[pavlov]

The US even changed its targets just weeks before the bombing. Originally the second bomb was meant for Kyoto instead of Nagasaki:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33755182

This enormous cultural destruction was averted because the US Secretary of War had taken his honeymoon in Kyoto decades earlier. Presumably he had no such emotional connection to the innocents killed in Nagasaki.

[tough]

Tourism will save you from total anhiliation from the masters.

[largepeepee]

Saved from total annihilation? They more than proved their point with the first nuke, the second nuke was more "fun" field testing.

Esp since civilians were the main casualties and they could afford to shop around for locations.

[bequanna]

This ignores simple facts.

The Japanese had sufficient time to surrender after the first nuke was dropped.

The second was apparently what was required for them to capitulate. The loss of life (on both sides) from an invasion would have been at least an order of magnitude greater.

One terrible action to avoid a prolonged much larger loss of life. I don't envy the people who had to make that difficult decision but it is clear they made the correct one.

[kjkjadksj]

If the point was to bluff and insist that we had a thousand nukes ready to go, we should have just dropped one in the remote countryside where the crater can be appreciated but loss of life minimized. There was no strategic merit at this point to this loss of life, nor was there any for the firebombing of tokyo or the bombing of dresden or any of the other war crimes commited by the allies against urban populations who had little choice but to sit and die.

[largepeepee]

From your own wording, even you don't quite believe that propaganda.

Esp since both nukes and fire bombings did far more damage to civilians structures at that point.

Even if you ignore the wanton destruction, Russia flipping over to allies and cornering Japan by that time would have been enough to destroy Japanese moral as much as the fire bombings did.

So really the excess use of force by that time wasn't really needed, and trying to justify it now sounds like making poor excuses at revisionism.

[bequanna]

The Japanese were brutal, determined fighters. Many of them willing to fight it out to the last man.

Imagine you’re Truman or a General who has watched countless Allied and Japanese die in the war. How exactly would you get an enemy like that to surrender if you’re not willing to deliver a couple knockout punches?

[tough]

It was a sarcastic comment tbh, as in it seems pretty wild that the only reason for a city to be spared and the other to be zeroed being the destination of a general of war honeymoon...

Like WTF.