Comment by forestrywat
21 hours ago
I think you need to educate yourself a bit here. Japan's surrender was inevitable, largely due to Russia pressing them. The war was ending whether those bombs dropped or not.
21 hours ago
I think you need to educate yourself a bit here. Japan's surrender was inevitable, largely due to Russia pressing them. The war was ending whether those bombs dropped or not.
That's a famous myth. Among other things, russia didn't have a navy, or a strategic bombing force, so they essentially posed no threat to the actual island of japan.
You are correct in the sense that Japan was going to surrender at some point, whether that was due to conventional bombings, starvation from naval blockades or an actual invasion by the USA, there's no scenario where they don't sign an unconditional surrender.
Most of those scenarios would have killed more people than the two nuclear weapons being dropped.
The other awkward detail was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were picked from a conventional HE & incendiary bombing targeting list; had they not been destroyed with the first atomic weapons then they would have been destroyed to the same degree by a wave of heavy bombers overnight, just as Tokyo and 71 other cities were.
This is the point I keep trying to make, like, I don't want to downplay, you know, literally being nuked, but I also don't want to downplay the results of 1000+ heavy bombers dropping thousands and thousands of tons of "regular bombs" on a city during a single night.
Dead is dead.
sure but they were picked because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. but who knows maybe that was Germany bombing us or them and we just were ignorant.