this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Viewers are divided over whether the film should have shown Japanese victims of the weapon created by physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Experts say it's complicated.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Quite frankly if the U.S. didn't develop it, Germany would have. And they would have used it just like the United States did.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Germany was already defeated and occupied, so I have a hard time following your logic.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

When the bombs were ultimately dropped, yes, but the Manhattan Project (actual development of the bomb) took place coinciding with the Nazi nuclear program before the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The Nazis actually started ahead of the Americans in 1939, and had the scientist who discovered nuclear fission as part of the program. The Nazis by all accounts had a head start and better scientists.
It wasn’t until it was clear the Nazis were using heavy water (i.e focusing on nuclear reactors) in 1942 that the US got the first clue that the Nazis had abandoned the idea of nuclear bombs in the war effort, but the project was still funded in Nazi Germany until the end of the war in 1945.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Not great logic saying that Germany would have. But he does have a small point. A lot of our reason for developing it was because we thought Germany had been working on it. Our development started before Germany had been defeated and we had reason to believe (via espionage) that they at least had collected the materials needed, and had scientists familiar with the physics. After the war, we discovered that their program was no where close to actually making a bomb. We probably could have, and maybe should have stopped once Germany fell.