or....the US simple negotiates the surrender the japanese were actively pursuing for nearly a year.
They almost didn't surrender even after the atomic bomb attack, and the Soviet declaration of war and attack, and the emperor's decision to accept surrender, there was a coup attempt to try to prevent surrender. Without those things surrender wasn't very likely.
The site you link to has a red rating from web of trust, although apparently that's from claims of conspiracy theories and racism not browser exploits and malware downloads. Personally I'm not sure any content short of child porn should get a red rating (other than in the "child safety" area), but I tend to be reluctant to browse red rated sites. But since I can read the content with the site not whitelisted in no script and there are no claims of exploits in the ratings I'll read it.
By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945.
Sure but try to tell them that. The fact that some emissaries where seeking peace does not mean that peace would have actually happened had we come to some agreement with those emissaries. There was a very intense element against any form of surrender in Japan. Some few still believed the myth that they could win. Others thought they could inflict enough casualties that we would give them favorable terms (no occupation of Japan etc.), others though that death was more honorable than surrender.
We might have forced them to surrender with invasion, or with continuing to bomb and sink their transports, but if we did that even more Japanese would have died then in from the nuclear bombs. If we ceased such activities they likely wouldn't have surrendered for a generation. In the meantime the Soviets where attacking Japan.
If the atomic bomb was dropped to impress the Japanese leaders with the immense destructive power of a new weapon, this could have been accomplished by deploying it on an isolated military base.
A truly isolated base might have had to have been outside of Japan or at least outside of Honshu, or have been a small base. Japan was (and is now to an even greater extent) densely populated. Either case would have greatly reduced the shock and fear imposed by the bomb, and might not have overcome the huge cultural and political reluctance to surrender. If we had a half dozen extra bombs in reserve, or maybe even three, then I think that would have been the right decision anyway, but we only had one. Even with just the three total bombs (four if you include Trinity but it was used up in testing), an argument can be made for going this way, its not an unreasonable idea, and nuking cities, even with small nukes, is horrible. OTOH it might not have done the trick, and the war as a whole was horrible. Even a modest delay in the end of the war might easily have caused more deaths than the bombs did. |
