Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
There were really three choices for the Americans and the effects weren't good in either of them.
Drop the Bomb force a surrender and demilitarization and culture change
Invade and see up to a million American's and more Japanese die during building to building fighting
Complete naval blockade and starve and freeze the Japanese into surrender.
The fourth choices is continue with a conventional bombing campaign and send Japan back to the stone age.
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From a 'war crime' perspective the defence is pretty simple, it doesn't matter why the bombs were dropped (and I fully agree there were all kinds of reasons that had nothing to do with forcing surrender such as testing the weapon, showing resolve to the Russians, all those arguments are valid) all that really figures into it is was the aim of unconditional surrender reasonable, I don't think any court would argue with that, and did the dropping of the bombs cause more or less deaths than was neccersary to meet the aim. I cannot see any argument that could be made that forcing the end of the war by the deaths of 300,000 was a massively higher casualty figure than the alternatives offered. In fact I truth it was the opposite, it did probably reduce Japanese deaths by the million.