this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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I may be remembering this video essay from Shaun a little inaccurately, but I recall that Japan was preparing a surrender anyway, and was in talks with the USA, but the argument was whether the surrender would be unconditional or conditional (Japan wanted to keep the emperor in power). The US was worried about an impending Soviet invasion of Japan because they didn't want the Soviet Union to have influence in post-war negotiaions (i.e. landgrabs). The US didn't want to send in troops for a land invasion, so they decided to hasten Japan's surrender with the atomic bombings of major cities (terrorism tactics, in my opinion, just like the much deadlier firebombings).
Americans (including me) are commonly taught that the bombs were the only choice in order to prevent lost lives of American troops, but the impression I remember getting from the video is that (my opinion) there was never a risk of an American ground troop invasion, and not a risk of another Japanese attack. Japan would have either surrendered or been invaded by the Soviets.
The kicker is that Japan surrendered unconditionally to the US, but in the end, the US decided that the emperor should stay in power anyway, so those civilian deaths to the atomic bombs were always unnecessary.
The unconditional surrender being whiffed on things like "execution of those most responsible" and "making sure their legal system believes in innocent until proven guilty" by MacArthur is irrelevant, a conditional surrender would almost certainly have denied any reconstruction period at all.
As for whether the bombs were necessary...
Practically the entire Japanese navy had been destroyed. Their mainland holdings were falling. Their army had already lost its heavy equipment and 2 million soldiers in China to kill 22 million people. Their wunderwaffe programs were years from completion.
They'd already executed and exiled anyone that didn't bend the knee to the militarism cult.
They didn't surrender. They didn't even surrender after the first bomb. They waited until the second, and even then a fairly large portion of the IJA tried to launch a coup to stop it, the Kyuju incident. The Minister of War tried to convince others to refuse surrender, and only failed because the others were loyal to their God-Emperor's wishes. Which implies, btw, that if the Emperor has wished to keep fighting, they would have, and the Truman administration had received no indication that the Emperor was willing to accept an unconditional surrender. They had, in fact, seemingly rejected the conditional surrender offered by the Potsdam Declaration.
You think you understand how fanatical the IJA was, you do not. You can not, and still be a sane, rational person.
And, quite frankly?
Don't want to get nuked, don't genocide half of Asia and then refuse to admit wrongdoing.