They should’ve dropped a third bomb on his ass then asked if he wanted to surrender.
They dropped the second bomb quickly to prove it was not a fluke...Tojo did not believe the stories about the first bomb.
BUT we did not have a third bomb ready.. It was a huge gamble that worked.
we didn’t have a third bomb.
That was part of the issue with using the bombs. Nobody was to know that two was all we had at that time. Making more but that was the whole shebang.
Speaking of a third bomb... one should have been dropped on Mt. Fuji... to blow’ed up that god (or whatever floated/floats around that mountain).
We had a third bomb. We used it for a test in the New Mexico desert to make sure the plutonium implosion design would work.
The problem for us in August 1945 was a lack of fissile material. We moved mountains (literally) to create the processing facilities to create as much fissile material as we had. Making weapons-grade uranium or plutonium takes either time or huge parallelism in the process.
If you go back and look at the records of the national expenditure on the Manhattan Project in terms of the national budget, you’ll see that we (as a nation) were pretty well spending as much as we could. What we produced was the result of a huge project with absurd amounts of money (considering we were fighting a two-front war) on the processing facilities at Hanford, WA (where the Pu was processed) and Oak Ridge, TN (the U-235 processing site).
There was a huge amount of construction done at both sites. Unless you go back and read a history of these places from an engineering perspective, the popularized accounts of these projects doesn’t give you a sense of the enormous scale of these things - just the physical plant construction alone at Hanford and Oak Ridge were quite the accomplishment for the period of time in which they were done. That they built these sites from raw land, created the first large scale (ie, something bigger than a lab reactor) plutonium reactor at Hanford, researched and tried at least two methods of refining U-238 into U-235 at Oak Ridge *and* created enough fissile material for two bombs in the time they had is nothing short of astounding.
The Hanford reactor was finally finished, loaded and started processing fuel in November, 1944 and shipped the first batch of Pu fuel in February, 1945 to Los Almos.
Oak Ridge had two lines of uranium enrichment going - gaseous diffusion (the more efficient method) and electromagnetic separation method. There was insufficient copper available for the vessels used in the electromagnetic processing line, so Oak Ridge borrows THOUSANDS of tons of silver from the US Treasury to create these units. The silver was returned after the war.
As it was, the test bomb in New Mexico used Plutonium and an imploding sphere design - this was the bomb design used on Nagasaki.
The Hiroshima design was never tested. Hiroshima was the test.
It would have been roughly November/December of 1945 before we had enough fissile material for another weapon.