Atomic Bombs

It's arguable. Bombing certainly affected the war e.g. Battle of Britain. Near the end of the war Britain began to bomb German cities which weakened German moral. Hitler was hoping the bombings on Britain would have this affect on Brits so this was quite ironic.

There are very few defenses that can be put up against a mass bombing attack by air craft. Having to sit and take it on the ground is very hard to endure, and after weeks of it, most people just want to get out and run away.

The use of mass bombing has, however, always been open to question by reason of both it's morality and effectiveness. As an earlier reply stated Hitler tried to bomb Britain into submission in 1940/41 but despite killing some 40,000 people, he failed. He did not break their will to fight on and despite the damage done (some two million homes damaged and hundreds of factories hit) British domestic war production was still able to increase.

From 1943 onwards, British raids on Germany became heavier and heavier culminating with the raid on Dresden, which alone is thought to have killed 35,000 people. Again, the aim was two fold, to damage factories and break the spirit of the enemy. Again, throughout the allied air campaign German war production continued to rise and the people continued to fight on.

Although in both these examples the offensive appears to have failed in it's aim the real consequences of the bombing are that without it industrial output would have been significantly higher, transportation of men, equipment and raw materials much easier, workers would have been fitter and morale even more resolute. So although bombing on it's own didn't win the war it was a vital contributor to that victory.

After the war Speer said in an interview that, following a raid on Hamburg, "If the allies could have made four or five more raids of that intensity in a fairly short space of time Germany would have been brought down". Since Speer was responsible for German munitions production he was in a better position than anyone else to make such a comment. I believe both the UK and US bomber forces were somewhat "tired" at that time and it is likely that the allies did not have the resources to mount four or more heavy raids after Hamburg in a fairly short space of time.

august 6 1945 was the first and the second bomb was on august 9 1945.

add. The first bomb exploded under the Manhattan Project was on July 16 1945, not long before the second and third bombs (above) were dropped in wartime.

Because an invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been hugely expensive in terms of US military lives, given the experiences of recapturing Islands & Island Groups taken by the Japanese, the use of Atomic power in the dreadful destruction of 2 cities brought about the end of Japan as a belligerant power. Also it was imponderable just how long it might have taken to bring about the end of the Pacific War by conventional means.
On August 6, 1945, at 9:15 AM Tokyo time, a B-29 plane, the "Enola Gay" piloted by Paul W. Tibbets, dropped a uranium atomic bomb, code named "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan's seventh largest city. In minutes, half of the city vanished. According to U.S. estimates, 60,000 to 70,000 people were killed or missing, 140,000 were injuried many more were made homeless as a result of the bomb. Deadly radiation reached over 100,000. In the blast, thousands died instantly.

The city was unbelievably devastated. Of its 90,000 buildings, over 60,000 were demolished. Another bomb was assembled at Tinian Island on August 6. On August 8, Field Order No.17 issued from the 20th Air Force Headquarters on Guam called for its use the following day on either Kokura, the primary target, or Nagasaki, the secondary target. Three days after Hiroshima, the B-29 bomber, "Bockscar" piloted by Sweeney, reached the sky over Kokura on the morning of August 9 but abandoned the primary target because of smoke cover and changed course for Nagasaki.

Nagasaki was an industrialized city with a natural harbor in Western Kuushu, Japan. At 11:02 a.m., this bomb, known as the "Fat Man" bomb, exploded over the north factory district at 1,800 feet above the city to achieve maximum blast effect. Buildings collapsed. Electrical systems were shorted. A wave of secondary fires resulted, adding to their holocaust.

Flash burns from primary heat waves caused most of the casualties to inhabitants. Others were burned when their homes burst into flame. Flying debris caused many injuries. A fire storm of winds followed the blast at Hiroshima as air was drawn back to the center of the burning area. Trees were uprooted. The bomb took the lives of 42,000 persons and injured 40,000 more. It destroyed 39 percent of all the buildings standing in Nagasaki. According to U.S. estimates, 40,000 people were killed or never found as a result of the second bomb.

To save lives. Many, many lives, both American and Japanese. A lot of people were killed immediately, and more long-term buy the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. But the number is actually small compared to the number of American soldiers and sailors, and Japanese people (a lot of them women, children and old men) who would have died in the invasion of Japan.

A More Detailed View:

Since the 'official' answer is becoming less believable every day--Japan tried multiple times to surrender before the bomb was dropped--the most likely answer is that they wanted to test the bomb on a human population.

While this interpretation is popular in some circles, it has been refuted in every detail by more diligent historians such as D.M. Giangreco and Robert J. Maddox. One of its biggest flaws is its equation of "peace" with "surrender." Japanese peace feelers were indeed put out several times, but none of them met the American requirement of unconditional surrender. It would not do to leave Japan in control of territory gained through its aggression or possessing a military capable of future offensives.

The question of why the US used atomic bombs is very complex. President Truman debated it from several angles, as is prudent for an unprecedented act of destruction. But most historians agree on one inescapable fact: the extraordinary human cost (in American and Japanese lives) of a physical invasion of Japan was too high.

The Japanese forces had in every engagement preferred death to surrender. On Saipan in July 1944, nearly all of the 30,000 Japanese forces and many of the 25,000 Japanese civilians died fighting. Approximately 1,000 civilians (including women) threw themselves off cliffs in front of American troops to avoid the disgrace of and feared treatment in captivity. On Iwo Jima in March 1945, only 216 prisoners were taken out of 22,000 defenders. Since the Japanese considered this island to be as sacred as Japan itself, US planners had every reason to expect the same level of resistance in the final invasion.

Among Giangreco's definitive debunking of revisionists' evidence, one simple story stands out. While Truman weighed the atomic decision, the American military prepared its invasion plans, including its estimates of American casualties. An analysis by Giangreco and Kathryn Moore of the manufacturing history of the Purple Heart medal demonstrates that the Navy's initial 1942 estimate of the total number of wartime medals it would need resulted in an order of 135,000. This figure was based on formulas assuming World War I casualty rates. But those medals had all been given out by October 1944, and Navy planners placed an order for 25,000 more (using updated formulas). Once again, it wasn't enough. They ordered another 50,000 in the spring of 1945. Orders based on projections consistently fell far short of the actual need. And yet when the war ended in August, the services found themselves with a combined surplus of 495,000 Purple Heart medals that had been produced in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. Every American serviceman wounded in action in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, and Kosovo received a medal not needed for its original purpose because the use of atomic bombs rendered them unnecessary. In 1999, the Pentagon placed its first large-scale order since 1945 to replenish the available supply.

ANSWER ONE:

two

1. Uranium Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima August 6, 1945
2. Plutonium Fatman bomb on Nagasaki August 9, 1945

Japan surrendered August 14, 1945 and signed the formal treaty in early September; if they had not a third bomb was ready and would have been dropped in late August, with 3 more in September, 3 more in October, 7 more in November, and 7 more in December until they did surrender. If they did not surrender in 1945 a new schedule for 1946 and on would have been developed as needed.

But fortunately only the two were needed to end the war.

ANSWER TWO:

Two on the former Imperial Japan which are mentioned in answer one. However the first officially recognized detonation, a test detonation, occurred on top of a tower platform in Alamogordo, New Mexico with an explosive force of approximately 18,000 tons of TNT during 16 July 1945.

There is also the possible misfired atomic weapon explosion of 17 July 1944, which occurred at 2220 GMT (10:20PM), Western Standard Time, near the military port of San Fransisco, California. The military port of San Fransisco Bay, California went up in flames, disintegrating two ships and an entire train, while the blast killed 320-323 people service-members instantly. Another 390 service-members and civilians were injured, while the effects of radiation exposure on this region are inconclusive. The port of Port Chicago, California was used as the decontamination port by the Navy; however Port Chicago was one of the neighboring towns damaged by the effects of this detonation... Provided that this was a time when the damaging effects of radiation exposure were challenged and sometimes even laughed at, the government clearly did not take the appropriate course of action in decontamination provided that it may have been a nuclear weapon.

With a yield of 1,780 tons of TNT according to previous US officials, the bomb blast was able to be seen within a 35 mile radius, and destroyed the windows of neighboring towns within a 20 mile radius, while also leaving a column of smoke approximately 12,000 feet high in the night sky. However the suggestion a 1,780 kiloton force does not carry weight in light of other evidence, such as that the blast caused a crater of 66 feet deep, 300 feet wide and 700 feet long beneath the water from which the event originated from. A five-kiloton nuclear bomb on the surface of wet soil creates a crater 53 feet deep and 132 feet in diameter. This implies that the detonation occurred on the water's surface or within proximity to the surface. There were also reports of a wall of water approximately 20 feet high having swept through the bay and crashing on shore. Some of the blast was absorbed by the hull of a ship in the bay that indicated the blast exceeded five kilotons. Also, the eye witness testimony described the blast as having a white flash which reportedly only occurs with nuclear weapons yielding a force of 5 kilotons and greater.

The official story in the US remains that this was not a nuclear weapon explosion, however there is video footage that came to light to the American public during that time, which the government is on record for accusing Hollywood of creating. Most notably, the footage that the US government is on record for having accused of being a Hollywood creation seems to be censored from the American public. There are however viewable clips of the fire that transpired from this explosion, most of which seem to use dubbed sound effects of explosions without actual filmed explosions taking place that do not sound like atomic weapon blasts or the shudders created by such. Also, there are many records that were reported by the Court of Inquiry, the official department/agency of that time assigned to investigating the matter, to have been destroyed or coincidentally vanished especially regarding various materials being freighted and carried in the affected area and by the affected vehicles/craft.

What is missing from the possibility of a nuclear weapon detonation is the cause of the detonation itself. It might have been an act of sabotage by someone, or some group, with nefarious intentions for America. If this is what happened, then it might be likely that such an entity continues to have control over the US, provided that the video footage of the blast and mushroom cloud following have been first condemned by officials and then omitted from public record- or extremely hard to come by... Or, it might have just been an error in what might have been one of the first atomic weapons, and the US government was too embarrassed to admit what truly happened. The again, it might all just be some kind of conspiracy theory that was caused by a conventional weapons explosion mixed with the anti-nuclear energy hysteria of some groups that seem to encircle nuclear energy.

Whether the fourth mention atomic weapon explosion did or did not happen, there were at least three atomic weapons, if not four, that were dropped/detonated during World War 2.

The US Army Air Force dropped atomic bombs on the two Japanese cities, as ordered by then-President of the US, Harry S. Truman.

During the final stages of World War II in 1945, the US conducted two atomic bombings against Japan, on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs were built in the US with plutonium and uranium from mines in the Congo in Africa. The top-secret effort to build the bombs was the Manhattan Project.

"Little Boy" was the codename of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. It was dropped from the "Enola Gay", a B-29 Superfortress bomber which was piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets (retired as a General) of the 393rd Bombardment Squadron, Heavy, 509th Composite Group of the United States Army Air Forces.

"Fat Man" is the codename for the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, and was dropped from "Bockscar", another B-29 Superfortress bomber, this time piloted by Major Charles Sweeney, also of the 393d Bombardment Squadron, Heavy, 509th Composite Group.

The "Enola Gay" was named for Colonel Tibbets' mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. "Bockscar" is a pun, based on the word "boxcar", the aircraft being named after Captain Frederick C. Bock, aircraft commander of "Bockscar" (the pilot is not the same as the aircraft commander).