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Originally Posted by nik-
Yup. There are a lot of people, in hindsight, who thought it wasn't necessary. That Ike quote is almost 20 years later. It's pretty easy to take decades of sober reflection and make a proclamation, but a lot of people thought about this problem when the dilemma was current. Including scientists who, other than maybe Edward Teller who actually seemed a little crazy, weren't about the geopolitical aims.
There is a chance they didn't need to use it, that the Russians declaring war on the Japanese was the last straw and they were going to surrender or that the Japanese were ready to surrender anyway. However they couldn't be sure, and a lot of the lives of their men were at risk as a result.
Basically the last input on the willingness of the Japanese to surrender was Okinawa. Japanese soldiers alone killed there matched the number of people killed in Nagasaki. Not including civilians and not including Americans. The KIA rate was like 80% And it wasn't even a home island. The home islands had millions of soldiers waiting to defend it, plus thousands of artillery pieces, thousands of tanks, millions of rifles. Add to that, multiple millions of civilians, seemingly fanatical about their emperor.
It's not like their estimation of casualties and willingness to fight of the Japanese was totally out to lunch here.
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I don't agree.
The dropping of the bomb is a cautionary tale of bureaucratic/military momentum. The Bomb was always going to be used. It was designed and built to be used, first on Germany, and then when that no longer worked as a target, on Japan.
The bomb was ALWAYS going to be dropped, regardless of need, all that was needed was a suitable target. After VE Day in Europe, those targets rested squarely in Japan.
The US estimate for an invasion of Japan was roughly 25-40k casualities on the American side, with the most intense fighting predicted outside Tokyo in the spring months. There's no evidence that any American in a position of authority expected half a million deaths, nor did that reasoning become canon until after 1945.
Certainly, regardless of what you think about the motivations for dropping the first bomb, dropping the second bomb was completely unecessary and should be viewed as a war crime.