Re:Marshal Zhukov's Pocket Knife
by inflatableDodo on Thursday August 22, 2019 @03:36PM
(#20771609)
I may not have stated this well enough, but my original interest was sparked more by the fact that there is a variation of beliefs in the story, than neccesarily what the original motivations truly were in history, as I was wondering about the resulting implications in strategic game theory. MAD only works if all sides have the same standard for destruction in their beliefs and probability measure for the word assured. The US political culture has a general view that nukes end a war, if the political culture in other countries think that it is possible to develop strategies where you can get nuked and still continue with the war, then that is very important thing to be aware of.
It's hard to prove exactly, but Stalin's entrance into the war is almost certainly the precipitator for it's quick end without an invasion. For the Japanese, partial occupation by Red Army troops was a much worse prospect than occupation by American troops. For the U.S., giving Stalin a say in Japan was utterly unnecessary and very much undesirable at that point (as opposed to much earlier in the war). The A-bombs wouldn't have moved the Japanese military or emperor very much: they weren't more devastating that fire bombing already had been, and there weren't any notable cities left to devastate in Japan.