Ask the orders of magnitude more of Americans and Japanese people who weren't slaughtered in a ground invasion. Or starved to death in the mass famines a blockade would have caused. And all their descendants. Sometimes wars require the least shitty of a menu of shitty choices.
The "ground invasion/famine due to blockade" are hypotheticals. They don't have the same weight as 2 real atomic bombs that killed real people. Evidence of plans for those could have been easily fabricated. Even if the plans were real, they could have been cancelled, or not worked.
I do agree that this costed less American lives than other options, and that in war most options are shitty. Inevitably, most involve civilian deaths. But the guy who picks the "let's mass kill civilians" is not going to get sympathy from me.
So no, I don't accept the "more people would have died" argument. Less US soldiers, yes. And it's not like the other side wasn't committing war crimes anyway.
Orders of magnitude more Japanese people would have died, but I guess you can just handwave that away as "fabricated evidence" because it supports your priors.
I didn't drive my car into a brick wall yesterday, but just because it didn't happen doesn't make it "fabricated evidence" that it was a much better choice for me not to drive my car into a brick wall.
Here's another hypothetical: "We wanted to limit future soviet influence in Japan and were willing to flatten two cities full of civilians in order to do that"
There is ample data that says Japan was on the verge of surrendering before the US dropped atom bombs on them. If you doubt it, ask yourself why the US rushed to drop a second bomb only three days after the first. It was in our interest to intimidate the USSR before Japan had a chance to surrender.
You're right. I apologize for using a link that did not support my argument.
The Wikipedia page on the debate about the bombings is very informative. I've seen what I consider to be strong arguments that the Soviet invasion of the Sakhalin Islands and potential invasion and occupation of Hokkaido.
I'm also disappointed that the critics to my original post failed to engage with the central question: What was the rush to bomb Nagasaki if not to ensure the US got to further intimidate Russia? (and test both a uranium-based bomb and a plutonium-based one)
Ward Wilson wrote that "after Nagasaki was bombed only four major cities remained which could readily have been hit with atomic weapons", and that the Japanese Supreme Council did not bother to convene after the atomic bombings because they were barely more destructive than previous bombings. He wrote that instead, the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and South Sakhalin removed Japan's last diplomatic and military options for negotiating a conditional surrender, and this is what prompted Japan's surrender. He wrote that attributing Japan's surrender to a "miracle weapon", instead of the start of the Soviet invasion, saved face for Japan and enhanced the United States' world standing.[120]
Prime Minister Suzuki said in August 1945 that Japan surrendered as quickly as possible to the United States because Japan expected the Soviet Union to invade and hold Hokkaido, an action which would "destroy the foundation of Japan".[121][122]
Literally the exact quote of the historian in the article you're linking:
"Any myths about this history you want to debunk or set the record straight on?"
"The big one was that the Japanese were ready to surrender and would have surrendered even if we had not dropped those bombs. I think that is a myth. Oppenheimer seems to have believed that the weapon was used against a country that was about to surrender—as he puts it, essentially defeated. The Japanese were essentially defeated—that’s true. Their fleet had been sunk and their cities had been burned. But they were not ready to surrender."
"Did the bombs lead to the Japanese surrender on Sep. 2?"
"Two atomic bombs forced them to. The dominant reason [the U.S.] used the bomb was to end the war. [The U.S.] thought the only way to end the war was to use these two terrible weapons."
very simplistic to characterize the decision as a trolley problem. lots of factors went into it, not least of which wanting to scare the USSR into the cold war
Japan war was ended because of USSR won the war. US slaughtering civilians was just that - slaughter of civilians. They should be ashamed of this war crime for hundreds of years to come.
The USSR had just taken Manchuria (Korea) and the US wanted Japan in our pocket and to intimidate the USSR. No need to repeat atrocity apologia. Japan in that era was evil af, kind of like Israel today (but in sheer numbers, Japan killed way more people), but that doesn't mean they should be nuked.
After the US took Japan, we reinstated the emperor, wrote their constitution, and used Japan as an imperial outpost to threaten Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and Russia, which we do to this day. In the case of Korea, we invaded in the 1950s and never left, setting up a puppet state. Okinawans and many Koreans want the US military out of their countries.
This was an acceptable trade to the Japanese elite, because the communists would have removed their monarch in the name of liberty!
An invasion by US forces was planned, with expected US losses to dwarf those on Normandy by an order of magnitude. Japanese losses would dwarf those, in turn.
The invasion likely would have been stalled, and the alternate plan was blockade of the islands to interdict food supplies, and Hirohito is on the record after the war as saying he feared a Lord of the Flies-style mass breakdown of society after famine.
But the reason an invasion was planned rather than waiting for starvation was that Stalin was planning to invade. I.e, if the US had been OK with Japan's ending up in the Soviet orbit, both a nuclear attack and an invasion could have been avoided.
Im not sure Japan would have surrendered. The real question is: why was total surrender the only acceptable outcome to the FDR admin? To the point that mass killing civilians was preferred over a negotiated peace.
It seems young Japanese doesn't even know who bombed their country. US controls most of the world media: they can highlight or hide any fact, or inculcate whatever interpretation.
US media doesn't particularly hide the fact of the US bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer was released just two years ago, to pick one recent and prominent example of the US not hiding the facts.
