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Photos of Mountains and Buildings, also more on WWII
1. Difficult work week - which has made me more irritable than I've been of late. Every time I think I have some semblance of control over my job? My crazy organization rips it out from under me.
I'd scheduled my week perfectly - with one major thing every other day. Site Tour (Tuesday Morning)/Consultant Ethics Training Tuesday Afternoon, Power Point Presentation on Teams (Wed), More meetings on Teams (Thursday), Site Tour (Friday). But alas, my boss changed it all last Friday. Instead it was Site Tour(morning)/Powerpoint Presentation (afternoon), Cancel Ethic Training - reschedule for later date, Boss covers for meetings on Teams, Site Tour all day Thursday.
Then to add to all this - they changed the dates and information on me for the presentation, prior to it. So I had to kind of wing it.
I'm doing three projects simultaneously, and one of them feels like I'm wrangling an alligator (as one colleague put it).
We all procure government services contracts for a living.
Anyhow, here's a photo from my Site Tour - or rather photos taken from the roof of Atlantic Terminal Train Station - I actually got to tour the interior of my train station. I got to visit the roof of Atlantic Terminal Station. (It was a site tour to replace an air conditioning system for the station.)
2. Now a few photos from my niece who is busy being a park ranger in Sequoia National Park. She's loving it out there. She did take a break to visit her Mom for her birthday. Also her friends. She flew out to Martha's Vineyard - where her parents were staying and stayed with them for about two days, then came back with them to New York, to see her friends. She drove into the city on Monday, stayed the night with her Mom, then flew back to California on Tuesday morning. She loves the area so much - that she's thinking of applying to schools in California. Apparently she missed her mountains.
3. Discussing Oppenheimer flick with folks.
* Co-worker informed me that she had an opportunity to take a job out at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It still studies and researches nuclear weapons and their effects. As a federally funded research and development center, Los Alamos National Laboratory aligns our strategic plan with priorities set by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE NNSA) and key national strategy guidance documents. We execute work across all of DOE’s missions: national security, science, energy, and environmental management. Scientific and engineering capabilities developed through LANL’s stockpile research are part of what makes DOE and NNSA a science, technology, and engineering powerhouse for the nation. More than one co-worker has visited the facility and interviewed there.
* Mother asked me an interesting question last night, that continues to haunt me today..."What if Japan had surrendered but Germany hadn't? Would we have dropped the bomb on Germany - and would have been the consequences of that?"
I think it's worth contemplating. Because if that had happened...
We went on to discuss the War. Germany lost mainly because of Russia - and for same reasons Napoleon did, and well anyone who tried to conquer Russia over the past 2,000 years has. Germany was fighting the War on multiple fronts - and well, Russian Winters - it couldn't handle. And that did it in, along with the fact that Hitler was losing his hold on his base, and there was dissension in the ranks (and more than one plot to assassinate him).
But the question that sticks - is What if we had dropped the atomic bombs on Germany? What would that have done to Europe?
What if someone else had gotten there first?
Oppenheimer brings up a lot of unsettling questions. The more I think about WWII, the more I want to cry. It was such a horrible war - it brought out the absolute worst in so many people. Light won in the end, but at such a high cost.
Did a little looking about, and found this regarding the actual death toll for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's been a lot of discrepancies and miscalculations over the years, so no one is certain. Same is true of the death toll of the Holocaust.
But the devastation was so bad, Truman announced after Hiroshima, that they would never do it again. Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagaskai - from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
"On August 8, news reports from Japan, plus a damage report created by the United States, began to paint a picture of the destruction. Aerial surveys revealed at least 60% of the city’s “built-up areas” were destroyed, leading to the conclusion that perhaps “as many as 200,000 of Hiroshima’s 340,000 residents perished or were injured,” as one United Press story put it. The same story quoted “unofficial American sources” that estimated that the “dead and wounded” might exceed 100,000.
Such numbers were large, and appear to have had a sobering effect on President Harry S. Truman. After the August 9 Nagasaki raid (which he had no apparent foreknowledge of), he would put a stop to further bombing, telling his cabinet that “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible,” according to an August 10, 1945, diary entry by then-Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace. It is not clear that Truman had any real sense of how many casualties there would have been prior to the attacks. The only pre-Hiroshima estimate on record is the recollection from Arthur Compton that at a May 31, 1945, meeting of the Interim Committee, J. Robert Oppenheimer had suggested that an atomic bomb dropped would kill “some 20,000 people” if exploded over a city. This is not recorded in the meeting minutes, nor in any other report or correspondence, so it does not seem that this estimate had any special weight to the participants. (Compton amended that this estimate had assumed people would seek shelter; given that no warning was issued for the attacks, this did not occur.)"
And here is a chart showing the number of dead via the Holocaust.
Counting the Deaths in the Holocaust by Germany? Roughly? 6 million Jews, 7 million Soviet Citizens (around 1.3 Million Jewish Soviets), 3 Million Soviet Prisoners of War (approx. 50,000 Jewish Soliders), 1.8 Million Polish, 312,000 Serbians,250,000 persons with disabilities living in institutions,Roma - between 250,000-500,000, Jehova's Witnesses - 1,900, Repeat criminal offenders - 70,000, Homosexuals - undetermined but counted under repeat criminal offenders.
The Bombing of Dresden (which is also the topic in Kurt Vonnegurt's classic Anti-War Novel - Slaughter-House 5. Slaughter-House 5 refers to Dresden.
"Before World War II, Dresden was called “Florence on the Elbe” and was considered one of the world’s most beautiful cities because of its architecture and art treasures. Having never previously been attacked in the war, the city offered increased value for terror bombing against an inexperienced population. On the night of February 13, the British Bomber Command hit Dresden with an 800-bomber air raid, dropping some 2,700 tons of bombs, including large numbers of incendiaries. Aided by weather conditions, a firestorm developed, incinerating tens of thousands of people. The U.S. Eighth Air Force followed the next day with another 400 tons of bombs and carried out yet another raid by 210 bombers on February 15. It is thought that some 25,000–35,000 civilians died in Dresden in the air attacks, though some estimates are as high as 250,000, given the influx of undocumented refugees that had fled to Dresden from the Eastern Front. Most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly."
So, maybe we already know what would have happened if we dropped an atomic bomb on Germany?
Here are the number of deaths in WWII:
Worldwide Casualties in WWII per Research Starters
Battle Deaths 15,000,000
Battle Wounded 25,000,000
Civilian Deaths 45,000,000
The following countries have the highest estimated World War II casualties: the Soviet Union (20 to 27 million), China (15 to 20 million), Germany (6 to 7.4 million), Poland (5.9 to 6 million), Dutch East Indies/Indonesia (3 to 4 million), Japan (2.5 to 3.1 million), India (2.2 to 3 million), Yugoslavia (1 to 1.7 million), French Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, part of Vietnam) (1 to 2.2 million), and France (600,000).
The Soviet Union is estimated to have suffered the highest number of WWII casualties. As many as 27 million Soviets lost their lives, with as many as 11.4 million military deaths joined by up to 10 million civilian deaths due to military activity and an additional 8 million to 9 million deaths due to famine and disease. Those totals do not include the more than 14 million Soviet soldiers who were wounded during the war. Among the Soviet Union's 15 republics, Russia withstood the highest number of casualties, with 6,750,000 military deaths and 7,200,000 civilian deaths. Ukraine tallied the second-highest casualties, with 1,650,000 military deaths and 5,200,000 civilian deaths.
China is estimated to have endured the second-highest number of total casualties in WWII. As many as 20 million people died in China, including up to 3.75 million military deaths and 18.19 million civilian deaths. That said, because both China and the Soviet Union were wracked by famine and disease during the war, some experts believe the countries' civilian casualty numbers may be significantly underestimated.
Germany incurred the third-most casualties of World War II, with as many as 7.4 million total deaths Also of note is Poland, whose death toll includes an estimated 3.2 million Jewish civilians who died in Nazi concentration and death camps. The following list includes the total estimated casualties for every country involved in the war.
[The US had the least.]
The critics appear to be in agreement that the film, Oppenheimer is ultimately about how ego can drive people to do the unthinkable, and justify it. And ultimately destroy them. And it's amazingly accurate to its source material.
I'd scheduled my week perfectly - with one major thing every other day. Site Tour (Tuesday Morning)/Consultant Ethics Training Tuesday Afternoon, Power Point Presentation on Teams (Wed), More meetings on Teams (Thursday), Site Tour (Friday). But alas, my boss changed it all last Friday. Instead it was Site Tour(morning)/Powerpoint Presentation (afternoon), Cancel Ethic Training - reschedule for later date, Boss covers for meetings on Teams, Site Tour all day Thursday.
Then to add to all this - they changed the dates and information on me for the presentation, prior to it. So I had to kind of wing it.
I'm doing three projects simultaneously, and one of them feels like I'm wrangling an alligator (as one colleague put it).
We all procure government services contracts for a living.
Anyhow, here's a photo from my Site Tour - or rather photos taken from the roof of Atlantic Terminal Train Station - I actually got to tour the interior of my train station. I got to visit the roof of Atlantic Terminal Station. (It was a site tour to replace an air conditioning system for the station.)
2. Now a few photos from my niece who is busy being a park ranger in Sequoia National Park. She's loving it out there. She did take a break to visit her Mom for her birthday. Also her friends. She flew out to Martha's Vineyard - where her parents were staying and stayed with them for about two days, then came back with them to New York, to see her friends. She drove into the city on Monday, stayed the night with her Mom, then flew back to California on Tuesday morning. She loves the area so much - that she's thinking of applying to schools in California. Apparently she missed her mountains.
3. Discussing Oppenheimer flick with folks.
* Co-worker informed me that she had an opportunity to take a job out at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It still studies and researches nuclear weapons and their effects. As a federally funded research and development center, Los Alamos National Laboratory aligns our strategic plan with priorities set by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE NNSA) and key national strategy guidance documents. We execute work across all of DOE’s missions: national security, science, energy, and environmental management. Scientific and engineering capabilities developed through LANL’s stockpile research are part of what makes DOE and NNSA a science, technology, and engineering powerhouse for the nation. More than one co-worker has visited the facility and interviewed there.
* Mother asked me an interesting question last night, that continues to haunt me today..."What if Japan had surrendered but Germany hadn't? Would we have dropped the bomb on Germany - and would have been the consequences of that?"
I think it's worth contemplating. Because if that had happened...
We went on to discuss the War. Germany lost mainly because of Russia - and for same reasons Napoleon did, and well anyone who tried to conquer Russia over the past 2,000 years has. Germany was fighting the War on multiple fronts - and well, Russian Winters - it couldn't handle. And that did it in, along with the fact that Hitler was losing his hold on his base, and there was dissension in the ranks (and more than one plot to assassinate him).
But the question that sticks - is What if we had dropped the atomic bombs on Germany? What would that have done to Europe?
What if someone else had gotten there first?
Oppenheimer brings up a lot of unsettling questions. The more I think about WWII, the more I want to cry. It was such a horrible war - it brought out the absolute worst in so many people. Light won in the end, but at such a high cost.
Did a little looking about, and found this regarding the actual death toll for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's been a lot of discrepancies and miscalculations over the years, so no one is certain. Same is true of the death toll of the Holocaust.
But the devastation was so bad, Truman announced after Hiroshima, that they would never do it again. Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagaskai - from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
"On August 8, news reports from Japan, plus a damage report created by the United States, began to paint a picture of the destruction. Aerial surveys revealed at least 60% of the city’s “built-up areas” were destroyed, leading to the conclusion that perhaps “as many as 200,000 of Hiroshima’s 340,000 residents perished or were injured,” as one United Press story put it. The same story quoted “unofficial American sources” that estimated that the “dead and wounded” might exceed 100,000.
Such numbers were large, and appear to have had a sobering effect on President Harry S. Truman. After the August 9 Nagasaki raid (which he had no apparent foreknowledge of), he would put a stop to further bombing, telling his cabinet that “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible,” according to an August 10, 1945, diary entry by then-Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace. It is not clear that Truman had any real sense of how many casualties there would have been prior to the attacks. The only pre-Hiroshima estimate on record is the recollection from Arthur Compton that at a May 31, 1945, meeting of the Interim Committee, J. Robert Oppenheimer had suggested that an atomic bomb dropped would kill “some 20,000 people” if exploded over a city. This is not recorded in the meeting minutes, nor in any other report or correspondence, so it does not seem that this estimate had any special weight to the participants. (Compton amended that this estimate had assumed people would seek shelter; given that no warning was issued for the attacks, this did not occur.)"
And here is a chart showing the number of dead via the Holocaust.
Counting the Deaths in the Holocaust by Germany? Roughly? 6 million Jews, 7 million Soviet Citizens (around 1.3 Million Jewish Soviets), 3 Million Soviet Prisoners of War (approx. 50,000 Jewish Soliders), 1.8 Million Polish, 312,000 Serbians,250,000 persons with disabilities living in institutions,Roma - between 250,000-500,000, Jehova's Witnesses - 1,900, Repeat criminal offenders - 70,000, Homosexuals - undetermined but counted under repeat criminal offenders.
The Bombing of Dresden (which is also the topic in Kurt Vonnegurt's classic Anti-War Novel - Slaughter-House 5. Slaughter-House 5 refers to Dresden.
"Before World War II, Dresden was called “Florence on the Elbe” and was considered one of the world’s most beautiful cities because of its architecture and art treasures. Having never previously been attacked in the war, the city offered increased value for terror bombing against an inexperienced population. On the night of February 13, the British Bomber Command hit Dresden with an 800-bomber air raid, dropping some 2,700 tons of bombs, including large numbers of incendiaries. Aided by weather conditions, a firestorm developed, incinerating tens of thousands of people. The U.S. Eighth Air Force followed the next day with another 400 tons of bombs and carried out yet another raid by 210 bombers on February 15. It is thought that some 25,000–35,000 civilians died in Dresden in the air attacks, though some estimates are as high as 250,000, given the influx of undocumented refugees that had fled to Dresden from the Eastern Front. Most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly."
So, maybe we already know what would have happened if we dropped an atomic bomb on Germany?
Here are the number of deaths in WWII:
Worldwide Casualties in WWII per Research Starters
Battle Deaths 15,000,000
Battle Wounded 25,000,000
Civilian Deaths 45,000,000
The following countries have the highest estimated World War II casualties: the Soviet Union (20 to 27 million), China (15 to 20 million), Germany (6 to 7.4 million), Poland (5.9 to 6 million), Dutch East Indies/Indonesia (3 to 4 million), Japan (2.5 to 3.1 million), India (2.2 to 3 million), Yugoslavia (1 to 1.7 million), French Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, part of Vietnam) (1 to 2.2 million), and France (600,000).
The Soviet Union is estimated to have suffered the highest number of WWII casualties. As many as 27 million Soviets lost their lives, with as many as 11.4 million military deaths joined by up to 10 million civilian deaths due to military activity and an additional 8 million to 9 million deaths due to famine and disease. Those totals do not include the more than 14 million Soviet soldiers who were wounded during the war. Among the Soviet Union's 15 republics, Russia withstood the highest number of casualties, with 6,750,000 military deaths and 7,200,000 civilian deaths. Ukraine tallied the second-highest casualties, with 1,650,000 military deaths and 5,200,000 civilian deaths.
China is estimated to have endured the second-highest number of total casualties in WWII. As many as 20 million people died in China, including up to 3.75 million military deaths and 18.19 million civilian deaths. That said, because both China and the Soviet Union were wracked by famine and disease during the war, some experts believe the countries' civilian casualty numbers may be significantly underestimated.
Germany incurred the third-most casualties of World War II, with as many as 7.4 million total deaths Also of note is Poland, whose death toll includes an estimated 3.2 million Jewish civilians who died in Nazi concentration and death camps. The following list includes the total estimated casualties for every country involved in the war.
[The US had the least.]
The critics appear to be in agreement that the film, Oppenheimer is ultimately about how ego can drive people to do the unthinkable, and justify it. And ultimately destroy them. And it's amazingly accurate to its source material.
no subject
Make that anyone from Europe. The Mongols quite easily conquered Russia from the east less than a 1000 years ago, and held most of it for several hundred years.
More WWII horror: Less than a month after Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo (a city of wood and paper houses) on the night of March 9-10 1945, is said to have killed more people outright than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.
no subject
It makes sense more died in Tokyo and Dresden with the fire bombing - both were more populated. What partly saved Nagaskai and Hiroshima from having more deaths - was population density - they just weren't as densely populated. (Add to that - Nagaski's bomb was dropped in the mountain range to the north of the City and not on the City itself - I think that's what it says in the report, so it didn't have quite as many casualties nor as much devastation.) There were however more deaths from the event years later (from radiation and cancer - which is hard to quantify or track, same issue with the atomic bomb testing - that's harder data to correlate accurately). Actually, according to the Atomic Commission research and historical records - the difficulty with atomic bomb was they aren't sure how many actually died. The entire city was reduced to ash. But it took a while to get in, and it was never clear. They weren't even sure how many people lived there, were in the area, etc. Rough estimates had it anywhere from 40,000 - 250,000, which is a wide margin. They really just had aerial footage, reports from Japan, and air samples, since it took a while for US forces to get to the islands to check in person. They were able to get data faster from more populated areas like Tokyo and Dresden. I think if they dropped the atomic bomb on Tokoyo, the devastation would have been greater - but according to historical data and the film (which is seemingly accurate on this point) - they deliberately avoided dropping it on a more populous area. Their intent was to get across to the Japanese that they had a weapon that could wipe them out with one drop - not to kill the Japanese. Originally it was supposed to be dropped on an uninhabited area, but then - they realized that wouldn't get the message across as effectively - and it worked better to do it on a populated one. They did it twice - because the Japanese didn't appear to react to the first one, after they informed them that they'd done it. So felt the need to get across that they had more than one bomb, and had no qualms about dropping them to end the war.
What's interesting - is per historical record, the Sec of State may have ordered the second drop without Truman's knowledge, and when Truman received the reports - he put a halt to it.
It is interesting to see from Japan's perspective though ("Grave of the Fireflies" (anime), and books like Kafka on the Shore, and there's another one I forget the name of, also all those 1950s Godzilla horror films.) When you see those - you realize it was probably more extensive on their culture, psyche, etc than we realize. Just as the other horrors from that War were.
No one comes out well in that war, unfortunately. Some just better than others. I honestly think Russia may have committed the least atrocities of the allies, but I could be wrong about that.
no subject
no subject
What came out of the War?
* Israel (which unfortunately borrowed a few horrible things from their enemies, that have not served them well...ie. militaristic, weaponized, isolationist, and racially/religious intolerant.)
* Nuclear power and nuclear weapons
* Berlin Wall
* The Cold War
* The collapse of the British Empire (the War kind of killed British expansion and their colonies)
(France to the degree it had anything followed suit.)
* Military Empowerment of Russia and the US, who became military powerhouses as a result of it.
* Germany and Japan's emphasis on finance, business, and technology
* Lots of WWII movies and television shows (Along with an insane romanticization of the War.)
* Superman, Captain America and Wonder Woman superheroes
Sigh, people, sigh.
no subject