Question about hiroshima and nagasaki

[Stuart]

Madeline Slade? I didn't realize you were related.

My aunt. Or, as she was known when I was growing up Aunt Ma-shhhhh-not-in-front-of-the-children."

[Stuart]

It is one thing to think there is a better way that does not involve the pointless slaughter of the trenches. But it is another thing to risk your nations security on it without testing the idea decently. No one could think a Battle would work as an effective bomber if even one test flight and bombing run had been done on a factory mockup. Which suggests to me that no test run was done and they just assumed 1000lbs worth of bombs dropped on the roof would destroy the whole place.

have you any idea how much a test like that will cost if its done properly? It's not just a question of erectinga building and droppinga few bombs on it, do that and it will look as if a handful of 250 pounders will do very nicely. The whole factory has to be made perfectly, equipped with machine tools and throughly instrumented.

Now, go back to when all this was done. It was the 1930s, money was in desperately short supply. For training purposes, tanks were simulated by a man riding a bicycle with a sign around his neck saying "Tank". There wasn't enough money around to buy new rifles or machine guns let alone the ammunition to try them out. Everybody was short of everything - and now you want to spend a literal fortune on a factory so we can blow it up? And that's forgetting the fact that all teh equipment (for said factory) was in desperately short supply. Do the tests on the cheap and the Battle looks as if it works, do the test properly and you've blown the military budget for the year.

Even today, something like blowing up a fully-equipped factory would cause us to think twice. Back in the '30s, it just wasn't possible.

[Bilbo]

It is one thing to think there is a better way that does not involve the pointless slaughter of the trenches. But it is another thing to risk your nations security on it without testing the idea decently. No one could think a Battle would work as an effective bomber if even one test flight and bombing run had been done on a factory mockup. Which suggests to me that no test run was done and they just assumed 1000lbs worth of bombs dropped on the roof would destroy the whole place.

have you any idea how much a test like that will cost if its done properly? It's not just a question of erectinga building and droppinga few bombs on it, do that and it will look as if a handful of 250 pounders will do very nicely. The whole factory has to be made perfectly, equipped with machine tools and throughly instrumented.

Now, go back to when all this was done. It was the 1930s, money was in desperately short supply. For training purposes, tanks were simulated by a man riding a bicycle with a sign around his neck saying "Tank". There wasn't enough money around to buy new rifles or machine guns let alone the ammunition to try them out. Everybody was short of everything - and now you want to spend a literal fortune on a factory so we can blow it up? And that's forgetting the fact that all teh equipment (for said factory) was in desperately short supply. Do the tests on the cheap and the Battle looks as if it works, do the test properly and you've blown the military budget for the year.

Even today, something like blowing up a fully-equipped factory would cause us to think twice. Back in the '30s, it just wasn't possible.

You are right. To me though it is counter-logical. When you are short on money you do extra testing. Why? Because you want to make sure you are spending your money in the right area. If some effort had been put into it I am sure the government could have acquired a bankrupt or out of date factory to do some testing on. Or they could have skipped the whole facotory and just detonated their 250 lbs at progressively closer range to some old machine tools and find out how close you have to get to damage it sufficiently and then see how much work it would be to repair.

[Samuel]

Bilbo, there is never enough money. People are insatiable in their demands for things and the competition for limited resources never stops.

Of course, in the US we had alot of idle factories and unemployed people- production wasn't the problem. I guess we didn't do it because of aiming problems and realistic conditions would require city bombing tests and it is too expensive to make mockups of entire cities.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Madeline Slade? I didn't realize you were related.

My aunt. Or, as she was known when I was growing up Aunt Ma-shhhhh-not-in-front-of-the-children."

There must be something about the Indians/Pakistanis and their culture to have produce people who have such "idealism" and naiviety, really. You see it plastered around especially after the Mumbai incident.

[Stuart]

You are right. To me though it is counter-logical. When you are short on money you do extra testing. Why? Because you want to make sure you are spending your money in the right area.

But, the problem then becomes that one spends all one's money making studies and conducting tests leaving none for procurement. Then, things go one of two ways, either the force structure collapses because inadequate procurement doesn;t provide the equipment needed to train and practice the force level or the defense budget mushrooms out of control. What you're sugegsting is, in bleak fact, the problems the US defense budget currently faces and why we get less bang for our buck than pretty much any other nation. We make up for it by spending a LOT of bucks. If we didn't spend a fortune, we wouldn't have any armed forces, a dilemma due to exactly the approach you are suggesting. The technical name for this process is called "Activity as a substitute for Achievement"

Remember also that the budget for our test factory comes out of the overall Air Force budget and, in the 1930s, it would probably represent a major proportion of at least one year's budget. So your experiemnt effectively knackers aircraft production for a year. That means the aircraft companies don't have orders coming in so they have to lay off staff and lose experienced workers. The production machinery is idled. So, when things restart a year or more later, all that has to be reversed and that costs money. So, your proposal not only halts production and causes a serious budget crunch in one year, it has knock-on effects that affect subsequent years.

If some effort had been put into it I am sure the government could have acquired a bankrupt or out of date factory to do some testing on.

There's no such thing as an out-of-date factory. Factories aren't Twinkies, they don't have a sell-by date. A factory will be run until it is no longer economically viable then re-equipped. As to a bankrupt factory, factories don't go bankrupt, companies do. If a company does go down the tubes, a solid asset like a factory is probably the only route the investors have to getting some of their money back. If the government wants to blow it up, they have to buy it first, then they have to convert it so that it becomes an instrumented test range and that's probably more expensive than building a test range from scratch. Look up the history of a test ship called Matapan for a horrible example of that.

Or they could have skipped the whole factory and just detonated their 250 lbs at progressively closer range to some old machine tools and find out how close
you have to get to damage it sufficiently and then see how much work it would be to repair.

The problem here is that you're applying hindsight to the situation. We know NOW that the critical factor was damage to the machine tools and associated facilities, that wasn't known back in the 1930s (or indeed for a lot of the 1940s). That needed experience, careful analysis of bombing attacks and imaginative use of resources to discover. In fact, we eventually found that the best way to destroy a factory isn't to blow it up but to burn it down. That was quite unexpected and, from a 1930s viewpoint, counter-intuitive. We take it for granted now because we've known it for fifty years. In fact, the best way to destroy the industrial infrastructure of a country is to set the workforce on fire but that's a different issue.

So, you're proposing a series of tests that take as their basis the body of knowledge that the tests were supposed to develop. What your suggesting is in fact phase two of the test program. Having spent a few years bombing factories to find out what weight of attack is necessary to disable them, we analyse the results and then, having determined that damage to machine tools was the critical factor, we start to analyse what we need to do to wreck machine tools efficiently. By the time everything is done, we've probably spent the better part of a decade and our aviation design state-of-the-art is now a decade out of date. So the Brits try to bomb the Ruhr using Bolton Paul Overstrand bombers.

That is, by the way, assuming the studies came to the right conclusion.

[Stuart]

There must be something about the Indians/Pakistanis and their culture to have produce people who have such "idealism" and naiviety, really. You see it plastered around especially after the Mumbai incident.

According to family legend, Aunt Maddie was always a bit weird, right from her time as a little girl. Apparently she used to sit for hours staring out of the windows of the ancestral pile near Dorking. I never knew much about her when I was young; I knew she existed, primarily because everybody refused to talk about her and pursuing the matter was a good way of getting one's earhole smacked. All the pictures of her had been either thrown away or she'd been blacked out of them. A bit later, I found out some bare details from the surviving members of that generation but it wasn't until the arrival of the internet that I found out mroe about her or what she looked like.

[[R_H]]

What did she do that was considered so shameful?

[Stuart]

What did she do that was considered so shameful?

Ran off with Mahatma Ghandi and became his disciple.

[[R_H]]

What did she do that was considered so shameful?

Ran off with Mahatma Ghandi and became his disciple.

Ah ok, thought there was more to it. Must have been quite a blow to her father.

[Stuart]

Ah ok, thought there was more to it. Must have been quite a blow to her father.

That was enough in those days. Anyway, enough family reminiscneces, back to nuclear holocausts

[Falkenhayn]

How many SS-18s were aimed at NORAD? I figured MOD1 and MOD3 were designed with decapitation in mind.

[Samuel]

How many SS-18s were aimed at NORAD? I figured MOD1 and MOD3 were designed with decapitation in mind.

According to An Illustrated Guide to Strategic Weapons (Published 1988) there were 308 missle silos holding the SS-18, with each ICBM able to deploy 10+ warheads. The sea based version is another matter. What are MODs? They weren't listed in the book.

Yes, Stuart and Shep and rubbing off on me.

[Falkenhayn]

How many SS-18s were aimed at NORAD? I figured MOD1 and MOD3 were designed with decapitation in mind.

According to An Illustrated Guide to Strategic Weapons (Published 1988) there were 308 missle silos holding the SS-18, with each ICBM able to deploy 10+ warheads. The sea based version is another matter. What are MODs? They weren't listed in the book.

Yes, Stuart and Shep and rubbing off on me.

Unless I'm totally off base, MOD 2 and 4 of the SS18 were MIRV'ed. MOD 1 and 3 were single 24 and 20 MT warheads, respectively.

[Adrian Laguna]

MOD is just short for "modification". It's different configurations for the same missile or warhead.

[MKSheppard]

have you any idea how much a test like that will cost if its done properly? It's not just a question of erectinga building and droppinga few bombs on it, do that and it will look as if a handful of 250 pounders will do very nicely. The whole factory has to be made perfectly, equipped with machine tools and throughly instrumented.

Well, what about a stand in?

Buy a couple of worn out machine tools, or get some from a war munitions factory that closed in 1918; set them up on a bombing range, get one of those mortars that the US Navy/Royal Navy used to test naval shells against armor plate, and then fire the bombs at the impact point, and then examine how much damage is inflicted to the machine tools at distance from the GZ by blast, shock, and fragmentation.

[Pelranius]

have you any idea how much a test like that will cost if its done properly? It's not just a question of erectinga building and droppinga few bombs on it, do that and it will look as if a handful of 250 pounders will do very nicely. The whole factory has to be made perfectly, equipped with machine tools and throughly instrumented.

Well, what about a stand in?

Buy a couple of worn out machine tools, or get some from a war munitions factory that closed in 1918; set them up on a bombing range, get one of those mortars that the US Navy/Royal Navy used to test naval shells against armor plate, and then fire the bombs at the impact point, and then examine how much damage is inflicted to the machine tools at distance from the GZ by blast, shock, and fragmentation.

But wouldn't that take things like the effects of the factory walls out of the equation when examining damage done by the mortars? And I think one would still need a whole factory's worth of machine tools, which won't come cheap either.

[Stuart]

Well, what about a stand in? Buy a couple of worn out machine tools, or get some from a war munitions factory that closed in 1918; set them up on a bombing range, get one of those mortars that the US Navy/Royal Navy used to test naval shells against armor plate, and then fire the bombs at the impact point, and then examine how much damage is inflicted to the machine tools at distance from the GZ by blast, shock, and fragmentation.

Again that would do nicely as a phase two. The problem is that we'd have to determine what the primary cause of elimination in a factory was. Remember, in those days we were starting from a zero base of knowledge when it came to destruction by bombing. Nobody knew it was pretty much irrelevent what happened to the building as long as the machine tools survived. After all, factories themselves had been around for less than fifty years; take a pre-1850s 'mill' and bomb it and a quartet of 250 pounder hits really would do a number on it. So to start a really methodical and meaningful analysis we'd have to start off with a real factory and bomb it, then carefuly inspect the damage and the data readings from the instrumentation and see exactly what happened when the bombs hit. Then, we'd have to try and get the factory working again, see how long it took and what the problems were. The holes in the roof? Tarpaulins. Damage to the railway tracks leading in? Take up the rails and relay them, you get the idea. Then the study splits two ways. Having determined what the critical points of damage are, how do we (a) maximize them from the offensive point of view and (b) minimize them from the defensive point of view.

Your study comes in Part 2(a). Having determined that damage to machine tooling is the critical point of damage how do we maximize it? Are lots of little bombs better than a few big ones? We know the answer to that today, nobody knew it in 1930 and the answer is actually counter-intuitive. We've got another problem, even if we can get the right answer, there's no aircraft available that can lift the load required for optimum performance. In parallel with that is study 2(b) - how do we defend against the attack? That means rebuilding the factory and putting defenses in. Like blast walls around each individual machine - which is very effective. We also have to study how we could salvage the bombed factory by moving its contents to a new building and replacing the damaged equipment.

Then we go to phase 3 of the study which would take the offensive results of study 2(a) and the rebuilt, protected factory from Study 2(b) and throw the first against the second in a repeat of phase 1. And the whole process starts again.

Please note that this is the minimum sort of study that would constitute a thorough investigation of the subject. It would take years and cost a fortune, probably a susbtantial proportion of the overall defense budget and a large proportion of the RAF's budget. In effect it would end RAF procurement of new aircraft for five or six years. The aircraft companies would go out of business and then there wouldn't be any procurement. Period. In fact the study would have done what the enemy's strategic air offensive was supposed to have done, taken out an entire industrial sector.

Please also note that even this study wouldn't be accurate, it omits two important points. One is the importance of fire as a way of destroying things and it also omits the importance of defenses as a way or protecting them. The only way to test the latetr is actually to try and shoot down the bombers (really shoot them down) and see what effect it has on accuracy. We know now the answer is "profound" but that wasn't so obvious then.

So, the sort of studies that would have given meaningful answers simply were not possible in the 1930s. Instead, people argued the point out theoretically. There were a few people who came up with the right answer, that the sort of effects claimed for strategic bombing could only be achieved by totally destroying the country in question but they were a minority. Only when nuclear weapons arrived on the scene and the effects of conventional bombing were reviewed did the horrible answer become apparent.