The Manhattan Project What was the US plan for ending the Pacific War?

The Manhattan ProjectWhat was the US plan for

ending the Pacific War?

Did Japan commit war crimes during WWII?Did Japan commit war crimes during WWII?

Rape of Nanking (300,000 civilians killed)

Pearl Harbor (2,300 military killed) Bataan Death March (1,600 POWS die)

YES!NO!

YES!

Developing the A-BombDeveloping the A-Bomb

• FDR gives the okay for developing an atomic bomb when the US learns the Nazis were trying to develop an A-bomb

• 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

•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

• Second bomb was named “Little Boy”

Pros & Cons of dropping the Atomic Bomb

The two targeted cities would have been firebombed anyway

Conventional bombing prevents US from using a horrible weapon

Japanese showed fanatical resistance to the end. Including suicide kamikazes

Japan was ready to call it quits. Japan home islands were being blocked. Soviets in Manchuria

Invasion of Japan would have caused casualties that could easily have exceeded the death toll at Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Those deaths would have mostly been military and not civilian

With only two bombs ready it would be a waste not to use both of them

One bomb could have been used over Tokyo Harbor to show how serious this weapon was

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.

For Against

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 Francisco-area 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)