How did atomic bombs change the perspective of warfare?

Answer 1

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The nuclear weapon age gives us an incredible capacity to change this world, for better or worse, as technological developments tend to do. Since World War II nuclear combat has been planned for in all major warfare doctrines. Russia, it should be noted, makes no distinction between regular, biological, chemical or nuclear weapons combat. They have no top echelon inhibitions in their training doctrines to make the use of nerve gas, lethal plagues, or nuclear weapons restrictive in use, or only as a last resort, as many claim their chemical weapon use during their previous extended military invasion of Afghanistan demonstrated. Their stockpile of nuclear weapons is what forces us not to intervene. Allow me some further elaboration.

Nuclear combat is obviously much different than the other two

'illegal by treaty' forms of non regular combat. Nuclear warfare doctrine, and nuclear age politics, have not just altered our perception of war winning strategies. It has altered the worlds methods of taking over defenseless and weaker countries, by richer more powerful ones. First a little should be said about the history of nuclear weapons to give a point of reference.

In world war II Hitler had a Heavy Water project, which meant collecting deuterium and tritium (Water molecules of Hydrogen and Oxygen with some Hydrogen atoms with 2 or 3 Neutrons, instead of the usual one) into a concentrated mass to experiment with radiation. Radiation physics work would teach about heavy elements, such as uranium. America began its own studies, because Albert Einstein sent a letter to the president warning of the potential war changing use of a nuclear powered bomb, in which atoms from heavy elements might be split, releasing massive energies. Thus, an 'atomic' bomb. In time this included the use of an atomic bomb as a trigger to power the fusion process for a Hydrogen bomb, which can have a thousand times the power of the earlier atom bombs. Instead of splitting large radioactive atoms, it involved putting hydrogen atoms together, thus taking advantage of natural physics that required less 'nuclear glue' per atom, releasing the excess as unconfined plasma energy.

In the U.S. efforts, named the Manhattan Project, America eventually built centrifuges and collected enough of the less common Uranium (weight 235) to produce 2 atomic bombs. In 1945 the warhead components were carried by the U.S. Navy heavy cruiser Indianapolis to be assembled into a warhead for the attack on Japan. First on Hiroshima and a few days later, the city Nagasaki. U.S. General Douglas MacArthur was against the use of these bombs, but seemingly the British crown convinced president Truman to use both weapons, to imply that we had an unlimited number of these bombs, but two was enough to make our point.

The horror of the blast, from the utter destruction to he radiation effects upon the populace, permanently changed the world view of large scale warfare. No longer could armies collect in massive nation destroying formations, because one bomb could destroy them all. Naval fleets could be destroyed if even one nuclear warhead got thru the defenses. The doctrine known as Mutual and Assured Destruction (MAD) was quickly foisted upon the world by various think tanks, led in a large part by the public 'arguments' of the British 'philosopher' and mathematician Bertrand Russell, and the doctrine became the standard balance of power. The argument was, if Russia attacks America, we will both be 'wiped out. The same Bertrand Russell had earlier campaigned for 'Operation Dropshot', wherein America was to preemptively 'nuke' Russia, but that was before Russia was given the secrets to building their own nuclear weapons. Historically Russell was now the 'father of the Peace Movement' and thus the 'cold war' began. Russia pushes here, European powers push there, each taking over control of pieces of the world, but no one willing to seriously provoke a hot war against the other.

This insanity was to be eliminated by President John F. Kennedy at his speech in Dallas, Texas wherein he was to call upon the nations scientists to design a defense against nuclear attack. That speech was never made.

In March 1984 however, U.S. President Reagan made such a speech which included a plea for the world's scientists and engineers to develop a laser defense system to shoot down all incoming missiles. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was led by Lt. General Abrahamson in the Pentagon, and was nicknamed Star Wars by the media. The media severely suppressed its highly successful tests and many alleged experts declared it to be impossible to construct. These 'experts', such as Dr. Hans Bethe, had in earlier years used the same mathematical skills to 'prove' that ICBMs were impossible to construct as a successful weapons system. The U.S. Department of State toured Europe claiming the SDI would only protect America, although President Reagan repeatedly insisted it was to destroy any missile headed for any country. Russia was intensely upset by the chance that America might be able to stop a nuclear attack, and immediately riled against it through every conceivable route, though themselves massively increasing their own laser defense efforts.

Stopping all out nuclear war. The SDI research proved that Particle Beam weapons could be immensely capable in the anti-missile capacity, as opposed to the the exceedingly dubious HIgh Frontier orbiting hand grenades approach of the retired General Danny Graham group. The difference in the approach is essentially: Rather than trying to intercept a missile with another missile, once you find the target, a beam weapon instantly strikes it, and you will never run out of beam pulses, and they cannot be intercepted or tricked. Yet 30 years later the 'political destruction' of the Beam Weapons program seems complete. America has no significant defense against ICBMs, and the world still lives under the doctrine of nuclear combat, and pretends Russia will never take the risk of nuclear war. Treaties are expected to protect the free world, just as the British ambassador Chamberlain's treaty with Hitler protected Europe until the invasion of Poland.

How secure are we?

Regarding the Strategic Arms LImitation talks, which were designed to maintain the MAD doctrine: Russia made massive bombs in 20 megaton categories, and America made smaller more accurate weapons. Russia constructed many thousands of nuclear warheads, even greatly exceeding American numbers. Russia consistently violated the Strategic Arms LImitation Talks fronted by then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It is also a fact that Russian arms talks personnel have zero authority to make the Russian leadership stick to ANYTHING in the treaties, and so the talks were always a waste of time, and just for political show. A really important fact is that while Russia practiced massive Civill Defense, and anticipated surviving a full scale nuclear attack given some weeks for civil defense preparation, America in the same time frame spent a total of $50,000 for the total annual national Civil Defense program. It's obvious American leadership was ignoring the risk.

This current circumstance has led to a new world changing political structure.

Lesser Developed Nations (LDC's as per the U.S. State Department acronym) have, since the nuclear weapon age, become aware of the fact that America can not be depended on to intervene against Russia, nor more recently against China, for fear of triggering a war between the major powers. China has for decades been building a nuclear arsenal to get in the game. As far back as the 1970's China was sending students to American universities to learn about atomic theory and engineering.

So the overall result seems to have been, The weak countries are at the mercy of powerful ones, and have no real hope of the major powers stopping each other from irrational treaty breaking invasions. America will no longer assist a country that has been claimed by an enemy nuclear power. With the MAD doctrine in effect, the world powers have often turned to economic destruction of LDC's, having no fear that America will intervene in their defense. The claim that a country might build nuclear warheads, is even used as a White House excuse to invade and destroy the industrial and economic capacity of 'Lesser Developed Countries'. No LDC will be allowed to have nuclear power to electrify their nation, thus ensuring they will be severely crippled in attempts to produce their own capital industrial base, and will be forever forced to rely on the developed countries for technology, and oil. The major world banks will continue to enforce the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World bank policies that starve developing nations into submission and guarantee their poverty and enslavement. The prevention of capitalization in the form of industries, the restriction of electrical capacity by eliminating safe modern nuclear power plant construction, the 'appropriate technologies' as defined by the ethics of the United nations food programs, and the suppression of technological advances in general including even such things as the artificial heart and the manned exploration of other planets, have created a static world power structure. With the threat of nuclear retaliation. there is no recourse for the human race but to sit under the oppression we have today. We let evil empires push the boundaries, because we won't dare to confront them with more than words. Militarily confronting a new version of 'Hitler with nuclear bombs' would be unthinkable.

That seems to be the overall result of how nuclear weapons have altered the course of the world.

"That decapitalization, slavery, depopulation and death travel always together is a fact whose proof is to be found in every page of history … By forbidding the application of labor, talent, or capital to any thing but agriculture - forbade advance in civilization." - Henry Carey 1858

Answer 2

The two atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, finally forced Japan to give up, so stopping the war in Asia. It is contentious, but the bombs did save many American lives (and also prevented the loss of many Japanese lives) if the American forces had needed to invade the main Japanese islands.