It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.

- Drop the first bomb in the ocean in front of an envoy of observers and give Japan a week to deliberate their response

- Blockade the island, threaten land invasion, and wait for the emperor to call for surrender as they gradually run out of fuel

- Drop a bomb on Hiroshima but give more than 3 days for the government to understand what happened and consider surrendering before dropping a bomb on Nagasaki

- Allow the USSR to go ahead with a ground invasion while the US sits on the sidelines

etc...

But sure, in the fine grained detail, if the US has not dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, we would not today be commenting on Hiroshima (1946) saying "they shouldn't have dropped nuclear bombs on Japan"

The message in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "We can put eleven men on a fancy plane and make one of your main cities simply disappear, and you can do nothing about it."

That made not surrendering simply and objectively not worth it.

Seventy scientists on the Manhattan Project signed a petition [0] to president Truman about doing something like that before actually using the bomb, but the petition was intercepted and Truman didn't even hear about it in time.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1rd_petition

Geopolitics 101 from HN.

That is to say, I think it's important to hear the argument against this alternative explicitly raised as a justification for the use of nuclear weapons, because ignoring that motivation is intellectually dishonest.

People rarely say that because there is little evidence for it - it was the USA that was pressuring Stalin to declare war on Japan. Little Boy was dropped on Aug 6, the Soviet Union finally declared war on Japan on Aug 9 as they agreed to at Yalta. (While the Soviets considered invading Hokkaido after Japan surrendered, very few people think they would have succeeded. The USA had given the Soviet Union some ships that could be used, but they would not have been nearly enough.)

The US blockades Japan causing food shortages. The military prioritizes what little food is available for themselves. The know the population will starve, but it’s necessary to defend Japan against the foreign Invaders. As long as there is enough food for the military, the war can continue.

Now you have a mass famine where millions of women and children slowly starve to death. Japan uses it for propaganda showing how cruel the West is and how if the West would just sign an armistice leaving the military junta in charge, all these people could be saved.

Is that better?

> It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.

My response was not wrong as to that. The Allies did care a great deal about the Japanese people, and you can see that in the Potsdam declaration, but they also cared about their own soldiers' lives. If we hadn't had, or did not want to use, the nukes, then maybe we might have tried blockading for a while, who knows -- it's what the then leadership surely would have considered, and you can't blame someone today for mentioning it.

Hell, if America breaks out in civil war...

Nor was attacking Pearl Harbor.

I mean, yeah. The act is one of many countably infinite quantum events that contribute to the reality that I experience. My point is that there's a strong argument to be made that the US not dropping the bomb would have resulted in largely the same state of the universe with significantly less suffering in it.

>...my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,

The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.

>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.

>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/okinawa-costs...

On a strategic level they were. The archipelago was being blockaded, they had no way to contest Allied air supremacy, they were reduced to send children into battle, etc.

FYI it is estimated that the war would go on until 1947 if the bombs were not dropped. There would be millions of American lives lost in that case.

FYI it is also estimated that the war would end within a few months if the bombs were not dropped. It really depends on whoever was estimating lol

This is a heavily contested issue that has been actively discussed for almost a century by full time professional historians and analysts. Making confident assertions isn’t particularly helpful

Again, this is a hotly contested issue, contested by people who in some cases, have a full-time profession in studying this issue

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