TRX
April 25, 2013
55:
Given that my background and politics are, uh, slightly different from Charlie's, I was surprised that I agree in principle with Charlie's stance.

Besides the political suicide issue, nuclear weapons are only useful against concentrated, high-value targets. They're great if you can get all your enemies to stand conveniently together so you can take them all out with one gorgeous nuclear flash, but when they're dispersed, they're not so useful.

With modern delivery systems you can take a conventional bomb or smaller nuke to where it will do the job, instead of indiscriminately bombing an entire area.

I don't see nukes going away entirely, but like battleships and horse cavalry (both still existent in the US military) they're not an appropriate answer to current military needs, nor are they a rational use of limited defense funding.

TRX
April 27, 2013
189:
@101:
I don't think there was an equivalent to Groves in the German project,
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That was Albert Speer. We'd call both Speer and Groves "general contractors" now. Lavrenti Beria was the boss of the Soviet project. Beria was chief of the NKVD. I don't remember if the name of the chief of the Japanese project is known.

The key factor of the American project was that Groves had a literal "carte blanche" from Roosevelt. Groves appropriated any resources he needed, and spent money so freely that the Manhattan Engineer District consumed a sizeable (though debated) percentage of the American expenditure for the war. Uranium and plutonium were the active ingredients, but mostly it was huge piles of money that made it work...

Speer simply didn't have the resources to effectively go anywhere with an atomic bomb project. There were several more or less independent German projects competing for what resources there were, due mostly to the National Socialist patronage system.

Beria had control of the gulag system, which provided about 20% of the wartime Soviet GNP. He also had security; it made perfect Soviet sense to locate a new super-weapon project in a prison camp, and use political prisoners to do the work.

Churchill was still rather bitter about Tube Alloys when he wrote "The Second World War." He'd worked Makenzie King for all he was worth, and when King absolutely refused to take the project, he started wheedling Roosevelt, who resisted for some months before agreeing to assign some resources to it, apparently just to get Churchill to stop bugging him about it.