Maybe not even that. By the time they dropped the nukes, 90% of structures in Japan were razed, in a far more deadly manner. Russians were a looming, merciless threat the Japanese leadership was very conscious of. There has been the suggestion that use of the Bomb had allowed for a good excuse to surrender to the U.S. then and there, because dealing with Russians would have been worse. I'm writing this from memory of an article on foreignpolicy dot com 5-7 years ago

There's a special on Prime about something you almost NEVER hear about: the Soviet Manchurian invasion. Which is what finally convinced the Emperor he had to stop it. The USSR had 1.5 million troops involved, and not surprisingly won a crushing victory.

Look at the dates: Aug. 9 was Nagasaki. It wasn't until the 15th that they surrendered. Up until then, the war councils actually thought Stalin would intervene and force a better peace than the "unconditional surrender" the Allies demanded.

I know everyone believes the A-bomb ended the war. Unfortunately even that wasn't enough. If it was, the Japanese would have surrendered on Aug. 10.

That's not to contradict CamperBob2 about the US would have done. We could only produce about one bomb per month, though, IIRC.

It's hard to imagine that anyone with observers in, or news from, the European theater could imagine that surrendering to Stalin was a better idea than surrendering to the US.

Indeed. It's well documented that Wehrmacht soldiers went out of their way to surrender to American and UK forces rather than fall into Russian hands.[1]

Tip to HN users: "This is indisputably true but I don't like it" isn't a good reason to downvote people.

1: https://socratic.org/questions/why-did-germans-forces-surren...

>Indeed. It's well documented that Wehrmacht soldiers went out of their way to surrender to American and UK forces rather than fall into Russian hands.[1]

That's because Wehrmacht soldiers and their pals have warred on USSR, and took millions of lives and caused untold suffering there.

The Japanese, at that point, not so much.

So, angry retribution against Wehrmacht soldier scum was to be expected...

It's a lot more than just that. Beyond their justified mad-on for German soldiers, the Russian military was (and continued to be, and essentially still is) monstrously brutal to pretty much everyone who crossed their path. Russian POWs liberated by the Western Allies begged not to be sent back to their own country. The ones that were sent back anyway were mostly murdered for the crime of being captured.

>That's because Wehrmacht soldiers and their pals have warred on USSR, and took millions of lives and caused untold suffering there. The Japanese, at that point, not so much.

This didn't really matter for the Soviets. Though the Manchurian invasion was too rapid and short-lived to really escalate to European-level Soviet brutality, the Red Army engaged in plenty of the same random massacres, mass rapes, brutalities and mass deportations after they entered and occupied Manchuria.

Many of these soldiers had already long since been brutalized by their campaigns in eastern and central Europe (from which they had been shipped in massive trainloads shortly after VE Day) and the basic nature of the Soviet leadership hardly fostered a spirit of good military conduct to civilians at any time.

Some deeper reading about the Soviet Manchurian campaign reveals quite a few of the uglier details.

Also, none of this in the least bit excuses the grotesque behavior of the Japanese Army in the same region during its long occupation. Regardless of how the Japanese are perceived today, their army's habits during the 2nd World War were completely beyond justification in their genocidal viciousness.

But once the dust settled...would the US hold the same moral high ground that it has today had it used 20 atomic bombs?

And would the US be so magnanimous in victory had the toll been higher due to Axis victories on all major fronts (meaning that the human losses of the Axis were transfered to the Allies) up to the Atomic bombs use?

> "But once the dust settled...would the US hold the same moral high ground that it has today had it used 20 atomic bombs?"

About 2.5 times as many people in Asia were killed by the Japanese as died in the German Holocaust. Let that sink in.

Anything the US did would have been seen as negligible in comparison.

It's not fair to equate war deaths with genocide deaths

What do you think the Japanese were planning to do, exactly?

War deaths? Surely you jest. Most of that 2.5x were civilians and were killed by the Imperial Japanese Army in ways a lot nastier than the concentration camps; it was genocide in all but name. The depth of hatred for the Japanese among older Asians is staggering for that very reason.

Japan's wartime actions in Manchuria were a genocide, they followed the "Three Alls" policy: "kill all, burn all, loot all". Arguably responsible for the deaths of more than 2.7 million Chinese civilians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy