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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

This is not true, serious military figures in the US armed forces concluded that Japan was utterly defeated and was making peace feelers. They were basically defenseless at that stage of the war, against the bombing raids.

The civilian massacre could have been prevented by merely demonstrating the bomb. However they chose to experiment by dropping it on an city.

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I think this ignores the historical context. The US had air control and been bombing the mainland relentlessly for a while. The firebombing of Tokyo had already caused bigger loss of life than the Hiroshima bomb did. So it was clear to both parties that the US did have the destructive capability and were willing to use it. This did not cause the Japanese to surrender. Why would it have made any difference to "demonstrate" the bomb, if actually bombing the capital and killing 100000 did not have that effect?

Even after the second bomb, just before announcing the surrender, there was an attempted coup d'etat by high ranking officers to prevent the surrender. So its not like surrender was a given after seeing a nuclear bomb.

It is only in retrospect it seems obvious that the nuclear bomb would lead to surrender. Even taking about "the decision to drop the bomb" as it was some unique moral dilemma is kind of anachronistic. Of course they were going to drop the bomb, just like they used any other weapon at their disposal.

Don't forget demonstrating both ability and willingness to the keen onlooker standing eagerly in the wings: the Soviet Union. It was ready to take on a weakened Japan in a drawn out conflict. Also, who knew what ambitions there were for Europe?

Best nip any grand ambitions in the bud.

(The Soviet Union was still some years away from having nuclear bombs.)

I think it's more complicated than that. There were at least some people who were not planning to surrender. If it was up to me, I would have probably dropped it on a mostly uninhabited island near Japan. It's probably true we wanted to scare the Russians with our new super weapon.

But the big question is if Japan was close to surrendering anyway is why didn't Japan surrender after the first one, why did it take a second one?

Ernest Lawrence, who worked on the Manhattan Project (and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the cyclotron), famously recommended a non-lethal demonstration of the bombs:

> At the May 31 meeting, Lawrence suggested that a demonstration of the atomic bomb might possibly convince the Japanese to surrender. This was rejected, however, out of fear that the bomb might be a dud, that the Japanese might put American prisoners of war in the area, or that they might manage to shoot down the plane. The shock value of the new weapon could also be lost.

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event...

Two cities.

They didn't stop at one, they did it twice.

Sure, since they didn't surrender after the first one. And there might have been a third one...

Yeah, three days seems a reasonable time to wait before having another go after using the first nuclear bomb offensively in the history of mankind.

Stupid Japanese for not surrendering immediately...

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