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It's funny. Laugh. Science

A Physicist with the Air Force 221

Posted by michael from the meet-new-and-interesting-people,-and-kill-them dept.
An anonymous submitter - anonymous because of the database crash that wiped out several hours of data today, sigh - sent in this tale about the duties of a physicist during World War II.
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A Physicist with the Air Force More

A Physicist with the Air Force

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  • ...but he neglected to mention which house---sounds like a scurve to me....

    This all was probably necessary, but it's much better when you can have this kind of fun in peacetime.
    • Silly frosh! Grad turkeys don't live in the houses, although I suppose he might have been a social member.
      • look in your history of tech at the time of ww2 ... they actually did rotate pilots and flight engineers through 8 week long classes here on campus, and housed them in dabney and page by god too, or maybe it was blacker too i forget exactly which of the houses. teaching flight crews dead reckoning and celestial nav, yup you didnt realize the tech was a trade school didya, look again it still is but for engineers and academic researchers :)
        • ...that's why they're called the "new" houses---I think they were built around 1960, in the post-Sputnik funding wave.

  • Don't ride the bomb... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mikeage ( 119105 ) <slashdot@mike[ ].net ['age' in gap]> on Tuesday August 21, 2001 @07:18PM (#2202682) Homepage
    From the article:

    At the pilot's insistence (I will not repeat his heated words), I dislodged the target by jumping on it while hanging from a bomb-bay rack and wearing a parachute, just in case.

    For those who didn't read the article (after all, if you did, this comment is worthless to you), he's talking about a training "dummy aircraft" for gunners to practice shooting at that didn't drop from the bomber that was carrying, and jammed in the bomb bay, preventing the doors from closing (which meant they couldn't land). Quite a hilarious mental picture if you ask me ;)

    • Quite a hilarious mental picture if you ask me

      I think it was probably more of a "look back on this some day and laugh" sort of issue. At the time, I think the prospect of being unable to land would have been strict brown trousers time.

      • I think it was probably more of a "look back on this some day and laugh" sort of issue. At the time, I think the prospect of being unable to land would have been strict brown trousers time.

        Whaddya mean? When I was your age, airplanes didn't _have_ landing gear...
    • Heh... that reminded me of the ending of Dr. Strangelove. Only it wasn't a dummy target, it was a nuke. Oh, and he wasn't wearing a parachute. Not that it would matter if he did anyway.
    • Similar to the ending of Doctor Strangelove, indeed.
      • That's what struck me, too. I'm trying to remember the name of the actor who rode that bomb. It sounds like a proverb or something. Slim Pickens or something like that.
        • peter sellers. imdb [imdb.com] is your friend.

        • Interesting relationship:

          In the movie, Slim Pickens (here [starpulse.com] for reference) is the guy who causes the atomic bomb to drop from the plane. (Jumping up and down on the bomb was one of his attempts.)

          In reality, Alex Green(writer of the article), jumped up and down on a plane trailer to get it out of the towing plane. Of course, the more interesting part is the fact that Alex also helped make the equipment that would cause the real atomic bombs to be dropped properly.

          • There's some good stuff at score level 1

            So true, so true.

            I would have modded up your comment for that sig. alone -- except I wasted all my mod points on the article that got "lost" today when Slashdot was up and down. (A good read, if unoriginal, read by the way about whether a wireless world and the changes it has already made to our social structures.)

            Ah well. Even with the bugs being worked out and the ever-present MS bashing, Slashdot is still the best place for consistantly insightful thoughts on the 'Net...

    • He trained people to shoot the big ole guns that blasted planes out of the sky. Well they towed a dummy airplane behind a real one. Sometimes while praticing advanced manuvers the trainee would for getwhich plane he was shooting at and would give the pilot a heart attack.
    • My first thought was of the scene in Dr. Strangelove where Slim Pickens was sitting on the bomb in the bomb bay.
  • Our streamlined procedures took advantage of the fact that officers had a monthly liquor allowance but enlisted men did not. To secure a special slide rule, the requesting officer would pay with two bottles.

    Yeah! I was born too late... ~sigh~

    • Of course, if liquor was what you're most interested in, too bad you weren't in the Soviet Air Force. According to the book by a Soviet pilot who defected with his MIG-25 (Belenko?), the hydraulics system of that plane was run open loop with pure alcohol. That is, when they fueled the plane, they'd also fill a large tank with alcohol, and it would pour out during the flight. The ground crews were usually drunk (and any officers and pilots with insufficient self-discipline, also), but mainly bottles of that alcohol became the "currency" to get your name moved to the top of the waiting list for an apartment, to get maintenance done once you had an apartment, or to buy things on the black market. Finally, an auditor wondered why the jet fuel and hydraulic fluid consumption didn't match -- so they dumped large quantities of kerosene out in the woods...


      America in WWII temporarily became a mostly socialist system -- and liquor used for bribes is a good example of how things get done in socialism.

  • Sheesh (Score:1)

    by wbav ( 223901 )
    Nonetheless, the personnel officer at the Washington, DC, area discharge center wrote the words "no active duty" on my discharge papers. That characterization nearly got me reinducted, and it disqualified me from the GI Bill. This last injustice has, however, since been rectified. On 7 December 2000, I received from Randolph Air Force Base in Texas a revised discharge "from active duty," entitling me, at age 81, to the benefits of the GI Bill.

    At least it seems that the army finally got things together.
    • The Army Air Corps during WWII was notoriously disorganized with paperwork. My uncle flew a B-17 during the war and he still has the receipt from when he turned the plane in after the war. He says "I know how the Army works and they're going to come looking for that plane one of these days."

      "We fill out this form in triplicate. One we keep, one we send to headquarters and one we destroy so the Russians won't get it."

      -Coach-

  • I like hearing stories like this, and this one is no exception, but I must commend this guy on his memory and detail after 56 years. Hehe, notice how he said "And then I came up with a way to count the gunner's score" or some such quote, then says about how someone else was the group leader? (DuMond?) Maybe not everything he said is true...
  • In our first launch from a bomb bay, the target got jammed against the tow plane's fuselage in such a way as to prevent the bomb-bay doors from closing. So we couldn't land. At the pilot's insistence (I will not repeat his heated words), I dislodged the target by jumping on it while hanging from a bomb-bay rack and wearing a parachute, just in case. After that experience, we mounted the target externally and soon had a usable offset tow-target system.

    Let's face it, probably the most fun most scientists have is in the middle of a war. If nothing else, it makes for great drinking stories, and it is often easier to get things done.

    - - -
    Radio Free Nation [radiofreenation.com]
    is a news site based on Slash Code
    "If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
    - - -

    • Scientists always have more fun in the middle of a war, they just have to convince somebody that what they are doing is capable of dispatching the enemy.

      The next big war should be fun though, mayeb I could try and get a job researching partical beam weaponry etc.
    • How very true, it is *much* easier to get things done in a dictatorship, if you're on the dictators good side.

      There's no question that the most effective and efficient form of "governance" is a benevolent dictatorship.

      Two problems: It's never benevolent for long, and it's never benevolent to dissent.

      It's also illustrative to consider the concept of "governance", and why efficient "governance" is a really lousy thing anyway.

      That's why the U.S. "government" is designed at its inception to be as inefficient as possible, and why it took four-score and seven years before someone was able to install an efficient "governance" under it. And that brought war.

      Bob-

  • What really went on...

    "Lets see...if I divide the mass of this, by the volume of that, multiply by the 'Q' factor of this approach vector, ofcourse keeping in mind the varible wind density...ahhh ha! yes! I'VE FOUND THE VELOCITY OF A GERMAN!"


    ***********Disclimer************
    This was meant to be in no way offensive to Germany, or it's people: the Germans.
    One can easily find the velocity of Americans by simply substituting the 'Q' factor with the square root of 5.2

  • Slide Rule Club (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dr. Dew ( 219113 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2001 @07:31PM (#2202716) Homepage
    At first I thought he was kidding about the slide rule club - I guess we're this generation's equivalent.

    It's a little sobering to think of these engineering problems in their human context - even ignoring the fact that he's talking about bombers, it's striking to think that they had enough data to calculate 70-to-1 fighter-to-B29 kill ratios on rear attacks and 3-to-1 kill ratios on front attacks.

    The opportunity to make adjustments to decisions as theoretical data are replaced by empirical data is exciting and rewarding. But I'm glad my adjustments don't have an immediate impact with respect to people living and dying.
    • the simplified statistics look like a trap; he treats them as a simple metric of the bomber's vulnerability to attack from different angles. i wonder if the bombers faced more frontal attacks early in their mission - before they had released their bombs and were still carrying lots of fuel.

      or perhaps less experienced pilots would tend to mount attacks from behind.

      the guy sounds very clever, but when i see statistics like that i start wondering about what they're really measuring.
      • cosmo7 wrote:
        the guy sounds very clever, but when i see statistics like that i start wondering about what they're really measuring.

        Umm, what difference does it make? If you're suffering more losses from frontal attacks, you need to beef up your frontal defense. It doesn't really matter why the losses are greater, the reaction is going to be the same.

        • What you say is somewhat true, but if you know why you're taking losses in a certain situation you're more likely to make the most effective adjustments.



      • (...) the simplified statistics look like a trap; he treats them
        as a simple metric of the bomber's vulnerability to attack from different
        angles

        (...) or perhaps less experienced pilots would tend to mount attacks
        from behind        .

        I see your point. If the opposition's tactics were such that
        the likelihood of an attack from the rear as opposed to a frontal attack
        was greater than 70/3, then this would indicate that even more tactical protection
        was required for the rear, rather than the front. Time dependence of
        enemy tactics beginning with the initial engagment should also enter into
        the analysis, as you suggest.

      • That was supposed to be (70/3) to 1

      • the guy sounds very clever, but when i see statistics like that i start wondering about what they're really measuring.

        I seriously doubt that the brief summary of his work on that problem was the entire thought process or analysis.

        Considering that the analysis he did make apparently helped to alleviate the problem says something to be certain. There's also the possability that data was severely limited and all he could do is make a good experimental guess.

  • Payment: Old Granddad! (Score:4, Informative)

    by hyrdra ( 260687 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2001 @07:37PM (#2202732) Homepage Journal
    This is an article which really makes me appriciate what we have today. If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.

    My favorite line of the entire article (in reference to the fabrication of slide rules used in the missions):

    But, to avoid paperwork and delivery delays, I chose to have them made at the Harmon Field sheet-metal shop on Guam. At that time, there wasn't much combat damage to B-29s. So the repair crews readily gave up some of their beach time for a few bottles of Old Granddad.

    Yep, things we're certainly different back then!
    • Heh, not that different. I'd be willing to bet that the enlisted troops at the Fab shop on Guam would still do you a few favors for a bottle or two of 'Ole Granddad'

    • If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.

      Where I used to work, we had a cranky old curmudgeon of an engineer. He was great fun; he knew how to use AutoCAD, but he hated it. Every time Windows would BSoD on him, out would come the slide rule from its padded case. And he was an artist with it.

    • But, to avoid paperwork and delivery delays, I chose to have them made at the Harmon Field sheet-metal shop on Guam. At that time, there wasn't much combat damage to B-29s. So the repair crews readily gave up some of their beach time for a few bottles of Old Granddad.

      Yep, things we're certainly different back then!
      Actually, things are still somewhat like this in the military. I was in the Air Force for 6 years, and saw this kind of thing go on routinely. Nothing illegal, just the shop giving your work priority over others' because they owe you a favor, or you bought them a case of beer or something.

    • This is an article which really makes me appreciate what we have today. If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a
      slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.


      It's not like the pilot had to fly and use a slide rule at the same time. The B-29 carried a crew of 10 to 14. Computational tasks were performed by the navigator, co-pilot, and bombardier.


      Pilot workload in today's warcraft is higher than it was back then. All those jobs are now done by one, or at most two, crew, along with multiple computers.

  • I've sometimes speculated that Shockley didn't like my Shoran slide rule and therefore went back to Bell Labs to invent the transistor that put us out of business.

    I do not work in and have had very little exposure to research science. I have read many stories, fiction and non, of competition providing motivation, even the base fuel to researchers in their endeavor to innovate. My grandfather, who was an optical engineer, related to me some stories of his time working in the optics research division of a very large and respected corporation during the fifties and sixties. Though they were on the same "team", the level of competition at that facility was as high as any he had ever seen in any of his experiences, including his time in the military and as an amateur and professional boxer.

    I would be interested to hear from people that are directly exposed to research sciences what role competition plays.
  • After all, this tale of yesteryear is published in "Physics Today".

    (Oh wait, this isn't FARK. Nevermind.)

  • So, they're hackers... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rimbo ( 139781 ) <rimbosity@sbcglobal . n et> on Tuesday August 21, 2001 @08:00PM (#2202789) Homepage Journal
    And I especially note this one:

    ``Requests for special slide rules grew. To respond quickly, I set up a paperwork-free design and production service. Our streamlined procedures took advantage of the fact that officers had a monthly liquor allowance but enlisted men did not. To secure a special slide rule, the requesting officer would pay with two bottles. I would pass these contributions along to the enlisted members of the 949th Topographical Company, who did the drafting, calculations, and reproductions. Somehow our service enjoyed a de facto priority second only to the production of mission maps.''

    My God...it's the grandfather of "Free as in Beer!" :)
  • I wonder how many times more powerful our modern day computers are compared to this articles "computerized slide rule"? :)
    • Not very if at all for the very specialized tasks these devices were designed for. Especially if you take boot times, power requirements and field service ability into account.
  • This reminds me of an excellent Isaac Asimov story. [downlode.org] I think he foresaw our reactions to the history of computation quite well.
  • The article was funny, and a good reminiscence, but:

    Shockley, Teller, and LeMay

    what an unholy trinity that is!

    Shockley [ferris.edu], the Nobel Prize winner who determined to devote his life to eugenics;

    Teller [tripod.com], the brilliant scientist who pushed the DoD further into the realm of "The Super", and beyond;

    and, finally, LeMay [wa.gov] (brilliantly portrayed by George C. Scott in "Dr. Strangelove"), the hawk's hawk who would stop at nothing to achieve global superiority for his country, even at the expense of the American people.

    These men, while they performed great deeds in their lifetimes, are to me a good example of how excessive hubris in the scientific and technical arena can be a very dangerous thing, indeed. None of these men can be considered Great Men, in my opinion, because they wandered from the path of integrity and truth in their zealous pursuit of technology for technology's sake.

    But the article makes for a great read, and I'm sure in their day these men were admired and respected. I have the advantage of hindsight, and hope that we can all learn from these men how, for some vicious mole of nature in them [thineownself.com], even the greatest of men are prone to fall!

    • Admit it. Who bought The HTML book [amazon.co.uk] because:

      • It was just a good HTML book
      • You always liked her Usenet .sigs
      • Having nuclear weapons will always appeal to geeks

    • What? You don't think we should follow Teller's idea and use H-Bombs (about 6 in the 20MT range, IIRC) to give Alaska a really kickass bay?

      Also IIRC, isn't there still some controversy as to if it was really Teller's design for the Super? There was a fair ammount of evidence that the design was really Ulam's and Teller stole it, wasn't there?

      Of course, IMHO, Teller is simply a nutbar, but that's just me. Atomics for civil engineering my arse!
  • anonymous because of the database crash that wiped out several hours of data today, sigh

    That's okay. Losing Slashdot for the day was bad, but it's worth it when you picture all the trolls and karma whores desperately trying to take advantage of the second chance to get first post on the Mac metadata story.

    "Gah! I click Reply and it goes back to the main page! But i need to post, it says 0 comments! Reply! Reply! Augghhh!"
  • Right, it's nit-picking, but this fellow should know better: after all, he was there! The Air Force was formed in '47 out of the Army Air Corp. My Dad joined the Army in '42 or '43 and was assigned to the Air Corp... He seperated along with about ten million other guys not long after VJ day
  • " This war story begins in 1935 at Brooklyn Technical High School, where my physics teacher, Simon Weissman, introduced me to most of the physics that I was eventually to use in World War II."

    Don't let this article give you a favorable opinion of Brooklyn Tech.
    It reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllly is a bad school. I don't know why it's still a NY "Specialized High School."(Did they mean to call it "Special" High School)

    Anyhow, I got one more year of suffering in brooklyn tech left.
    Somebody shoot me point blank with a sniper rifle.
  • The Air Force was technically the Army Air Corp during WWII... but who's counting :)

    The article reminds me a lot of "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!".

    • You mean where he was at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, and he figured out how to open the combination locks on other people's desks? What a great story. I especially liked his interaction with the house locksmith.
  • that this would make a good movie, not a good article on a physics site. Its got its share of action and war etc.

    I suppose it'd be a bit too intelectual for hollywood though.

    • I was thinking that it would make a good companion piece to Cryptonomicon - they both discussed men of thought thrown into the midst of WWII and prized for their intellect. OK, Cryptonomicon had a lot more stuff too, but just imagine the yarn that Stephenson could spin out of this guy's story :)

      • After reading this article, I'm wondering why I stayed up for four nights reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

        In ten minutes this guy drops just as many names as Stephenson, and the -1 comments are just like the sex between the fat unix guy and America Shaftoe.


        Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!
  • "To facilitate the calculation, I developed a special slide rule that used the general principle of multiplying two quantities by mechanically adding distances proportional to their logarithms."

    He pretty much described right there the basic concept of any sliderule ever used by anybody. All that was needed was to figure out the trig formula and making the numbers different on a normal rule. And for this the Army Air Corps needed a PhD candidate? I didn't know they had PHBs that long ago.

    BTW: Is it my imagination or do we no longer need P tags?
    • Interesting, though, that nobody else came up with it before this particular man did.

      Of course, I'm sure that with your towering intellect, you would have come up with it much more quickly, allowing our friend the writer to get on with whatever it is he was supposed to be doing.

      (Can you tell I really hate these "it's so obvious" posts?)
      • "Interesting, though, that nobody else came up with it before this particular man did."

        I was harping on that particular paragraph's wording. He seems to be claiming credit for the sliderule in general (something the author points out at the bottom of the article that has been in use since the 17th century or so).

        In today's terms, it would be like me saying "I developed a new, specialized computer for our B-2 bombers. It has a small hexadecimal LCD screen, a number pad, and four buttons, one each for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. With it, the crews can enter one number, press the multiplication button, enter a second number and receive the product of those two numbers. For more complicated calculations, I've even inclucded a small memory for storing values."

    • From the pictures, it looks like there were some other features used, like 2D graphs with cursors ("nomograms"), which allowed the user to evaluate a function of two variables. One of them had multiple curved lines, indicating the evaluation of a function with three variables.

      Designing something usable in combat with hastily trained crews was a neat trick.

  • incorrect simulation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kisrael ( 134664 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2001 @10:28PM (#2202976) Homepage
    After six weeks of data collection and statistical analysis, I completed my report. My analysis showed that, in attacks on our B-29s from the rear, it cost the enemy 70 lost fighter planes, on average, to shoot down one of our bombers. But in frontal attacks, the Japanese lost only three fighters for every B-29 they downed. This result differed starkly from the results of a massive combat simulation study, done back home, that had concluded that B-29s would be most vulnerable to attacks from behind! In light of the new findings, bomber formations and tactics were modified to bring greater firepower to bear against frontal attacks. These changes, together with some minor technical modifications, largely solved the problem

    Any guesses what they were doing wrong with the "massive combat simulation study"?
    • sign change error? ;-)

      (how many times, if you were a technical student, have you ever calculated a negative mass or something and realized it was a simple sign error somewhere in the middle of a pages-long computation?)

    • "combat simulations" with real aircraft lack one thing: live ammo. You can't have live ammo drills with air-to-air combat, it's too dangerous (no kidding, you say) even with the .50 caliber machine guns and relatively inaccurate sights and cannons of the 40s.

      I'd guess that they based this on:
      a) the history of the other bombers of WWII, that took MANY more losses from the rear than from the front, as they had much more front-bearing defensive weaponry
      b) the japanese were used to making frontal attacks on the old bombers, and were better at avoiding the defensive weaponry. It's a reflex thing. If you've ever played a flight sim you know that it's much easier to stay on target when you're behind an enemy - but if you practice the frontal attacks, with double the closure speed, that's a huge advantage.
      c) Read some history of the Pacific air war sometime. The Japanese pilots were totally fearless, they didn't care if they died attacking bombers, because of the Samurai ethic, and that the B-29 was being used to bomb the home islands. By the time the B-29 showed up (late winter/spring 45) we were well into Japanese territory and it was a grave insult to them.

      -JW

    • Any guesses what they were doing wrong with the "massive combat simulation study"?

      To state the obvious, wrong assumptions that could only be properly tested in real combat. Don't forget that that there'd never been anything that heavy, fast, and long-range before, and that the development program had to be pushed through at an incredible tempo once the war started in the Pacific where such an aircraft was essential. It's not surprising that simulations didn't always get the right answers - what was critical was that the real-world results were accepted and acted on, rather than a having a lot of arguing with the simulations people fighting for "their" results.

      There's a lot of material available online about the plane. Try asking Google about "B-29" and combat and warbirds, and look at the warbirdsresourcegroup page near the top of the list.

    • Any guesses what they were doing wrong with the "massive combat simulation study"? Just a guess, but since they obviously couldn't let the gunners use real bullets when Americans were flying the fighters, they didn't properly figure how much easier it is to get the tail turrets onto a plane flying along behind you (usually less than 50 mph difference in speed), as compared to using the nose turret to hit a plane oncoming at about 900 mph relative velocity. On the other hand, any fighter pilot could tell them that from the tail he could keep a bomber in his sights until it went down or he ran out of ammo, while from a nose attack you were lucky to put a dozen rounds on target. Not enough to do real damage unless you got really lucky (e.g., through the windshield and into the pilots.)


      Or maybe they just failed to simulate desperate Japanese pilots using kamikaze tactics. From the tail, there was plenty of time to shoot an attacker down, from the nose it was probably too late by the time they locked on target. And a zero hitting head-on would either destroy the whole cockpit or shear a wing off if on target.

  • It's amazing what a little "alcohol lubrication" can do to speed up the production line!
  • and here I thought I just got burned on a daily CVS build of Mozilla.... now nothing builds, my browsers horked from me trying to "fix" it when slash had the problem, and I'll have to re-set every cookie I blasted away.

    Thank god I did not think it was a kernel problem....

  • Flying tigers (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    My favorite quote:


    Hobbs later served as president of the American Psychological Society.


    Sad that the tiger who provided such companionship to Calvin would one day finally go completely crazy.

    Anonymous cowards do too know how to spell, dammit.

  • This "turn computer" proved useful 50 years later, when Edward Teller asked me, in hindsight, to investigate whether a humane high-altitude "demonstration" detonation of an atomic bomb over Tokyo Bay would have been feasible. The higher the detonation altitude, the less time the B-29 would have for turning away from the impending shock wave.

    OK this sounds scientifically correct - but what was the actual answer to Mr. Teller's question?

    • > what was the actual answer to Mr. Teller's question? [about whether or not the crew of a B-29 doing a high-altitude demonstration burst over Tokyo Bay would have been survivable]

      From the pilot's own account of the Nagasaki bombing [att.net]:

      We removed our glasses after the first flash but the light still lingered on, a bluish-green light that illuminated the entire sky all around. A tremendous blast wave struck our ship and made it tremble from nose to tail. This was followed by four more blasts in rapid succession, each resounding like the boom of cannon fire hitting our plane from all directions.

      If that's what a bomb at 1640 feet feels like from 30000 feet and after turning away and hauling ass out of there [att.net] as fast as possible, then there's... well... to be blunt, I see no effing way a B-29 could deliver a high-altitude demonstration burst and have survived, slide rule or not.

      (By way of reference, the service ceiling of a B-29 is around 33000 feet. Flying to 60000 feet simply wasn't an option with the technology at the time - and the B-29 was the only aircraft capable of lifting something as heavy as a nuke and flying it the required distance.)

      War isn't pretty. War isn't supposed to be pretty. The day war becomes pretty, we've all got problems.

      /me raises a glass to all veterans and all who supported them for jobs well done. Thanks.

      • War isn't pretty. War isn't supposed to be pretty. The day war becomes pretty, we've all got problems.

        Read some of the US media descriptions of the Gulf War, or even better find some CNN footage from it. Not pretty, exactly, but most of them avoided as much of the ugly stuff as they could. They made it look like a video-game war. Granted, they were mostly just passing along the stuff spoon-fed to them by the Pentagon, but that's part of the problem, innit?

        Yup, we've all got problems.

  • ... in my days we did extreme physics!
  • - anonymous because of the database crash that wiped out several hours of data today, sigh


    Michael, SAP/DB [sap.com] is free, and transaction safe, and hence recoverable if the machine crashes. Might be worth checking it out. It's GPL, too.


    Cheers!

  • I found it interesting that he'd done computations regarding whether or not we could have done a "demonstration" bombing, and that it wasn't feasible.

    The B-29 over Nagasaki was barely far enough away to avoid destruction as it was; if we'd done the "demonstration" so many Slashdotters occasionally complain about, it would have been a suicide mission.
    • The B-29 over Nagasaki was barely far enough away to avoid destruction as it was; if we'd done the "demonstration" so many Slashdotters occasionally complain about, it would have been a suicide mission.

      Yup. That doesn't rule it out, of course -- it's not like suicide missions aren't sometimes worth the cost. But instead, it was a 60,000* homicides mission. And 90,000* homicides for Hiroshima. (Possibly justifiable homicides, depending on how one looks at it. But possibly not.)

      *Conservative estimates.

      • But instead, it was a 60,000* homicides mission. And 90,000* homicides for Hiroshima. (Possibly justifiable homicides, depending on how one looks at it. But possibly not.)

        How many homicides are you gonna charge us with for Iwo Jima? Normandy?
        • How many homicides are you gonna charge us with for Iwo Jima? Normandy?

          How many were there?

          Like I said, it's at least arguable that killing people is sometimes justifiable. But it is still killing. Arguing that one should go ahead and kill tens of thousands of people because one possible alternative is a suicide mission for a few is totally specious.

          Would I go on such a suicide mission? Dammed if I know. If I was reasonably certain that it had a good chance of making hundreds of thousands of further deaths on either/both sides less likely, I like to think that I'd be willing. But obviously no one can really know such a thing about themselves unless they're actually in the situation.

          • Like I said, it's at least arguable that killing people is sometimes justifiable. But it is still killing.

            Killing does not necessarily equal homicide. You used a specific term.

            Arguing that one should go ahead and kill tens of thousands of people because one possible alternative is a suicide mission for a few is totally specious.

            Is it? I don't see it that way.

            Japan attacked us. The way I see it, that means that saving their lives becomes less of a consideration than saving the lives of our people.

            I would never advocate an initiation of force, but they initiated.

            And don't give me the "following orders" argument; if you're expecting ME to commit suicide to avoid killing them, they should bloody well commit suicide first to avoid killing me.
            • And don't give me the "following orders" argument; if you're expecting ME to commit suicide to avoid killing them, they should bloody well commit suicide first to avoid killing me.

              [shrug] I'm not expecting YOU to do anything.

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