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The US even changed its targets just weeks before the bombing. Originally the second bomb was meant for Kyoto instead of Nagasaki:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33755182

This enormous cultural destruction was averted because the US Secretary of War had taken his honeymoon in Kyoto decades earlier. Presumably he had no such emotional connection to the innocents killed in Nagasaki.

Tourism will save you from total anhiliation from the masters.

Saved from total annihilation? They more than proved their point with the first nuke, the second nuke was more "fun" field testing.

Esp since civilians were the main casualties and they could afford to shop around for locations.

This ignores simple facts.

The Japanese had sufficient time to surrender after the first nuke was dropped.

The second was apparently what was required for them to capitulate. The loss of life (on both sides) from an invasion would have been at least an order of magnitude greater.

One terrible action to avoid a prolonged much larger loss of life. I don't envy the people who had to make that difficult decision but it is clear they made the correct one.

If the point was to bluff and insist that we had a thousand nukes ready to go, we should have just dropped one in the remote countryside where the crater can be appreciated but loss of life minimized. There was no strategic merit at this point to this loss of life, nor was there any for the firebombing of tokyo or the bombing of dresden or any of the other war crimes commited by the allies against urban populations who had little choice but to sit and die.

From your own wording, even you don't quite believe that propaganda.

Esp since both nukes and fire bombings did far more damage to civilians structures at that point.

Even if you ignore the wanton destruction, Russia flipping over to allies and cornering Japan by that time would have been enough to destroy Japanese moral as much as the fire bombings did.

So really the excess use of force by that time wasn't really needed, and trying to justify it now sounds like making poor excuses at revisionism.

The Japanese were brutal, determined fighters. Many of them willing to fight it out to the last man.

Imagine you’re Truman or a General who has watched countless Allied and Japanese die in the war. How exactly would you get an enemy like that to surrender if you’re not willing to deliver a couple knockout punches?

It was a sarcastic comment tbh, as in it seems pretty wild that the only reason for a city to be spared and the other to be zeroed being the destination of a general of war honeymoon...

Like WTF.

Here is source for what you are saying:

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/warning-leaf...

This says that the Nagasaki leaflets may not have made it to Nagasaki until after the bomb was dropped. The leaflets that may have been dropped before the Hiroshima bomb (“LeMay leaflets”) did not reference the atomic bomb. You also have to be aware that the US had been carpet bombing Tokyo for years by this point. People were used to bombs, just not to the atomic bomb.

We grew up with the idea of atomic bombs but for people in 1945, seeing the destruction that it caused for the first time in human history must have been truly shocking.

The fact that the destruction was caused by a single bomb was shocking to those that appreciated that fact from a distance.

The destruction it caused was on par with conventional overnight HE+incendiary raids already carried for months across Japan and previously across Germany prior to German surrender.

From photographs and M&M stats alone it would be difficult to seperate destruction in Hiroshima from that in Tokyo.

The atomic bomb was “shock and awe” - the implication was that the US would just continue to delete cities one by one easily until Japan surrendered. The destruction was comparable or even less than other firebombing raids but done with one plane.

At the time ... the two atomic bomb tests were the first live theatre tests of two aerial bomb designs only one of which had been previously tested in a controlled tower detonation (Trinity).

The two tests (Hiroshima & Nagasaki) were squeezed into an long ongoing campaign that had already "deleted" 72 cities .. at a time when the conventional campaign was already running out of good targets.

The atomic bombs had been developed at great expense to use on Germany and were not yet ready to test when Germany surrended.

Those military at the head of the Manhatten Project were desperate to find live theatre test sites before Japan surrended to either the US or, god forbid, the Russians (who had advanced so far through the formerly Japanese occupied terrirory in China that Japanee surrender to Russia was considered a very real possibility at the time).

While the Project had the ability to painstakingly handcraft more bombs at a low rate (and at very very great expense), they had not yet developed the Cold War production line ability to reliably turn out hundreds more bombs.

It's well worth reading up on the thoughts of the time before the after the fact post surrender stories spun up and atomic weapon use became a key part of the Cold War zeitgeist.

What do you mean by M&M? Did the overnight raids in Tokyo also kill 80,000 people? I don’t know the numbers for Tokyo but that would sound surprising.

Yes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1...

Thanks for sharing that.

Mortality and Morbidity Statistics.

Those directly killed and injured and those indirectly killed and injured.

Water and food supplies were disrupted and polluted, infections followed, etc.

As someone else linked and as I stated the scale of each event was very similar.

See also Kurt Vonnegut's accounts of the Dresden firebombing he lived through as a US PoW in Europe some months earlier.

Dresdens destruction was so severe that now, 78 years later, reconstruction efforts are still ongoing - despite huge efforts and spending of enormous financial resources over the past decades.

Plenty places in Europe were hit harder than Dresden, but lacked a world renowned author to document first hand account.

The nuclear bomb was shocking, and distracted from the horror of conventional bombing. Dumping white phosphorus and napalm on cities is no less barbaric than nuclear explosions.

LeMay and his ilk were monsters, eager to rain destruction down with any tool available.

> Nobody expected the United States to specifically target tens of thousands of innocent civilians instead of military targets in a single sweep.

The bald facts are the USofA had already performed overnight raids on 72 cities in Japan and completely levelled them.

The Tokyo firebombing saw tens of thousands of civilian deaths, a similar number to the deaths in Hiroshima.

In Japan at the time bombing raids were expected to strike anywhere and everywhere built up urban | industrial areas existed.

So 72 cities got burnt down meaning no place is safe. That doesn’t seem like a fair warning and they could’ve avoided the bombing if they want to—that means civilians are being actively targeted and will be massacred no matter where they are.

Japan is a very, very narrow country. “Cities” are basically just a naming convention. Everything from Nagasaki to Tokyo is, frankly, one continuous urban and industrial area. There’s no place that’s more than a brief drive from a dense populated area along that entire corridor.

You seem to be overlaying a map of Japan now to a map of Japan then. For example, in 1945, Tokyo's population was 7.4 million, whereas it is now several times that. I can't confirm that it takes up a larger area now than it did then but I'd be willing to bet that it does, by quite a way.

>Everything from Nagasaki to Tokyo is, frankly, one continuous urban and industrial area

I don't know how true that was in 1940. My understanding is that much of that sprawl developed as they rebuilt all the cities that had been bombed.

I also don't like the argument that it was okay because it ended the war...

It didn't, it was just another bombing raid among many as far as the Japanese government was concerned. It was the entry of the USSR into the war against Japan that ended the war (Japan had been hoping that the USSR would act as a go-between to negotiate peace until that point).

the entry of the USSR into the war against Japan that ended the war

It is impossible to disentangle the events. The Soviets declared war on Aug 8, Nagasaki was Aug 9, surrender was proposed by Japan on Aug 10. It was the totality of events that finally caused Japan to surrender. The Japanese Supreme Council was split on surrender even after Nagasaki and USSR invading Manchuria.

Here is a quotation from Seal Kido, who was a leader in the peace faction in Japan.

On the eve of the atomic attacks, the peace faction’s influence was becoming strong enough to constitute a counterweight against the war faction; and the atomic bombs drastically reduced the sway of the war faction, and the peace faction gained momentum. In addition, the Soviet declaration of war further reduced the dominance of the war faction and gave the peace faction the upper hand. Therefore, I think that the atomic bombs alone could have allowed us to terminate the war. However, the Soviet Union’s entry into the war certainly made it easier [for us]. It is difficult to tell which event contributed more to the termination of the war: the atomic bombs or the Soviet Union’s declaration of war.

Possibly, but we can’t discount the fact that the nuclear bomb was specifically called out in the emperor’s surrender address.

It also ended unit 731, that had very creative plans for the near future at the time.

...though, at the time? After several years of war, across the globe, I can understand a messy end. I can only commend the decision, from afar, as I am pretty sure the Japanese may not have surrendered so soon. And that's an awful lot of atrocities avoided, as well further military and civilian casualties.

//off topic: plus plus to the current Japanese government, and their support for Ukraine.

> Nobody expected the United States to specifically target tens of thousands of innocent civilians instead of military targets in a single sweep.

Yea they did. The US had already bombed most big cities killing hundreds of thousands. The other cities were actively preparing for the same to happen.