Say, would he now be able to warn a certain pres about Yamato, the class and the danger of nuclear energy?
And maybe getting a fire lit under the construction of the Iowa class?
Albert Einstein wrote that letter.
The letter was received in 1940, and FDR had created an advisory committee on uranium at that time to start researching possible civilian and (particularly) military applications of nuclear fission. At this point, it's still mainly theoretical and about whether anyone
else could develop an atomic bomb (so we would know if we needed to do so as a deterrent), but the committee is in full operation by this time and will, with the start of the war, transform into the Project to Search for Substitute Materials of the Manhattan Engineering District, US Army Corps of Engineers--better known as the Manhattan Project. (I always loved that cover name, ever since I learned it. They really WERE searching for substitute materials, after all--specifically, a substitute for one HELL of a lot of TNT!)
More appropriately, how would he even know about that?
(without using up-time knowledge, mind you)
Well, ONI did know about the Yamatos even before they were launched. Even knew their names. They were convinced they were Iowa-sized equivalents of the SoDaks (45,000 tons, 27 knots, and 16"/45s, with balanced armor) until early 1945, but we did know they existed. And despite the Japanese secrecy, there were still rumors circulating that accurately placed them at about 70,000 tons with 18" guns not long after Yams herself was launched. That said, Thompson would have one HELL of a tough time justifying any attempt to convince ONI of this without doing something insanely provocative like, say, sailing Sara out to just off Tokyo Bay and sending an SBD out to take recon photos of Yokosuka before they could do anything to hide her. (Note: Doing this would probably A: get the SBD shot down, B: get Thompson cashiered for VASTLY exceeding his authority, and C: cause a massive international incident that could well touch off the war early... or at least make the attack on Pearl be considered far less of a dirty move by the public, since we'd already given them a very similar scare.)
Claimed the flyboys, while it most likely was a Destroyer it´s torp´s that got her.
Think for a moment, if she was so easy to kill, they would have killed her way sooner, yet she died once finally a destroyed gets in range for her torpedo´s?
If you want a cause of good PR, you just found it.
And a Sci-fi book a few years before that, used it as a plot.
Thing was very accurate to boot.
Hell, suggesting that test be done to check if deadly radiation exist, before exposing humans to it...
Nobody claimed that the Yamato class were easy kills. Ever. The reason it took so long to kill them with airstrikes was that the early strikes, with dive bombers, had to take out enough of the ship's anti-aircraft batteries to let the torpedo bombers get in and put the real lethal weapons into her.
Musashi lasted longer than
Yamato simply because we went with the hammer-and-anvil attack pattern to split her AA, resulting in her taking torpedo hits on both sides and remaining upright as she sank; we learned from this and had the torpedo bombers all hit
Yamato from the same side, resulting in her capsizing relatively quickly. Note also that late-WW2 numbers for US dive bombing showed that only about 10% of all the bombs dropped actually hit their target, which goes a long way to explain why it took so long to silence the AA batteries. Late-war US torpedo bombers showed about a 40% hit rate, thus further explaining why it took so long to sink them after the AA batteries were silenced.
And the only time, the
only time that any American surface ship got within range of either Yamato-class battleship with
any organic weapon (as opposed to a carrier aircraft) was Taffy 3's suicidal attack runs during the Battle off Samar, with at least one or two of the destroyers getting within torpedo range of
Yamato herself (though they were focused on closer ships). Note that this was the day
after Task Force 38's
17 aircraft carriers managed to sink
Musashi with their airstrikes. (There were a couple of cases where US submarines got a look at one or the other through their periscopes near Truk, but while technically within torpedo range, they were never able to get into a decent attack position and shoot.)
What danger? We had the only nukes, the only danger was us. He could maybe convince Los Alamos to stop wasting time on gun-type bombs and focus on more easily mass-produced implosion-type bombs so we have more warheads to play with though.
More accurately, stop wasting time on the
plutonium gun-assembly device and focus on using it in implosion designs; gun-assembly weapons are actually easier to build (because they literally use a short cannon--a cut-down 155mm howitzer barrel that had never been rifled, in the case of Little Boy--to assemble the device, and a gun isn't too fussy about precisely timed multiple points of ignition); the only hard part is shaping the "target" and "bullet" bits of the pit properly--and that's no harder than properly shaping and assembling an implosion device's pit. The original reason we went to implosion weapons was that the plutonium Hanford produced wasn't pure enough to use in a gun-type weapon; we largely abandoned the gun-type after the war as we found that an implosion design was more efficient and we could thus produce more bombs with the same amount of fissile material--but the amount of HEU that Oak Ridge managed to produce by 1945 wasn't going to be enough for two implosion bombs, anyway, at least with the conservative "it's gotta work!" wartime design.
The real bottleneck in production wasn't the assembly apparatus, anyway, it was production of fissile material for the cores. Hell, we had enough assembly apparatuses that we stopped using concrete-filled bomb cases for training and switched to orange-painted live bombs with inert (iron) cores, called "pumpkins"--they provided much clearer feedback as to how accurate the drop was. We even started having Silverplate B-29s drop "pumpkins" on Japanese targets on actual combat missions, since they contained about 4000 pounds of explosive each and would do quite a bit of damage--plus, it would help keep the Japanese from realizing anything special was up with the actual nuclear attacks, since these were flown the same way, with one bomber and two camera ships; the Japanese would see three B-29s coming in in formation after the morning weather recon B-29 pass, and think it was just another pumpkin raid, as the conventional raids were mass formations at night. And if anyone saw the lead ship drop something big, well, it's just another "pumpkin," nothing special, right?
Especially since any useful reactor design would have a fully enclosed containment vessel.
Not true. Many low-power reactors used for research (and, back at the time, for production of weapons-grade plutonium) are simply housed in cooling pools with no containment vessel, as their design limits their maximum theoretical uncontrolled yield to energy levels that ordinary construction can withstand. It's only when you want to up the power output to the levels where you can generate useful amounts of energy from the reactor that you have to worry about containment. Indeed, Fermi's original reactor was an air-cooled, uncontained pile under a squash court at the University of Chicago.
Horseshit. The North Carolina-class were built to fight the Kongō class. The South Dakota class was the evolution, with improved armor and engines that worked.
No, the North Carolinas were designed to counter the new generation of fast battleships that were being built by a number of powers. It was
thought that they could counter the Kongous, but we didn't know at the time that the Kongous had been rebuilt to increase their speed to 30 knots. The SoDaks were a compromise, compressing the ship to basically fit the North Carolina armament and speed into a package light enough to allow the armor to be increased to regain balance with the 16"/45. (Remember, the NCs were originally designed with four-gun 14"/50 turrets and balanced armor, and were changed
during construction to the 16"/45, unbalancing their design.)
The Iowas were supposed to address two things--the excessive congestion of the hull on the severely compressed SoDaks (by using the extra 10,000 tons freed up by the Second London Treaty escalator clause, once it was invoked, to make the hull larger and provide more volume), and to quell the Navy's internal panic when we DID learn that the Kongous could make 30 knots and the NCs and SoDaks thus couldn't force them to action. That latter point is why we spent so much weight to gain nothing but six knots and a slightly larger gun (the armor package was virtually identical to the SoDaks), and also why we built the Alaskas--the theory was that the Kongous (and, presumably, any replacements Japan built) were fast enough to hunt down carrier task forces and attack them at night, when their planes couldn't defend them; the Iowas and Alaskas were intended to act as heavy escorts for the carriers just in case that happened.
Evidence that the Iowas were very much a special-purpose design can be found in the fact that, except for a very few early sketches done to examine the weight implications of retaining Iowa-level speed, all the designs for the Montana class reverted to the 28 knot speed of the NCs and SoDaks; it seems very much that the USN planned on, as in the past, sacrificing some speed to maximize firepower and protection.
Uh, no. If you try to go swimming in the (sealed, so I'm not sure how you'd get in in the first place) reactor you'll die in hours. Now, I know science wasn't as carefully done in the forties, but I think someone would notice scientists dropping like flies. The only place you could conceivably take a swim and not die in hours is the spent fuel storage pool.
Again, this is not entirely true and even today, low-power research reactors have divers do a lot of work with everything but the spent fuel elements, because A) water is a very good radiation shield, and B) when the reactor's not running, its radiation output is quite low. If it was an
unshielded reactor, or a high-power one, or was running at full power at the time, you'd be right, but even water-shielded research reactors have a certain amount of metal shielding around them specifically so that people
can safely work on things like control rod motors and swapping out samples
without dying.
(Interesting note: the spent-fuel pool at a large power reactor is somewhere you can theoretically swim in safely... as long as you don't get too close to the spent fuel elements, because within about 10 feet or so, you'd still be taking a massive dose of radiation, at least at the start of the cooling-down period. Of course, you'd be shot dead by the guards before you ever got near the pool anyway...)
