Your points about the Communists stand, but keep in mind that the West always considered them the least bad option. They started out on Hitler's side and they only got half of Europe because they already had it occupied with masses of troops. The West couldn't have pushed them back to Moscow unless they were willing to fight a couple more years, killing millions more.

All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki was bombed, that gave the peace faction in the Japanese government enough leverage to get the Emperor to intercede. The Japanese still weren't exactly sure what the nuclear bombs were, and they had already been firebombed for months so having two more cities incinerated was not the huge change that later US propaganda made it out to be. But the Japanese had been trying for many months to get Stalin and the USSR to broker a peace agreement, and Stalin and Molotov had been stringing them along without any real intention of helping, to ensure that Stalin would have time to enter the war against Japan. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria shocked the Japanese government into realizing their true position and made surrender an urgent priority since Japan greatly preferred being occupied by the US to being occupied by the USSR. The nuclear bombs were a convenient way for the Emperor to save face and not have to admit that it was really the strong desire of the Japanese to surrender to the US and not to the USSR that drove the decision.

See the excellent book Racing the Enemy by Hasegawa for a detailed and thorough exposition:

https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/...

Even so, a land conquest of Japan would have cost vast numbers of lives - far more than the nukes.

When people die one by one in war, the emotional impact is blunted. But when a million die in one bomb, it seems much worse, even if the overall body count is lower.

That was the strategy that FDR and Churchill agreed to, but the primary person driving it was Stalin, because he didn't want the US and Britain to defeat Japan before he got a chance to attack them, and he knew he would not be able to attack them until Germany was defeated. (He wanted to attack them so he would have a pretext for taking over territory that Russia had lost in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905.) As events proved, the US and Britain did not need any help from the USSR to defeat Japan militarily, and with different diplomatic choices they probably could have gotten Japan to surrender before the USSR attacked.

Once FDR died and Truman took office, btw, it was no longer clear that having the USSR enter the war against Japan was a US objective. Truman, unlike FDR, was not a fan of Stalin and viewed him as a geopolitical threat, not an ally. Which, historically speaking, was a sounder view.

Such as?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y43-p3xLDyo

This is from the final episode of the series. Easy Company have fought their way from Normandy to Germany, losing hundreds of their friends and brothers in battle after brutal battle. Now the Nazis have surrendered and they finally have some respite - but their celebrations are shortlived. Their commanding officer informs them that they're to be redeployed to the Pacific. The war isn't over, and the expression on Malarkey's face at 2:09 says it all.

Whatever anyone says about the atomic bombings, I bet those men were damn happy to hear about Japan's surrender. Imagine if they'd been sent to invade Japan, in another brutal campaign that would have taken months if not years, costing hundreds of thousands more Allied lives.

Then imagine telling them that the government had secretly developed a powerful new weapon that could have ended the war earlier and avoided all this bloodshed - but they hadn't used it because they were worried about the moral implications. I don't think they'd have agreed it was the right choice.

Japanese knew that Soviet rulers did not care if another million of soldiers died and Soviet occupation was considered much worse outcome. That contributed to their surrender to US.

I like how they ultimately accepted the unconditional surrender, but still tacked on a condition that the emperor was not to be blamed.

Even though he should have been:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/hirohito-the-war-crimina...

Contrary to what this article says, I’m absolutely convinced that not prosecuting the emperor was the right call. The country would have more or less literally exploded overnight.

The fact the man himself told everyone to surrender was of more importance than almost anything else done, both at government and civilian levels. Most of the internal efforts to stop the surrender were around stopping him from declaring as such.

The emperor directly mentions the atomic bomb in his address; "Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."

He only tacitly mentions the battle situation; "But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state, and the devoted service of our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest."

I know that. And I said why: to save face. He didn't want to tell the Japanese people that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was the reason. The atomic bomb made a much better reason for public consumption. That doesn't mean it was the actual reason that drove the decision, which was made in private.

That's not clear either. Without the atomic bomb they might well have found another way to save face.

Now I will say that I have not read Hasegawa's book but Wikipedia says that it is "challenging the widely accepted orthodox view that the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most decisive factor in Japan's decision to surrender ending the war against Japan."

It will be interesting to read but it looks like that it is not the accepted theory and that primary sources from the era were destroyed on all sides.

Only because the US froze all trade with Japan and intentionally refused all Japanese attempts at diplomacy to negotiate some kind of arrangement. The US did that knowing that the Japanese government would go to war, since the US had broken the Japanese codes and was reading all Japanese diplomatic traffic. In other words, the US intentionally provoked Japan into going to war.

The Soviets were allies. Look up what they did in Germany at the end of WW II. And that's not even looking at all the other atrocities they had perpetrated before the war started, many of them on their own people.

Also, the empire building I referred to on the part of the US, Britain, and other European countries took place well before WW II. That doesn't mean it can just be ignored.

> Or maybe just stop spreading Soviet propaganda.

It seems to me that you are the one spreading Soviet propaganda since you are not even acknowledging the moral implications of having the Soviets as allies in WW II.

You don’t have to convince me that the Soviets were evil. They were part of the Allies purely because Hitler put them there.

They then immediately started propagandizing the world to undermine the genuine contributions and general legitimacy of the West.

Stopping Axis aggression against the US, Britain, France, and other Western countries was good for everyone.

Stopping Axis aggression against the USSR? I'm not so sure. Particularly not since the price of doing that was condemning Eastern Europe, China, and a good chunk of Southeast Asia to tyranny.

And with it, the enactment of the Final Solution in its territories.

Are you sure you mean to say that you're "not sure" if stopping this project in its tracks was a good idea or not?

We know that this wasn't the primary motivation behind the decision of the Soviet-Western alliance, of course. But it was indisputably one of the key outcomes of the war and that cooperation.

And some would argue that nuking entire cities is completely unacceptable.

1. Invade. Expected Allied casualties of 300k all the way to much more than a million. Expected Japanese casualties: tens of millions, perhaps up to literally all of them. Previous Japanese strongholds fought to the last man, earlier in the war the Allies invaded an island with 11000 Japanese soldiers, and I think 47 of those eventually surrendered. The rest died. The civilian populations on these islands infamously committed suicide in huge numbers rather than be captured by the Allies. How much harder would an invasion of the home islands be!? The Japanese government issued an order that every single person must fight to the death.

2. Starve them out. The allies had submarines all around Japan and completely blocked all food and oil imports. This was working. But given the Japanese fighting spirit, likely tens of millions would have died before any change took place. It's also possible that the population could drop so low that the islands would become self-sufficient and then the war would drag on literally forever.

3. Conventional aerial bombardment. The Allies were already trying this with great gusto, to little diplomatic effect.

4. Demonstration nuke off the coast. The Allies only had two nukes left after the test one, and weren't 100% sure it would work. A failed demo would only strengthen Japanese resolve. There were concerns whether one demo nuke would be scary enough to force a surrender. Given that one actually used nuke wasn't, these concerns turned out to be valid.

5. Actually drop a nuke. This option turns out to have had the lowest bodycount in the end and had the unexpected side-effect of ushering in an unprecedented era of global peace.

First, there is no evidence of any actual casualty estimates made during the war that were anywhere near as high as the ones you give in option 1. Those numbers were made up after the war. The wartime estimates were about an order of magnitude lower.

Second, you left out an option: clarify the status of the Emperor if the Japanese surrendered, which the US government well knew, since they were reading Japanese diplomatic traffic and also had plenty of intelligence from spies, was the only real obstacle in the way of the Japanese surrendering. The final surrender agreement left the Emperor in place as the head of the Japanese state. If the Japanese had known that was going to be the final outcome of surrender earlier, it is highly probable that they would have surrendered earlier. The status of the Emperor was the primary weapon the military war faction in the Japanese cabinet used to quash surrender proposals.

Third, to call the time since WW II "an unprecedented era of global peace" is a bit much. What the bombs ushered in was an era of nuclear stalemate. The US does deserve credit for not using the bombs again, even though the US was the only nuclear power for at least four years after WW II. It is also true that many people after WW II expected a nuclear conflict to happen as soon as the USSR got nuclear weapons, and none did. But that didn't stop plenty of conventional conflicts from continuing to break out all over the world, nor has the US kept out of such conflicts.

I don’t know much about the second point, so you may be right.

Third, you have to look at stats, not emotions. Battle deaths - in absolute terms and per capita - dropped like a stone after 1945.

After rising like a rocket when WW II started. If you leave out WW I and WW II, it's not clear that post-1945 was more peaceful than pre-1914.

Even one battle death is too many but having them go down overall is very good.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a well known logical fallacy. That is what you are doing here.

Also, the relevant comparison, as I said before, is not post-1945 vs. pre-1945. It is something like post-1945 vs. pre-1914, so that the comparison involves peacetime conditions on both sides.

The cold war was cold because of M.A.D.

And I will compare any periods I want. The nukes fell in 1945, so I compare all of human history before that and after that. There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.

You are inferring direct causality based on one event following another. That is the logical fallacy I referred to.

> There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.

That's not what I see, so I guess we'll just have to disagree.

Have you noticed how in history good guys always eventually won every major conflict? What are the odds? 100% if you paint a bullseye after you shot.

Probably the biggest share of the blockade at the end was done by naval mines. At the end, the US airdropped naval mines in Japanese harbors to prevent them from importing food, and this sunk more Japanese shipping than the submarines ever did. It was even called “Operation Starvation”.

Given that you don’t know the body count of the other options, given they didn’t happen, that’s a bold statement to make.

The reason hiroshima and nagasaki (small cities) were chosen as nuke targets was because every other bigger city was already mostly destroyed due to firebombing campaigns.

Only the emotional impact was different. A nuke was an otherworldly weapon that marked a technological superiority that was impossible to overcame during the war, hence the surrender. Carpet bombing would have to go on until enough Japanese cities and industries were reduced to hash. Then maybe an invasion. As somebody pointed out, the surrender of the Japanese troops in China was a goal of the war and they could not carpet bomb or nuke China.

I imagine there were more before that.

And yes. Stalin was a bad guy and it's a pity the war didn't end with the demise of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. This is also irrelevant to the matter of strategic bombings perpetrated by America and Britain.

"We may have been fighting the wrong enemy (Germany) all along. But while we're here (on the Soviet border), we should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have to fight 'em eventually."

https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=32DxAAAAMAAJ&d...

You realize that this is exactly how the war between Oceania and Eurasia started, right?