truth about the bomb is that it cost too much money to make, approximately ten million dollars to produce one bomb. Plutonium, the most crucial part of the atomic bomb was hard to come by. Uranium-235 was scarce at this time, and plutonium was a by-product of uranium. Not only was the uranium to produce the plutonium hard to come by, it was also hard to process. The plutonium was hard to process and could not be produced in large amounts; it had to be produced in small quantities ( Maag & Rohrer). Marshall argues that exploding a bomb over the sea has never been tested and its behavior was unpredictable. No one knew how the atomic bomb would behave, it could be a dud, in which case the Japanese would laugh in the faces of the Americans, or it could get out of control. The truth about the situation is that there was only enough plutonium to produce two bombs, and the Americans could not afford to squander one bomb, which costs ten millions to produce, on a demonstration. There is really no way the Americans could have known what the Japanese would have done. No one knew for sure what would have happened had the bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only assumptions have been made about what would have happened. For all anyone at all knew, the Japanese could have kept on fighting until the last Japanese was killed. Defending the decision to use the atomic bomb, Marshall states, “we had to assume that a force of 2.5 million Japanese would fight to the death…” kind of like how they did on the small islands that the U.S. troops attacked, “we figured that in their homeland, they would fight even harder” (Alperovitz 361). What could have possibly led Marshall to believe this is the fact that the Japanese were very resourceful. After they were blocked in, and food lines were blocked, the Japanese started to promote the substitution of acorns for rice, over one hundred and fifty millions acorns were proc...
