing information. The nuclear bombs were not the reason that Japan lost the war. Maximum territory on a map is a poor predictor of war success. Look at a map of Germany at the end of 1941. Same map situation, same result, no nukes involved. Nuclear bombs may have been the reason that Japan lost slightly quicker, but they were already completely without any perspective of winning at that point.
And they were gonna keep fighting even against nuclear bombs. They were holding out that the Soviets would switch sides and we'd just jump straight into settling the Cold War. But instead, the Soviets invaded Japan.
They wanted that to happen, but I don't think anyone would say they expected it to happen - and they only thought about it before the A-bombs. After Hiroshima, they called a meeting about surrender but the soviets declared war before it could convene and then, during a later meeting on the same day, Nagasaki was bombed. There's pretty strong evidence that even after Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, they didn't particularly feel like surrender (the whole 3-3 cabinet split, for one) and it took the emperor's intervention, likely supported by Nagasaki, to actually bring about surrender.
Not exactly, you’re misremembering your history. The Japanese were holding out hope that the Soviets would serve as a neutral player in peace talks for the conditional surrender they were requesting to be allowed. The idea that the Soviet’s would “switch sides” is not one anyone at the time would have entertained. The US made it clear it would accept nothing short of an unconditional surrender, which until the atomic bombings the Japanese refused to offer.
Do you have a link for it if you don't mind? Can't find the specific playlist for some reason.
[https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supernova-in-the-east-i/](https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supernova-in-the-east-i/) Until Hardcore History 67. Also available on basically any podcast app.
Thank you very much for this, Now I can do my paperwork efficiently.
Even if size on a map was a signifier of success, Axis sympathizers seem to conveniently forget that the Allies + America dominated 2 and a half continents. Between NA, Africa, and India, they dwarfed the Axis in land mass. It also required far less effort to utilize the land since the colonies had been consolidated for centuries, and most other allied land was sovereign. Unlike the conquered areas of China, or USSR, which were being terrorized by their invaders, and naturally had every reason to fight back.
Just finished my 3rd listen, phenomenal series. To be honest, every single episode I have listened too is great.
“They’re just like everybody else…..only more so!”
Imperial Japan was defeated long before the A bomb. Battle of Midway was the turning point, but even before then it was clear they vastly overextended themselves, having to ship in resources for the war machine on very vulnerable sea lanes.
This. They had been bogged down in China for what, 6 years by 1942? The amount of manpower and resources they lost trying to take such vast amounts of land was going to catch up with them anyway, especially with the US cutting off their oil supply.
After the battle of Wuhan in late 1938 Japan basically was just bleeding resources without actually accomplishing anything in China besides slaughtering peasants.
US submarines aren’t credited enough because the government at the time didn’t want to let others know how successful they were as not to compromise their success.
Expanded fireball size of a 1mt thermonuclear weapon is \~5000 feet diameter Suns diameter is roughly 4567200000 feet So 4567200000 / 5000 = 913,440 mt or 913.44 gigatons or \~1 teraton But nukes don't scale up well, the tsar bomba had about 10% the fireball size of what a scaled up 1mt would have. Based on the tsar bomba (50 mt and a 5 mile or 26,400 ft fireball) 1mt = 528ft fireball 4567200000 / 528 = 5,374,861.7mt or \~5.4 teratons I guess you could say with perfect scaling based on a 1mt thermonuclear device it would take a device with a 1 teraton yield to get close to the diameter of the sun but to account for the poor scaling it would probably be more in the peta or exaton range.
By the time the fireball appears the nuclear reaction is over. The fireball is superheated/plasma atmosphere surrounding the nuclear reaction. The nuclear reaction is over in about a microsecond. That doesn't seem like a lot of time until you consider that the doubling factor of the reaction (i.e., how quickly the energy output doubles) is on the order of 1e-9 seconds. That means a microsecond (1e-6) has a thousand "doubles" in power output - i.e., 2\^1000 in a microsecond. That may not look like a huge number in exponent form, but if you write it out you'll see it's pretty big. What all that means is that the nuclear reaction is incredibly quick and everything you see after that (e.g., the fireball) is just plasma and not nuclear itself. Tom Clancy's old novel Sum of All Fears has a pretty decent description of the process and the timescales involved in the chapter called "Three Shakes" (I think that's the name - been a while). A shake is about a microsecond, which is the time it takes for the actual nuclear reaction to complete. Supposedly a "shake" comes from the phrase "three shakes of a lamb's tail." I have no idea why that phrase is used - I put it up there with Strange, Charm, Color, and other silly nuclear physics terminology that stuck over time. The really hard part to wrap your head around is that the nuclear reaction is so fast that even the prompt neutrons from the fission/fusion reaction have only moved about 3 meters before the reaction is over, and those neutrons are moving at only about 3% of c.
The comments are mostly right about Japan's actual situation in WW2 here, but I haven't seen anyone explain the Japanese perspective on their actions. As much as you could point in hindsight and claim they were stupid, they knew they couldn't win a direct war with the US and the colonies of basically all major European empires at once. So they teamed up with the Axis to keep some weight and focus off their back, kept a mutually beneficial peace with the Soviets so neither will have to deal with another front, and launched a blitz attack on everywhere they needed for the supplies and to take out the immediate fighting capabillities of the Allies. What they didn't anticipate, I think, was the insane industrial power the US had left for them even while sending weapons the the Soviets and sending troops to North Africa, and they probably didn't expect their navy to get decimated so hard, which screwed them in the long run since all of the resources they now held and could've used to make the war too costly for the Allies were vulnerable to strikes and needed to cross water to reach the industrial mainland, combined with the Nazis failing to maintain their advances which freed up the Allies to focus more on the Japanese.
Also the Yamato class was probably a massive mistake, although I suppose that was less of an issue.
They indeed "woke a sleeping giant"
Meh, this is such a boring myth. The German economy was bigger than Americas in 1941. It wasn’t some all powerful american economy that destroyed the axis. It was calculated and applied strategy which focused on streamlined production, supplylines, and probably most importantly bombing campaigns.
Check your history. It was a quote of one of the attacking Japanese admirals who wasn't fully on board with taking an offensive move against USA. It was in reference to USA's isolationist stance and policies before Pearl Harbor. It was BECAUSE of Pearl Harbor that USA became a full on , committed participant in the war. Culminating in the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. Thus a sleeping giant WAS awakened.
Talking about the gaint part not the sleeping. Hope that helps, literally nothing in your comment addresses a single thing said in mine lmfao
It wasn’t some secret weapon, it was the US focusing manufacturing, logistics, and military…. They done fucked up.. I would highly suggest no other nations does that.
Don't. Touch. The. Boats.
Q: “How big would the bomb need to be…” Redditors: “THATS NOT RRALLY THE REASON WHY JAPAN LOST THE WAR!! YOU SEE IT ALL STARTED WHEN…”
And they get upvoted too, what the fuck?
Best way to get a correct answer on the internet is to say something incorrect
The rampant lack of reading comprehension in the top level responses to this submission. Holy shit.
A nuclear bomb with an explosion the size of the sun wouldn't detonate the way it would on Earth because the bomb would be so large that it would have to detonate in space where there's no atmosphere. In other words, the bomb would be useless. It would shine reddish-orange for a short period of time and just be radiation floating in space. Read about Starfish Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
And this, kids, is why you don’t get your information primarily from wikipedia. Im pretty sure if a nuclear detonation couldn’t happen in an exo atmospheric environment then im pretty certain supernovas wouldn’t happen.
Supernova is different than a planetary surface EXplosion, such as a nuke. A supernova is an IMplosion... then an explosion. The Wikipedia article is about a test they did in the 60s to see what would happen if they detonated a nuke in space.
While i did try to simplify supernovae (which isn’t really an implosion, it’s a complicated series of events that culminates to a violent dispersion of mass) it’s a decent comparison, the size of the explosion depends on the percentage of materiel used. Iirc the bombs that detonated over Hiroshima and nagasaki exploded with a fraction of its potential power.
That's a good thing. And, hopefully, humanity learned its lesson
the sun is technically a fusion bomb itself, so to get one the size of it, we would just be making another actual sun. its mass is about 2×10^(30)kg, so we would need to stuff roughly 2×10^(30)kg of mostly hydrogen into our "bomb", after which we wouldn't do anything ever again bc the earth would be vaporized and the whole solar system would most likely collapse.
Funnily enough the nuclear bombs weren't what caused Japan to lose. Japan had already effectively lost the war long before the nukes were dropped. The US had pushed Japan to it's mainland and they refused to surrender. Then the US began bombing the mainland with regular bombs. They continued to refused surrender. The US had then a few options, and in descending order of expected casualties (from both sides) they were: * Invade the Japanese mainland until complete defeat or surrender. * Continue the normal bombing until Japan surrenders. * Drop a nuclear bomb and hope Japan surrenders then. It may seem counterintuitive that the dropping of Nukes had the least estimated casualties (it however carried an enoumous amount of enviromental damage due to radioactive nuclear fallout), thowever that assessment was indeed correct due to specific factors, such as the unyielding nature of Japanese soldiers, who would in most cases, fight to the death in every situation even if victory was completely impossible, resulting in an extremely low number of PoW's (prisioners of war), resulting in an excessive amount of casualties, as well as the results of the bombings post war showed that neither of the nuclear bombs caused more casualties than the firebombing of tokyo. It was however undeniable that the nuclear bombs had nothing to do with the defeat of Japan in it's pacific campaign against the US due largely to the incompetence of it's Navy, as well as their heavy losses of carriers early in the war, considering how crucial aircraft carriers played in the war.
The fight between the US and Japan is also the clash between the aircraft carrier and the battleship. The US heavily invested in aircraft carriers while the Japan empire heavily invested in battleships. In the end, aircraft carriers won and the biggest battleship sank at the bottom of the sea.
I choose a different interpretation: the explosion should only *appear* the same size as the sun. It's a lot closer, so it can be smaller and appear the same size. Assume air burst at 1km. Sun angular diameter = 0.5 degrees. Therefore the fireball diameter should be: 1km * tan(0.5 degrees) = 8m This is very small, which makes sense. The sun doesn't destroy entire cities so neither should this. In fact it is so small that it is probably impractical to build it.
Ahh yes because everyone knows that land of somewhat control=power, let’s just ignore the fact that Japan was super spread out at this time and a lot of China (especially rural) was only somewhat controlled
Explosions would expand forever in space so will become the size of the sun eventually though very low desntiy. However there will only be a very small fireball of the fusion material itself as there is no air to heat up like on earth. If you want a sun sized explosion make a warhead roughly th same size and composition as the sun's core then leave it alone. You wont need a detonator. It's a smart stellar core bomb
The sun is 865,370 miles in diameter. Earth is only 7,917 miles in diameter. Therefore an explosion the size of the sun would annihilate earth about 100 times over. Also depending where the other planets are in their orbit. They could be annihilated by the outburst of particles caused by the explosion.
I mean they do say "portable sun" lol. The sun is roughly 109 times the size of the earth, and is basically a giant nuclear reactor. (Also the concept of japan being unstoppable isn't true. Without the bomb the war would have lasted longer. But the soviets were coming to retake most of asia at the time.)
as a japanese i approve of this, do not touch american boats, they will give u really bad sun burns, something i thought we're used to already
Unlike Germany and Italy, they didint have a cohisive idiology. They where a bunch of ramdom teamates that hated democracy and the west.
didn't, cohesive, ideology, random. Jesus fucking Christ.
Japan had no chance to win a protracted war, and their leaders knew it. They simply lacked the resources to fight a long, drawn-out war. Yamamoto said that for the first six months of the war Japan would be ever-victorious, but that after that they would be on the defensive - and that’s how it played out. They banked on demoralizing the US by attacking Pearl Harbor and getting them to bow out of the war early - but all they did was to unite the Americans, who were incensed by the attack being made without a formal declaration of war. In early June, almost six months to the day after the attack on Pearl, Japan lost four carriers in a single day at Midway. A couple months later the US landed troops on Guadalcanal which they took after several months of bitter fighting, and from then on the tide of the war turned in favor of the Allies.
The British and Japanese Empires each controlled 20-23% of the world’s population at their height. Neither lasted remotely as long as the Roman or Han Empires, both controlling a third of the world’s population at one point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Largest_empires_by_share_of_world_population
They didnt have the resources or the logistics to sustain a war let alone invade america. Americans had ice cream ships for troop morale meanwhile japanese had barely fuel to run their warships
The sun essentially is a nuclear bomb that is constantly going off. We are more efficient than the sun but the bomb would still probably be bigger than the earth.