Transcript The Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project
What was the US plan for
ending the Pacific War?
Did Japan commit war crimes during WWII?
YES!
Rape of Nanking (300,000 civilians killed)
NO!
Pearl Harbor (2,300 military killed)
YES!
Bataan Death March (1,600 POWS die)
Developing the Atomic Bomb
• FDR gives the okay for developing an a-bomb when the US learns
the Nazis were trying to develop an A-bomb (1939)
• The project was called “The Manhattan Project”, led by General
Leslie R. Groves & physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer
•Work was conducted at
the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, New Mexico
•The new weapon could
release more energy than
20,000 tons of TNT
•New US President Harry Truman would have to decide if the US should
use this weapon on Japan, or invade Japan
•Four bombs were developed at a
cost of about $5 billion a piece
•The first bomb called Gadget
was tested in a controlled
explosion in New Mexico desert
Trinity Test
• Second bomb was named “Little Boy”
•On August 6, 1945, a plane named the Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy”
on the city of Hiroshima, Japan
•Japan doesn’t surrender. Three days later, a plane named Bockscar
dropped the third bomb named “Fat Man” on Nagasaki, Japan
•Japan surrenders on August 13th, 1945
For
Pros & Cons of dropping the Atomic Bomb
Against
The two targeted cities would have Conventional bombing prevents
been firebombed anyway
US from using a horrible weapon
Japanese showed fanatical
resistance to the end. Including
suicide kamikazes
With only two bombs ready it would
be a waste not to use both of them
Japan was ready to call it quits.
Japan home islands were being
blocked. Soviets in Manchuria
One bomb could have been used
over Tokyo Harbor to show how
serious this weapon was
Invasion of Japan would have
Those deaths would have mostly
caused casualties that could easily been military and not civilian
have exceeded the death toll at
Hiroshima & Nagasaki
After the first bomb, Japan refused
to surrender
America did not give enough time
for news to filter about destruction
The bomb's use impressed Soviet
Union enough that USSR did not
demand joint occupation of Japan
Japanese lives were sacrificed
simply for power politics between
the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
My older aunt, my dah ahiee (big aunt), is actually very small. Her wrists are the size of
napkin rings, as delicate as rice paper--and the clothes we pass around in our family do
not fit her small frame. She is shy, especially in English. And during one heated family
discussion on the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a San Franciscoarea Sizzler, she kept quiet. I had pointed out to her rather talkative husband that the
U.S. government was still the only government that had dropped the atomic bomb on
human beings. Hiroshima, I could maybe see, but Nagasaki too? At this point, my petite
aunt spoke up. "I think they should have bombed the whole country!" she bellowed, and
then lapsed back into silence.
It was the first time I realized how profoundly the Chinese were affected
by World War II. Even then, I was not familiar with what had happened
in the country of my mother's birth during the war.
As Americans, we are almost all familiar with the Nazi-sponsored
Holocaust, which spread its dark wings across the face of Europe during
World War II, spawning unspeakable horrors, starvation and genocide.
We know six million Jewish people were killed in the Nazi death
machine--along with almost as many Gypsies, Poles, gays, communists
and resistors. Even as Allied troops marched in victory to the gates of the
death camps, the Germans continued to commit war crimes. Many will
never forgive the Nazis. But now I see how the Chinese feel about their
Holocaust. The lesson of a Holocaust is to never forget. (From Iris
Chang’s The Rape of Nanking)