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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Taro who wrote (626100)8/28/2011 8:24:11 PM
From: i-node1 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) of 1572561
 
You truly believe any government (Obama????) would have been able to decide on an unconditional surrender - or anything else of any importance for that - within 72 hours???

Not sure about Obama.

I think 72 hours was enough. You don't just put a war on hold waiting around to see whether the other side is convinced. Truman had estimates, that if an invasion of the mainland were required, that we could suffer 500k casualties and the Japanese could have twice that many. Truman believed an invasion would have extended the war by an additional year or more, which would have resulted in up to a million more US casualties total.

As a matter of military strategy, I think it is fair to say that once you've knocked the enemy down you don't allow them time to get back up. And there was the knowledge that we only had ONE MORE bomb to work with. It had to be convincing. After the first bomb was dropped, a top Japanese military adviser is said to have not believed the weapon was an atomic bomb at all. After the second one, his attitude changed and he quickly came to believe we had 100s.

At any rate, given the suffering that occurred in the Pacific War, I can see why it was done. There were American POWs starving and being tortured, and frankly, under those circumstances, pulling the trigger was totally reasonable.
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