re: The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Animated

quote:

---

And a precedent was started that nuclear war can be justified.

---

Quite the opposite. Many of the scientists in the Manhattan Project were very worried that if the war ended before the bombs were used in combat, that the next world war would be fought with hundreds or thousands of atomic bombs, and part of the frantic effort to complete them was to get them used so as to prevent that from happening.

Nuclear deterrence only works if people understand what a nuke is, and until they were actually used, very few outside of the scientific community did or would. Peierls and Frisch talked about the concept in their ground-breaking memo in 1940 that started the British, and later the US, atomic programs.