12/4/15 Oops, Cheering For The Wrong Team?

    Wife and I are watching Manhattan, a series on TV.  It follows the scientists and their challenges leading up to building the first atomic bombs.  I would not want to walk in their shoes, although these were heroes who helped carve the path of America even to this day.  The work they did there in New Mexico forged the path to the knowledge of building atomic bombs with Plutonium and Uranium, and I am sure subsequent work lead to the possibility of our current aircraft carriers running on nuclear energy which can go for twenty years on a softball size of radioactive material, or whatever the amount is.
    In the show there are spies for Russia on site.  In their conversations, the logic for being American and helping the Soviets is that no one country should have this much power and be able to wield it.  They believe that without an equally big force with similar weapons the United States would exploit their power.  They would like to sabotage the whole affair but it is too big and security is very high.  I can almost see their side of it, no one country should be so strong that it can be a bully on others.  The only problem is that even after the iron curtain came down under President Reagan, we did not launch out to expand to even one more state.  We do kind of suck in our meddling in the middle east, but why is all the oil there, we need it?
    My other bone to pick is that nobody said we were the only ones who could build nuclear weapons at the time.  Instead of stealing and copying our plans, each country was free to go and figure it out.  No, original thinking is hard.  We have had luck in industrial endeavors because our people are free and enough of our population is educated enough to come up with the next big thing.
    Their other argument which they mention as their heroic duty is "think of all the innocent people you are saving."  This really pisses me off because what about the innocent people in Pearl Harbor?  We were not even committed to fighting at that point.  Japan thought they would neuter us with one airstrike and continue on its merry way.  Sorry, but that is not the way World Wars work.  I love the line whether Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Japanese Navy truly said it or it just came from the movie showing it, I believe it to be true, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." More interesting is that he was the mastermind behind the attack.  When we finally got done building the new weapons, it seemed only fair to pay back the Pearl Harbor attacks with a little science wrapped in a bomb.  They should be thankful we had mercy and didn't drop it on a heavily populated city.