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ToxicSlurpee posted:They don't because it was a real dick move on the part of America. Generally speaking American history in high school is super ultra nationalistic where America is rarely the bad guy. Even Vietnam is pretty heavily sanitized to make it look like an honest mistake made on the name of fighting the Russians rather than the awful horror of a crime that it was. Needless to say the real reason we were there in the first place or the poo poo America got up to in Laos before hand were never mentioned. I dunno what civil history you took, but ours was pretty apologetic about quite a number of American war crimes, especially that whole time were we firebombed Germany and Japan and then nuked Japan.Granted, that dumb argument that we nuked those two cities to "to end the war  " was still present.then again I got older and realized virtually nothing that was taught to me in my general science/history classes was even factually correct.
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Feb 23, 2017 20:46
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bean_shadow posted:Speaking of uranium, does anyone remember that I Love Lucy episode where the gang goes to Vegas for Ricky's show and they see an article about uranium in the Nevada desert? Well, that means big bucks, especially to Fred Murtz, so they all get into the car and hunt. I especially remember that episode because the few times I would catch an episode of I Love Lucy it was always THIS one. That's also similar to the beginning of This Boy's Life, where the mom is going to make big bucks searching for Uranium with her new Geiger county. It's a pretty small part of the story, but it always stuck out to me as strange. I didn't realize people went actively looking for Uranium.
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Feb 23, 2017 23:14
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Boofchicken posted:That's also similar to the beginning of This Boy's Life, where the mom is going to make big bucks searching for Uranium with her new Geiger county. It's a pretty small part of the story, but it always stuck out to me as strange. I didn't realize people went actively looking for Uranium. Someone hasn't been playing Fallout 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ANI6oj8p2M
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Feb 23, 2017 23:17
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:The original Banana Republic incident in which Edward Bernays painted the moderate left wing Guatemalan president as a dangerous communist so that the CIA would overthrow him and benefit the United Fruit Company was even better. And by better I mean equally horrible. it's an older term
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Feb 23, 2017 23:52
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Boofchicken posted:That's also similar to the beginning of This Boy's Life, where the mom is going to make big bucks searching for Uranium with her new Geiger county. It's a pretty small part of the story, but it always stuck out to me as strange. I didn't realize people went actively looking for Uranium. That's actually a true story, and if you haven't read the book and you like the movie you'll love it. Lots of extra little stuff that probably wouldn't fit into the movie.
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Feb 23, 2017 23:56
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How exactly woukd you go about selling uranium that isn't through a crazy black market
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Feb 24, 2017 00:02
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Aesop Poprock posted:How exactly woukd you go about selling uranium that isn't through a crazy black market Presumably by selling mineral rights to a developer, like you would if you had oil or other valuable stuff on your property.
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Feb 24, 2017 00:39
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Deteriorata posted:Presumably by selling mineral rights to a developer, like you would if you had oil or other valuable stuff on your property.
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Feb 24, 2017 01:00
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zedprime posted:When picking from small sets with replacement you get repeats unbelievably often. Combine with confirmation bias and you only ever see one episode of a sitcom every time you turn it on, and you hear the same song 5 times over an 8 hour car ride even though you have 20 hours of music loaded up on your phone. The biggest thing there is that our meat brains just aren't designed to understand actual, concrete math very easily. What seems true often isn't, especially mathematically. The number of random people required to get 99.999% certainty at least two of them will have the same birthday is surprisingly low. There's actually a ton of mathematical proofs that demonstrate that kind of thing. It's on the level of people assuming that if a coin flips 6 heads in a row it's more likely to flip a tails the 7th time. Well no, actually...it's a 50/50 shot each time it's just that the probability of having 7 heads in a row is slim. It's possible to flip 5 trillion heads in a row but also extraordinarily unlikely. Then again if you had infinite flips there'd be a set of 5 trillion heads in a row in there somewhere. This is why some people fall in love with math. It's neat. A White Guy posted:I dunno what civil history you took, but ours was pretty apologetic about quite a number of American war crimes, especially that whole time were we firebombed Germany and Japan and then nuked Japan.Granted, that dumb argument that we nuked those two cities to "to end the war Ours didn't mention firebombing Germany at all. Nor did it mention the Mai Lai massacre or anything of the sort. I went to school in rural PA and let me tell you this history I got taught was painful in retrospect. The Trail of Tears came up but in the context of "America never did anything wrong ever again after realizing how much of a mistake this was." If memory serves the history book even said "America has never lost a war" in that Vietnam was technically a conflict. It mentioned the nukes and the Manhattan Project but in the context of "American ingenuity wins wars and will win ever war forever."
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Feb 24, 2017 01:21
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Worldwide laws obviously vary but in the US for just uranium ore mining you probably have more paperwork due to MSHA proving you aren't going to cause heavy metal poisoning to the local watershed or to mine workers than to the NRC. As such, mines have been traditionally independent businesses. Its a pretty captive market from that point forward because the conversion and enrichment steps are usually operated by nationalized businesses or special partnerships under strict licenses from regulatory agencies because these steps are fairly tightly controlled information for anti-proliferation agreements. It might touch a couple of these on its way to becoming nuclear fuel which is sold again under strict licenses to independent operators. But yeah there's expert uranium mining companies so you'd just sell the land to them. I wouldn't mess with selling mineral rights for heavy metals because it'd be real easy for them to go poof due to changing regulatory conditions and leave you with heavy metal contaminated land that you now need to pony up for the Superfund cleanup. e. Checking back into it, in the NATO sphere of nuclear supply chain its a lot less nationalized than I thought and all through agency licensing. For reference, you basically have 3 choices for conversion in NATO supply chain, 1 Canadian, 1 US, 1 French. I am starting to remember as a miner you probably don't give a poo poo because I think the contracting is through the independent operators: you sell them your ore, they arrange to pay the converters and enrichers (and fuel fab by that point but that's completely outside my experience) and custody transfer is limited which probably makes licensing easier. zedprime has a new favorite as of 01:34 on Feb 24, 2017 |
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Feb 24, 2017 01:22
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A White Guy posted:I dunno what civil history you took, but ours was pretty apologetic about quite a number of American war crimes, especially that whole time were we firebombed Germany and Japan and then nuked Japan.Granted, that dumb argument that we nuked those two cities to "to end the war That’s because they weren’t war crimes. 
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Feb 24, 2017 01:23
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Platystemon posted:That’s because they weren’t war crimes. It's not a war crime if you're never tried and convicted  
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Feb 24, 2017 01:34
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I found this site that had loads of uranium mining book covers, which combine postwar optimism with radioactive materials.   
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Feb 24, 2017 01:37
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This one looks like it's from a really earnest anti-nuclear Christian movie from 1952 or so.
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Feb 24, 2017 02:18
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Wheat Loaf posted:This one looks like it's from a really earnest anti-nuclear Christian movie from 1952 or so. It's the Mother Of All Bombs!
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Feb 24, 2017 02:45
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A White Guy posted:Granted, that dumb argument that we nuked those two cities to "to end the war So why did we?
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Feb 24, 2017 02:45
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Gann Jerrod posted:I found this site that had loads of uranium mining book covers, which combine postwar optimism with radioactive materials. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acMqxcdxE0E oh ffs i missed the whole conversation
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Feb 24, 2017 02:49
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Byzantine posted:So why did we? Here’s my predicted answer. Don’t read if you don’t want spoilers: We nuked those two cities because we wanted to test our new toy and send a warning to the Russkies.
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Feb 24, 2017 02:53
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hogmartin posted:To be fair, though, there was any number of "French Revolutions" at the end of the 18th century, along with maybe 30 notable figures, a whole ton of factions, and no shortage of incidents and decrees and affairs and the like. If you're a high school history teacher who has to cover from, say, the Renaissance to the Vietnam war in a semester, saying "and then they overthrew the monarchy" is about all you can hope for before you fall down the bottomless rabbit hole. That's true but I only ever learned there was a monarchy to be overthrown because I'm an auto-didactic message board dumbass. That's also the only reason I ever learned what the Renaissance was. Except for an ancient history class in 7th grade, Europe never really came up as a real place where stuff happened until we'd reach WWI It's maybe different for other people but history classes before college basically hit the same few topics every year--age of discovery, the colonies, the american revolution, founding fathers & constitution etc., lewis & clark, the civil war, the captains of industry, WWI, the great depression, the new deal, WWII, the end. If another country didn't make a cameo in one of those, it didn't come up.
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Feb 24, 2017 04:45
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Platystemon posted:Here’s my predicted answer. Don’t read if you don’t want spoilers: One detonation is a fluke, two is a test, three is a weapons system.
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Feb 24, 2017 04:47
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Platystemon posted:Here’s my predicted answer. Don’t read if you don’t want spoilers: I think there's also the element of not wanting them to make too many inroads into China. Stuff like the Franck Report and the admirals who wanted to continue the naval siege estimated Japan would have surrendered in December 1945, which gives the Soviets a lot of time to make a massive push and benefit the Communists in the civil war. Also showing that America is willing to use the bomb to win wars makes it a more powerful negotiating tool. How willing would China have been to back down over Korea or Kinmen when they were threatened with the nuke if they didn't have the knowledge America was definitely willing to use it?
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Feb 24, 2017 05:00
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Greatbacon posted:One detonation is a fluke, two is a test, three is a weapons system. Truman’s moratorium, Hirohito’s surrender, and the dearth of fissile material all independently prevented a third bombing, but the USAF absolutely would have kept bombing. At the time, American commanders saw the atom bombs as just another weapons system. That’s why “we nuked two cities to end the war” is wrong—there was no expectation that the war would end after two bombs. The USAF was going to drop as many bombs as they could before and during the invasion.
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Feb 24, 2017 05:02
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Platystemon posted:Truman’s moratorium, Hirohito’s surrender, and the dearth of fissile material all independently prevented a third bombing, but the USAF absolutely would have kept bombing. Yeah, Truman's speech directly implied we had zillions of them in stock and even bigger ones were on the way (which wasn't true, of course). There was a third one in transit, IIRC, that they would have used if the two weren't enough, but that was it for the US nuclear arsenal at that point.
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Feb 24, 2017 05:13
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Platystemon posted:Truman’s moratorium, Hirohito’s surrender, and the dearth of fissile material all independently prevented a third bombing, but the USAF absolutely would have kept bombing. Yeah, sorry I wasn't clear. I was referring to Trinity as the first detonation.
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Feb 24, 2017 05:19
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Deteriorata posted:Yeah, Truman's speech directly implied we had zillions of them in stock and even bigger ones were on the way (which wasn't true, of course). There was a third one in transit, IIRC, that they would have used if the two weren't enough, but that was it for the US nuclear arsenal at that point. A core for a third bomb was cast on August 13. A weapon was expected to be ready by August 23, with another coming early the next month. Formerly TOP SECRET transcript where the timeline of additional bombs is discussed (PDF)
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Feb 24, 2017 05:28
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Platystemon posted:Truman’s moratorium, Hirohito’s surrender, and the dearth of fissile material all independently prevented a third bombing, but the USAF absolutely would have kept bombing. This part is especially true; the thnking of the top brass in a pre-Cold War military believed that the most moral path of action involved making the enemy suffer as much as possible in as short a period of time as possible. With the idea being that the sooner you can make your enemies surrender, the shorter the war will be; and the shorter the war will be, the fewer the casualties. So it's basic math that if you can cause 2 million casualties in a hour, and make your enemies surrender immediately; you would save 280 million lives on all sides that would be thrown into the grinder over a period of four years. So it's no wonder that American commanders would be eager to use as many bombs as possible during the war.
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Feb 24, 2017 05:36
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umalt posted:This part is especially true; the thnking of the top brass in a pre-Cold War military believed that the most moral path of action involved making the enemy suffer as much as possible in as short a period of time as possible. With the idea being that the sooner you can make your enemies surrender, the shorter the war will be; and the shorter the war will be, the fewer the casualties. So it's basic math that if you can cause 2 million casualties in a hour, and make your enemies surrender immediately; you would save 280 million lives on all sides that would be thrown into the grinder over a period of four years.
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Feb 24, 2017 07:07
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war bad
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Feb 24, 2017 08:38
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Dutchy posted:That's true but I only ever learned there was a monarchy to be overthrown because I'm an auto-didactic message board dumbass. That's also the only reason I ever learned what the Renaissance was. Except for an ancient history class in 7th grade, Europe never really came up as a real place where stuff happened until we'd reach WWI History in school is as much about indoctrinating a population to believe they all belong to one shared national identity group as it is about informing people on what happened in the past, so it's not really surprising that school history lessons focus on bits of history that make the 'nation' feel like a single united protagonist rather than something more complicated or uncomfortable. I grew up in the UK and the most we got on the British Empire was like, a two page spread in a history textbook with that map of all the pink countries, and that's despite the long, long shadow the Empire casts over contemporary British society. Japanese history textbooks, similarly, barely mention the Second World War in anything but the most oblique terms. The Swedish education system doesn't really cover the treatment of the Sami people. We got a semester on the Aztecs one time though, that was really fun.
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Feb 24, 2017 09:21
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ToxicSlurpee posted:They don't because it was a real dick move on the part of America. Generally speaking American history in high school is super ultra nationalistic where America is rarely the bad guy. Even Vietnam is pretty heavily sanitized to make it look like an honest mistake made on the name of fighting the Russians rather than the awful horror of a crime that it was. Needless to say the real reason we were there in the first place or the poo poo America got up to in Laos before hand were never mentioned. For example, we're always taught about the war crimes the Soviet Union pulled on Germany after Germany surrendered (rape and pillaging) but shady poo poo American soldiers pulled, like taking home Japanese skulls for souvenirs, is never mentioned. And, of course, we're taught that America swooped in during WWI and WWII and saved everybody's asses. Instead of the truth about WWII, which is the Soviet Union helped us. A LOT. Hell, I was never required to take a geography class in either of the states I grew up in (Nevada and Missouri during the 1990s, graduated 2001. To be fair Nevada is pretty dismal with education, often making the bottom of lists, and Missouri isn't much better). I had to teach myself geography when I realized I didn't know where anything is. The only type of geography I learned was connected to Ancient History. An aside to terrible Nevada education: in middle school we had a unit where the teacher had us read the novelization of Jurassic Park. Not the book the movie was based on, but the book that was based on the movie. Even I thought that was pretty pathetic and I was obsessed with Jurassic Park. Also, in my middle school science class we watched The Lion King more than once one semester. Her justification was the "Circle of Life" part. If education was terrible in those states back then, I can't imagine what's going to happen during the Trump Administration.
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Feb 24, 2017 09:31
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Nessus posted:Wasn't this also the thinking of Grant and Sherman in the Civil War? Yeah, Sherman popularized this view of warfare, though I don't know if he's the originator of it.
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Feb 24, 2017 10:03
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Let's look at some pre-history: Neanderthals made the first synthetic material--a glue made from birch bark. It requires such a fine control of fire and material that modern scientists have trouble recreating it. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/neanderthal-superglue.html
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Feb 24, 2017 12:08
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I'm trying to remember what we did in history in school. We did some stuff about the Normans and the Battle of Hastings, the Feudal system, the First World War and (for some reason) Mary, Queen of Scots. There was other stuff but I don't remember what it was. That was all pre-GCSE stuff. GCSE and A-level I can remember more clearly. We studied Ireland between around 1750 and 1800 (really everything from Grattan through to the Act of Union), Germany from 1919 to 1939, Russia from 1900 to 1945, Nazi Germany in more depth, Russian foreign policy from 1900 to 1990 and most enjoyably, the Troubles (which was enjoyable my class quite improbably had one guy who was really hardcore republican and another guy who was really hardcore loyalist). I think it was reasonably well-rounded. They had the sense to teach the Troubles even-handedly, which I suppose is a necessity when it's a cross-denominational grammar school. 
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Feb 24, 2017 12:54
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bean_shadow posted:For example, we're always taught about the war crimes the Soviet Union pulled on Germany after Germany surrendered (rape and pillaging) but shady poo poo American soldiers pulled, like taking home Japanese skulls for souvenirs, is never mentioned. I generally dislike "who was worse" kind of military history arguments but I'm perfectly fine with this if your description was accurate.
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Feb 24, 2017 15:59
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umalt posted:This part is especially true; the thnking of the top brass in a pre-Cold War military believed that the most moral path of action involved making the enemy suffer as much as possible in as short a period of time as possible. With the idea being that the sooner you can make your enemies surrender, the shorter the war will be; and the shorter the war will be, the fewer the casualties. So it's basic math that if you can cause 2 million casualties in a hour, and make your enemies surrender immediately; you would save 280 million lives on all sides that would be thrown into the grinder over a period of four years. Oddly enough, Dan Carlin released a new episode of his history podcast, and it's fascinating and frightening to listen to the possible mindset of the time-period. The fact that so many generals were pushing to drop nukes as though they were bigger bombs is insane. As for war-crimes, I finished reading a novel called "Volk" and it talked about the US and France POW camps for German forces being almost as bad as the russian/german POW camps in Europe. However the only information I can find seems to come from one book, and very little else on a cursory google search. Anyone else have some good material on such?
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Feb 24, 2017 16:15
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Plus, whenever someone mentions the 'the save lives' argument, You really have to think about the American mindset toward the end of the war in context. Operation Olympia literally called for a string of nuclear holocausts, one after another, followed by an astonishingly bloody invasion of the Japanese homeland, where planners were casually tossing around "Oh, 1 to 2 million American dead whatever". Which would've been almost double the number of actual causalities the Americans had suffered in the entire war. And then compare that mindset to the save lives argument. Really? Let's rephrase this argument for what it really is: "America nuked two cities, killing 129k to 246k people, entirely to prevent them, the Americans, from killing even more vastly more yellow people." If that doesn't sound like an actual crazy person argument, then I dunno what is  Plus, it's not even what American planners were actually thinking at the end of the war. The short answer to why America dropped two nuclear fission weapons on Japan: The Americans were really curious to see what would happen if you re-enacted the Trinity test on a city full of people.
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Feb 24, 2017 16:56
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So what's the argument here? That America should have not dropped the nukes and gone forward with the ground invasion?
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Feb 24, 2017 17:01
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A White Guy posted:Plus, whenever someone mentions the 'the save lives' argument, You really have to think about the American mindset toward the end of the war in context. Operation Olympia literally called for a string of nuclear holocausts, one after another, followed by an astonishingly bloody invasion of the Japanese homeland, where planners were casually tossing around "Oh, 1 to 2 million American dead whatever". Which would've been almost double the number of actual causalities the Americans had suffered in the entire war. AFAIK most plans issued in preparation for the invasion counted American casualties "only" in tens of thousands. Also they didn't want to destroy / genocide Japan, that is some weird revisionism. They for the most part wanted to capture the Tokyo coastal plains and force the Emperor to surrender at Kyoto.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:06
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A White Guy posted:Plus, whenever someone mentions the 'the save lives' argument, You really have to think about the American mindset toward the end of the war in context. Operation Olympia literally called for a string of nuclear holocausts, one after another, followed by an astonishingly bloody invasion of the Japanese homeland, where planners were casually tossing around "Oh, 1 to 2 million American dead whatever". Which would've been almost double the number of actual causalities the Americans had suffered in the entire war. The document Platyslemon linked above directly contradicts this. They were clearly discussing the psychological impact of the first two in terms of convincing Japan to surrender, possibly dropping a third, but if Japan still held out they were going to start holding them back to support an invasion of the islands in December or so. Somehow the firebombing of Tokyo in March that killed 100,000 was OK by you. Dropping two nukes that killed half as many, however, was beyond the pale.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:09
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steinrokkan posted:AFAIK most plans issued in preparation for the invasion counted American casualties "only" in tens of thousands. Also they didn't want to destroy / genocide Japan, that is some weird revisionism. They for the most part wanted to capture the Tokyo coastal plains and force the Emperor to surrender at Kyoto. There's been an argument made that the bombs gave the Japanese leadership - at least the factions that wanted to end the war - an opportunity to do so. The theory is that amphibious landings, bombings, and air-supported ground actions were nothing new to the military leadership, but that single bombs that flattened cities gave them an out: "well, this is a weapon beyond anything we can produce, and we can't counter it, no shame in capitulating now". Of course, Japanese leadership had enough back-biting factions to make Nazi leadership look like a campfire sing-along, but the fight-to-the-end ones happened to lose in this case.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:14
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