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> We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea.

Yeah, one large, irradiated South Korea, ruled by a pathetic murderous dictator who would have friends in Washington D.C. instead of Moscow, and who would have killed people throughout the peninsula for being Communists[1], instead of being against Communists.

Yay for progress?

Fuck freedom and democracy. All those talk of freedom didn't do shit when Rhee murdered Koreans, when Park murdered Koreans, and when Chun murdered Koreans.

I know I can't really expect American soldiers to wage wars and get killed just to support the freedom of some third-world country they've never heard of, instead of ensuring the continuing political dominion of the US in a large portion of the world, but people could at least be honest about it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre

> How many died because of the advance of Communism in Asia?

How many died because the US fought the advance of Communism in Asia?

And why do you believe that it is even your damn business to interfere in countries that are thousands of miles away from the US?

By the way, the General that was responsible for the bombing Japan with nuclear weapons, Curtis LeMay (you can see his signature on one of the photos) was in favor of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and proposed dropping more than 140 nuclear bombs on Russia.

And yes, he was willing to lose US cities due to counter strikes. All that mattered to him was that the US had an advantage at the time, and could win a war.

He also insisted on invading Cuba during the Missile Crisis and almost convinced Kennedy. We are lucky that he failed, because there were already nuclear weapons on Cuba at that time (which he didn't know) and an invasion would have triggered an all out war.

How many died because the US fought the advance of Communism in Asia?

Nowhere near as many that were systematically slaughtered by their own gov't.

> How do we really know this? The Japanese were ready for a long drawn out decades conflict. The US forces were war-weary and war was draining the economy. This could have gone on with quite some time, or ended in a frozen conflict that would reignite periodically. Who knows, but a quick non-nuclear win was certainly not in the cards.

A quick non-nuclear win was very much on the cards. The soviet union had just entered the war. The navy knew that it couldn't protect the homeland and didn't have any planes. There was, at the very least, a substantial faction in the cabinet that wanted to surrender, and had the support of the emperor in this. Can we be sure the war would have ended quickly? No. Can we be sure that the human cost would have been less than the ~200,000 civilian deaths caused by the bombs? Definitely not - conventional firebombing could have inflicted those kind of casualties if the war had continued for as little as another week or two. But a decade-long conflict or frozen ceasefire is really implausible; the balance of conventional forces was really overwhelming at that point.

> Arguably, if the US used nukes on Chinese soldiers during the Korean conflict, as some generals advised, there would be no North Korea. We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea. Instead we have one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen as a client state of China, who uses China's political influence and muscle to threaten the West with nuclear war every day. So, progress?

You could equally argue that if the US had given up and pulled out of Korea entirely, instead of North and South Korea we'd have a country like Vietnam, which is doing pretty well. Or that if the Soviet Union had used nukes to conquer the world we'd have peace everywhere. Everyone thinks they're the "good guy"; any moral principle that would allow the US to use nukes would seem to allow other countries to do so too.

I don't think there's any chance of the war lasting more than a year or so longer than it did absent nuclear bombing. The US was preparing for a full-scale invasion. That invasion would have succeeded, albeit at great cost. No matter how stubborn the Japanese were about not surrendering, there was simply no way they could mount an effective long-term defense.

Your counterfactual about North Korea seems rather weak. You seem to assume that we'd drop The Bomb and then the war would be won and we'd all go home. But it probably wouldn't have won the war. The Chinese would have been happy to keep on fighting even with nuclear bombardment. All it would have done would be to greatly widen the scope of the war and turn a small proxy war into a general WWIII.

As for the rest, those brutal proxy conflicts were still way better than direct conflicts between great powers, especially a potential large-scale nuclear conflict.

Instead of going for the quick win, you'd rather we had risked an invasion with five- to seven-figure casualties to each side, followed by years of necessarily yet insufficiently brutal occupation, followed in its turn by another war against a nation we'd just finished giving every reason in the world to want to wipe us off the face of the earth?

Japan had already offered a complete surrender, conditional only on the protection of the emperor. They were looking for a way to surrender since at least April, according to the post-war inquiries.

Which inquiries, by whom, of whom, and in what context? Links, please; that doesn't accord with any history of WWII I've ever read, and while I don't assume that makes what you're saying false, I would very much like to evaluate the claim for myself.

The details were in a memo from the president's Chief of Staff, detailing McArthur's accounts of five separate surrender offers. This article gives more details and a lot of sources:

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)

This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:

- Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.

- Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.

- Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.

- Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.

- Release of all prisoners of war and internees.

- Surrender of designated war criminals.

Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):

The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.

As we know from 'Operation Valkyrie', high-level officials in the Nazi party wanted to surrender to the allies days after the Normandy landing. The problem is they were not high-level enough, and out-numbered.

And as we can all agree, the emperor played at least as central a role to the Japanese leadership's legitimacy as the Fuhrer did to his.

What the atomic bombs did was made the emperor himself call on his people to surrender. This removed the ability for more hawkish parts of the Japanese leadership to continue a resistance effort, which some surely would have pursued.

Given the sprawling nature of Japanese positions, its deep cultural divides even between army/navy, its hard to know exactly who could authorize a peace treaty and if all other factions would listen to him.

What? Where do you get the idea that I prefer that?

I do not see why it was mandatory to invade Japan. Their army was wiped out, so were most Japanese cities and industry centers.

They were no threat to anyone at that time.

And if we look at it from the japanese perspective: They never intended to invade the US. Their goal was to end the US blockade of Japan.

Not every single war has to end with an all out invasion.

The alternative to invasion was a long-term blockade. Japan was already near the breaking point and there would have been millions dead due to starvation in fairly short order in that scenario.

There was probably no way to beat them without getting a lot of people killed. Leaving them alone was probably not a good option either.

I also feel a need to point out that Japan did invade the US in the Aleutians campaign, albeit a fairly insignificant and deeply out-of-the-way portion of the US. The Philippines could also be considered part of the US at the time the Japanese conquered it, although pretty loosely.