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I'll put it this way: in popular culture, the controversy over the use of atomic weapons by America goes beyond purely what can be proved, and has instead become a proxy war for other contemporary political issues. (This is not a new phenomenon, and the history of Hiroshima discourse is a fascinating subject in itself.) You will no doubt find some 'mainstream' pundits—even NY Times op-ed authors—willing to carry water for the notion that the use of the atomic bomb was unnecessary, and furthermore known to be unnecessary by the principals at the time. The evidence, however, does not support it. EDIT:
To respond to your edit, statements of opinion made by American military figures after the war are not considered convincing. A lot of our war scholarship used to be based on statements made by participants after the war, but we have become increasingly skeptical of this approach, for good reason. For example, our narrative about the German invasion of the Soviet Union used to be largely based on the postwar testimonies of Nazi generals. However new examination of primary sources—i.e. records, receipts, transcripts of meetings (some of which were previously buried in Soviet archives)—have shown that their testimonies were often extremely inaccurate, misleading, self-serving, or else calculated to produce a political effect in a Cold War context. For the same reason, what figures like Halsey—and particularly Douglas MacArthur, an unreliable narrator worthy of "Pale Fire"—have to say about whether the atomic bombs were decisive should provoke skepticism at best. And this is not just because they were political figures and seasoned inter-service warriors, jockeying for position in a postwar hierarchy, but because they weren't there. The best way to determine whether the bomb was decisive is to examine primary sources, both in the American and Japanese context, some of which have been posted elsewhere in this thread. By examining those sources you cannot really make the case that the bomb was not decisive, nor can you claim that the decision to use the bomb was primarily motivated by factors other than the urgent need to end the war quickly. While some people may indeed make that argument, they are relying on questionable postwar statements of opinion, with no convincing evidence to support them. |