Maybe? We can go around in circles on this but there were so many other options the Allies could have tried:

- 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"

Keep in mind that every day the war continued meant thousands of innocent lives being lost under the brutal Japanese occupation that still covered vast areas of east Asia. Blockading Japan and waiting for them to starve might have been the best thing to save American lives. I think it’s unlikely to have been the best thing to save innocent lives overall.

Blockading Japan would have probably killed countless Japanese civilians via starvation, right? At least, I don’t think the island could sustain itself at that population level, particularly without fuel…

The aerial mining operation was literally called Operation Starvation, so, yeah. The big question is how quickly it makes them surrender. If they decide they’re cooked and give up fast, it might not have been too bad. If they hold out a long time then it would have been terrible.

Given how ideological they were? It would take 5 mil dead at least.

A blockade would mean a slow death for thousands or potentially millions of Japanese, as well at the cost and risk of tens of thousands of American troops, as well as a stupid amount of resources and infrastructure.

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.

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

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

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

Geopolitics 101 from HN.

I'm not suggesting this is would have been a good idea or had good outcomes. I mention it specifically because I frequently hear the false-dichotomy (from Americans in particular) that "we had to use nuclear bombs because a ground invasion would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives". I never hear them say that "we had to use nuclear bombs because we didn't want the USSR to invade Japan before they surrendered".

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.

>..I rarely if ever hear them say that "we had to use nuclear bombs because we didn't want the USSR to invade Japan before they surrendered".

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.)

If you go sufficiently far back in history, this is true for every event.

Not really. The war was practically over, and we could just have blockaded Japan until it surrendered without invading. And the Soviets' entrance in the war did as much, if not more to push the surrender as the atomic bombs.

You say “blockade” without thinking about the consequences.

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?

Sadly we've all seen this unfold in current times.

I was responding to:

> 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.

Maybe, but it's a very uncomfortable precedent to say that sometimes burning a lot of civilians alive is acceptable.

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

I don't think a lot of the other things the Japanese did during WW2 were acceptable either.

Nor was attacking Pearl Harbor.

> you might not have the life you do now.

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.