I think people underestimate the Chinese. They were (and are) much bigger than almost all the other civilizations mentioned here. Sure, they had a closed door policy for thousands of years, but the world within their border was pretty huge - much bigger than the Romans, etc. Plus, all those millions and millions of people were once different kingdoms, tribes, etc. They were all just conquered and united at one point. It’s not like China was always just one country.
Once the British and other Western civilizations became naval powers, they became the biggest game in town. But before that, China was still the biggest civilization.
Well, if you say China then you have to say which dynasty. Han Dyanasty FTW. A book called Records of the Grand Historian chronicles the Han and Qin dynasties and was written around 100 BC. It starts around 2600 BC, facinating read at parts although some of it reads like Deuteronomy
These conversations (The US is the greatest empire the world has ever seen) are fun, but not really determinable. The best you can do is say “under these criteria, it is; under those criteria, it isn’t.”. The US hasn’t really been trying to declare sovereign authority over other territories, which makes its “empire” qualitatively different from most empires of the past. In terms of direct military-to-military capacity, it’s definitely the most impressive on an absolute scale, and up there pretty high on a relative scale. In terms of cultural and economic influence, it’s also pretty dominant.
What would you call the Islamic countries taken together? From Northwest Africa to Indonesia (barring India and Sri Lanka), they form a continuous belt of loosely aligned states. Thie rulers clearly aren’t united, but the citizenry for the most part, is. Much more than Christians in Europe (or maybe that’s just my perception.) If a Muslim uniter (not a destroyer like bin Laden but somebody with a more constructive philosophy) came along, he could forge the Muslim world into one empire. Ottoman 2.0, if you will.
What territories would the US go after? At that time, pretty much the whole accessible world was paying tribute to some European power. And since the Europeans owed the US a ton of money, I’m guessing that it was in the US’s best interests to keep those countries and their territories intact.
There was the Phillipines, but I guess the US decided that it was not worth the trouble of maintaining that sattelite territory, what with the 1950s equivalent of Arab Spring going on across the world.
I agree that they did the heavy lifting in Europe, but the U.S. did the heavy lifting against Japan. USSR agreed to declare war on Japan within three months of the end of the war against Nazi Germany (which they did). The Japanese may have expected the USSR would attack them, but they probably did not know the exact timing. The U.S. dropped the first bomb, then the Soviets attacked Japanese controlled territory in Asia (and won easily), the U.S. dropped the second bomb, then the Japanese surrendered. It probably would have been as difficult (or more) for the USSR to attack mainland Japan than the U.S. The U.S. had been island hopping it’s way across the pacific with a ton of ships. I doubt the Soviets would have been able to get the ships there to start an invasion before the US would have (absent the a-bomb).
The US had eliminated all meaningful waypoints between us and the home island and were positioned to strike. The only thing holding us back were logistical preparations and the percieved cost. So the h bomb was introduced as a way to save human costs for both sides.
Not trying to be a dick - as a person that likes watching nuclear explosions on youtube way too much, I can’t help but point out it was the “A” bomb. The “H” bomb was about five years away.
Dropping a hydrogen bomb on a city would have been much, much worse. Would have made for good youtube though.
Ron Johnson. Former CEO of JC Penney. He was given a package that paid him 1795 times the average wage and benefit of an average department store worker. He was so good at his job they fired him after 16 months. Not before he laid off 43,000 workers however.
One of the amazing things is that if you go to Hiroshima today, there is virtually no sign that it was ever the site of an atom bomb explosion, except for the parts that have been very carefully preserved.
The devastation after the A-bomb was phenomenal, and of course the radiation sickness had horrific after effects; however, one reason why Hiroshima looked quite so devastated in photos after the A-bomb was dropped is because Japanese residences at the time were primarily made of wood.
Of course, an H-bomb is 10s or 100s or even 1000s of times larger than the Hiroshima bomb, so that really would make a mess of things.
Another amazing thing is how small tactical nukes can be. Apparently they can get as low as 70 tons of TNT (about 1/200th the power of the Hiroshima bomb). It might destroy a city block or two. That’s pretty small for a nuke. The big risk is that once you cross the nuclear line, how do you prevent escalation to megatons…
The military was (maybe has) trying to develop tactical nukes that could be shot into caves a la Starship Troopers…seriously. In theory the explosive yield would be less than the normal non-nuculear cave busters, but more effective at eradicating cave dwellers.
Good in theory but, yeah, kind of bad PR to go around rocket-launching nukes into the side of mountains.
I think there are some bombs that are designed to burn all the oxygen in the cave, thereby killing all occupants. I don’t think these are nuclear though.