I do believe the bombings were a strategic show-of-force to the Soviet Union since they were coming out of the war as a global power; USSR were instrumental in ending the war.
[0] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-reason-america-used-n...
It was already defeated, and offering to surrender, before the USSR joined the fight.
Totally surrounded/blockaded, no allies left in the world, bombed at will, what else could it do but accept defeat?
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Denying Korea and Taiwan is easier said than done. Remember that Japan essentially won the continental war against China. It's best equipped and most experienced troops are there. Japan is also in an optimal position to control ocean access to Korea. Any boats have to travel through the East China Sea, or sea of Japan to reach Korea. Both of which are in range of the thousands of kamikaze planes built for the purpose of destroying vessels that sail close to Japan.
At this point, you're talking about conducting an invasion of a landmass even larger than the Japanese home islands, against better troops, and with more difficult naval access. It would undoubtedly incur substantially more losses than the 100 to 200 thousand inflicted by the atomic bombings. And to what end? A hostile military government would still be in power back in Japan.
Before these bombs were dropped, tens of thousands were dying on days with no large military operations.
This is blatantly false. Even after two atomic bombs had fallen on Japan, their military leaders -- and indeed most of their population -- remained committed to fight on until the nation of Japan ceased to exist. It was only the intervention of the emperor himself (who never gets involved in matters of war) that convinced the military and the people to surrender after the bombs were dropped.
The counter argument for that is it took two atomic bombs for Japan to concede. And after the 2nd one it was 3 days before they gave up.
Could a blockade have worked? Maybe. But how long would it have taken? Would we all just sat and watched while hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians starved to death over a few years?
I hope I wouldn't have dropped the bomb on a populated city if I were in Truman's shoes, but without the benefit of hindsight, I'm not positive I would have decided differently.
On a side note, Japan is a wonderful country, particularly the countryside. My wife lived there for 13 months while we were dating, and I have many fond memories of trips around Japan with her. Lost wallets more common than not are returned to the police with money still inside. One of my colleagues once saw a man in a business suit sleeping on a park bench one morning, obviously drunk, and someone had placed the man's dropped phone and wallet on his chest.
If the war aim was the permanent political defeat of Japanese fascism, then this was important. You don't just want the leader's signature on paper, you want defeat to be undeniable to everyone.
In both cases, the naval blockade left a lot of civilians hungry, and was great military value-for-money. But politically, that was easier to forget afterwards. Your adversary's ability to destroy whole cities with one plane was not.
(In germany's case, having two different armies in Berlin for half a century was also kind-of hard to forget.)
We had already destroyed most Japanese cities with fire bombs. Hiroshima was one of the few cities specifically spared from fire bombs
The only real difference with the atomic bombings was it was one bomb from one plane.
Some of the most fascinating reading I’ve done is the Pentagon papers because they go into exquisite detail about all of the thinking that resulted in the US’s involvement in Vietnam. It wasn’t just the Domino Theory, it wasn’t just containment of China, it wasn’t just getting France’s support for NATO, it wasn’t just Truman’s, JFK’s and Johnson’s efforts to look tough on communism.
It was all that plus a dozen other things.
It's a slightly more optimistic take on the tragedies of the 20th century.