> Likewise most people don't realize how much more death there would've been on both sides if the US invaded Japan by sea.
That's begging the question - was a US invasion the only alternative? https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/05/nuclear-war-or... argues that Japan would have surrendered without the bombings. And that's for unconditional surrender - a conditional one would be even more easily achievable.
I have read a lot on this topic, visited museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki etc. I'd urge you to compare this article to others, because I bluntly think the author has no idea what he's talking about and just glued together various opinions of soldiers and politicians who happen to have that opinion without presenting the other side at all.
Furthermore the article is self-contradictory, e.g. first it says the conventional bombings were so successful that a nuclear wasn't necessary, then it says since the conventional bombings were unsuccessful the nuclear strikes also wouldn't make a difference (pure conjecture by developers of the weapon, who are no experts in neither politics nor military strategy or history).
It's also simply a lie that the casualty estimates were pulled out of thin air. Ask yourself: don't you think the US army would try to estimate how many of its soldierd would die (cost) vs how many Japanese soldiers would die and how many military targets would be destroyed (benefit)? Of course they did a huge study on this topic!
The article also suggested the Japanese would've surrendered if key people had been left in power. Yeah, maybe (again conjecture). But for comparison: if the US had allowed Hitler to go unpunished, conquered territory to remain under Nazi possession, the Nazis would also maybe have surrendered earlier. But why would you even offer such a surrender? It would render the entire war pointless.
There was no conditional surrender possible. The Japanese were still demanding to keep their “colonies” in China and elsewhere. Agreeing to that would be agreeing to continue the Japanese holocaust against the Chinese and the peoples in their other captured territories.
And from the Allied perspective, after the Bataan death march, the massacre of surrendered US troops and civilians in Wake, and the hundreds of similar massacres of surrendered allied troops, and rape and murder of nurses and civilians, across the Pacific, no one was going to allow the Japanese leadership or military off the hook.
Western powers weren’t committing atrocities like the Rape of Nanking during the 30s and 40s. Japanese troops killed surrendered soldiers, raped and murdered civilians not as a rare or exceptional event, but as a standard act in every country they invaded during the 30s and 40s.
That's begging the question - was a US invasion the only alternative? https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/05/nuclear-war-or... argues that Japan would have surrendered without the bombings. And that's for unconditional surrender - a conditional one would be even more easily achievable.