American Conservative: Don't Whitewash the Hiroshima Bombing

Another way to think about it is this. How many American soldiers would be killed in the invasion? The American soldiers who would invade are every bit as innocent as the women and children killed in the A-bomb attacks. Estimates are that Around 500,000 American soldiers would be killed or seriously wounded in an invasion. Every American soldier was an innocent man, defending his country from the Japanese who brutally attacked st Pearl Harbor. Do the lives of these innocent men not matter to you? This perfectly demonstrates what's so screwed up about liberals in America. They would literally rather send many more of their own countrymen to get their arms and legs blown off and killed, rather than kill the enemy. It's sickening, awful and evil how they would gladly sacrifice more of their own innocent fellow Americans to save the wives and children of attackers. Send 500k Americans to get murdered by the japanese, plus their dead, or kill 250k with the a bomb.

The choice is clear once you have the facts. Of course maybe you don't think it matters if American soldiers die. Maybe you think it's better that they die than the enemy. Try telling that to the wife of a soldier lost in battle. Try explaining that to a kid who wonders where his dad is. "The Japanese who attacked us at Pearl Harbor and want to kill us are more important to keep alive than your daddy".

You see think pictures of the a bomb with horror. And rightly so. But you forget the horrors of Okinawa. The terror of Kamikaze pilots literally suicide bombing the Americans.

The a bomb was not only better from a military and casualty standpoint, it was better for Japan in the long run. It completely broke the back of their military empire in a way that not even an invasion could. It was complete and utter defeat that crushed their delusions that they would gain greatness through military strength. That enabled them to move on and rebuild focusing on the right thing, economic power

If you want tough choices, ask Japanese to choose between living as they are now (with atomic bombing in the past) or Japan living as a North Korea (but without atomic bombing).

Even with two atomic bombs and the Russian invasion of Manchuria, Japan still faced an attempted military coup when they considered surrendering.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

>A much stronger theory is that Japanese were sacrificed in order to flex muscle against the Soviet Union.

I've seen that theory floated but it never made sense to me, and I haven't seen any documentary evidence to support it.

I prefer to apply Occam's Razor... which to me suggests the simplest conclusion is that the US bombed Japan hoping to spare American soldiers from the worse fate of an invasion, not the Japanese.

No one said the US used nukes to spare Japanese civilian deaths. They did it to end the war which was killing thousands of people a day from both sides, and that was before an invasion that would easily kill over a million people.

The Japanese leaders still thought they could negotiate an "honorable" surrender that would allow them to keep the lands they had brutally enslaved.

They still believed in the Kamikazi, the "Divine Wind" which destroyed the invasion fleet of the worlds most dominant and brutal military machine just before it could brutally subjugate Japan. They thought they could arm children, the elderly, housewives, or turn them into suicide bombers and kill so many of the invaders that the bloodbath would force the US to agree to their terms.

US leaders really had no choice. If they tried to wait out the Japanese without using the bomb, the family of every sailor and pilot who died in those many months would be rightfully angry. They'd be out for blood against the entire sitting US government in the next election. Just as the families of the hundreds of thousands of dead US soldiers would be, after finding out the US invaded without using the bomb.

By ending the war more quickly with the bomb, US leaders also saved the lives of an immense number of Japanese who were being fired-bombed, shot and starving in huge numbers.

General US Grant was renowned for fighting brutal battles of attrition intended to bleed the confederate armies of soldiers, between his forces and theirs his battles created casualties of 350,000 Americans. But before he was given total command of US forces nearly a half million had already been killed. He ended the war after one last bloody year that was costing nearly 200,000 lives a year, and killing civilians by the many thousands.

Here is a Quora answer covering that, that I came across a while ago: https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-the-US-first-nuke-an-empty-p...

The tl;dr is that it was suggested, but consensus was that a successful test would only bolster Japan's resolve.

Even at the end the Japanese government believed by arming the entire population, and turning woman and children and the aged into suicide bombers, that they could inflict such heavy casualties on the allied invasion force that the US would agree to a peace treaty keeping Japan in control of the peoples they had conquered and enslaved.

The US only had two bombs. They weren't even sure they'd work. It might take months to make and deliver more. Thousands were dying every day on both sides. The US leaders decided a demonstration was too risky, what if it failed?

They had already firebombed most of Tokyo and killed more Japanese in one night than the nuclear bombs would kill. And still the Japanese leaders were still determined to use their people as cannon fodder to try to force massive casualties on the invasion force. They probably would have shrugged off the demonstration bombs, especially when no others were dropped after the 2nd for another month.

Meanwhile, tick, tick, thousands more would die every day while the US dawdled. And then they'd have to use the next ones on Japanese cities, so the delay just kills more.