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It was just a matter of time, right? The US had the ocean by that point, so presumably we could have just bottled them up on their island and then take our time making more bombs.

Grim stuff. As horrible as the war was already, glad it didn’t come to that.

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As someone whose grandfather was fighting in the Pacific, looking back sure seems easy to judge but there are no guarantees and in the horror that was WWII you don't really take risks 'because'. You ensure victory. My grandfather was forced to call in flamethrowers on other human beings that would not come out of tunnels. He never forgave himself for that. Was he a monster? Should he have told his supperiors to stall out their plans, maybe wait the guys out instead? He was part of the occupation and saw the damage the bombs did first hand, helped cleanup the damage, but he never doubted the need to end the war or the way it was done. But glad you looking back figured out a better way by volunteering to let my grandfather 'bottle them up'.

I wasn’t proposing a better method to end the war (sieging the island wouldn’t have been a tidier or more humane end to the war anyway, it would have probably involved mass starvation, etc); I was just pointing out that “only two” was not really a limit in any practical sense, it was at least as many as were needed.

I had grandfathers on the Western and Eastern front in Europe. Them being there doesn't mean they had any real idea of what they were doing and what was going on. Beyond short term survival that is.

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