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Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II
well, thousands of innocent civilians and soldiers died anyway, I think that other than the Allied soldiers that were getting ready for an armed invasion, we didn't save anybody's life with the atomic bombs (ironically enough at least one British POW perished in the Nagasaki blast).
Truth is that things could have been handled in a different manner, but as said in the video, 3 billion dollars are no joke, such an investment needed an adequate output..
There have been many efforts and even letters from the scientists behind the Manhattan Project on alternative demonstrations that wouldn't cause the death of so many people (like inviting an international committee to assist the bombing of a desert island with one of the bombs), besides the two different kinds of atomic bombs were dropped so closely together that Japan had little or no time to understand what happened, let alone surrender. There is evidence that Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been selected for the orography around them, which would have channelled and amplified the blast better, so it was all planned to be the dramatic end scene of a bloody conflict, where it was time to raise the game to another level. Truth is that they needed to show the world (and above all the Russians) who had the stick of command, and the Cold War wouldn't have been the same without this horrible example.
But even if the ghost of Cold War was about to start, things could have been handled differently.
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After the first blast, the emperor recorded a surrender speech on a disk to be played the next day. A group of officers stole and destroyed the disk and that left enough time for the second one. After Nagasaki, Hirohito fired all the top officers and surrendered live...(from a Japanese film)
When the bombs were dropped the Russians were massing soldiers and equipment in the islands just north of Japan. What was shapping up was evaluated at 10 million deaths, hundreds of thousands of american included. And probably a 'Northern Japan' like East Germany, controlled by the Soviets.
Japanese civilians were killing themselves by the thousands in the pacific islands near Japan as the Americans were moving in, no reason to think they would have stopped on the mainland.
Other options were considered, like showing off the bomb at a safe distance etc...But Stalin forced the play...