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Comment by sbjustin | Hacker News Reader

This is a comfortable stance to take 70 years after the fact.

In WWII: Over 60 million people were killed, which was about 3% of the 1940 world population (est. 2.3 billion).

The US ended the war in the pacific with those bombs(129,000–246,000+ killed), who knows how many more would have died with an invasion of Japan. The second would not have been dropped if the Japanese had surrounded and ended the war. BTW, the US did not start the war. I'm not saying I support it, I'm just saying stop Monday morning quarterbacking.

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War is hell. The US tried to stay out of it as much as possible at first. Japan changed that, and they reaped what they sowed.

The US could have "ended" the war by simply walking away. At that stage the war was effectively won and dropping the Bombs had very little to do with military strategy.

The argument that the Bombs "ended the war" is patent bs, and it keeps being repeated unchallenged as a justification for what was effectively a war crime.

Actually, even after the bombs were dropped, several high-ranking Japanese military officials were planning a coup to stop those were planning on surrendering to the Allies at that point. There was significant support to fight until the very last.

It is debatable where it was necessary to drop the bombs on populated areas as opposed to Tokyo Bay, but it is without a doubt that the nuclear bomb and subsequent further threat ended the conflict.

And what would they do ? Swim to California with knifes between their teeth ? Japan posed no thread to the US at that stage of the war. The conflict was over, the allies have won.

The bombings were geopolitical stage props.

The allies had hardly won. Much of Asia was still under Japanese rule. The Japanese still controlled Singapore, Hong Kong, massive swaths of China and South East Asia, Korea, Taiwan, etc. The idea that the US could have simply "walked away" at that point is ludicrous.

Nonsense. Russia would have occupied Tokyo within the month, maybe less, Japan was defeated, and thoroughly. The US needed Japan to surrender to them, not Russia, and so it was.

The USSR had no real amphibious capability to carry out such a plan.

Civilians were dying at a rate of something like a quarter million per month in all the various Japanese-occupied areas at this point in the war. If the atomic bombings sped up the surrender by just three weeks they were a net win in terms of lives. (And yeah, I know how morally difficult that calculation is, but that's war.)

I cannot remember the exact number but since the Japanese had so many islands as well as mainland Japan, the cost of invasion in lives (Western and Japanese) was massive. Of course it was not just a numbers decision, there was certainly some posturing for the post war world. The US was very concerned that Russia would not honor the agreements around splitting up Korea and roll on into Seoul. Then you had Germany and Eastern Europe to think about.

It is interesting to theorize what would've happened after the war if the U.S. had not developed the bomb or if the U.S. had developed it but chose not to use it.

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