[mytailorisrich]

The US had invaded Japan, they did not need to be "nice" to acquire any of Japan's knowledge.

My understanding is that the US were worried about the communists and Japan's stability in general and decided not to unduly rock the boat.

[082349872349872]

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Course

[discardedrefuse]

There's some interesting analysis of WWII that posits that the nukes were completely unnecessary. Stalin was poised to invade Japan from the north so the US had to act fast.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...

I don't know how accurate this is, but its a good read.

[refurb]

One piece that is always missing in these arguments is - what was the alternative? Blockade Japan into submission? Is hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians dying of hunger better than being killed by an atomic weapon?

[hutzlibu]

How about exploding the bomb in the sky, visible from the emperors palace and the whole city?

Or using it against an actual military target.

The message would have been clear, we can annihilate you if we want and you don't surrender. But they choose to go against the civilian population simply, because they wanted the data, of what a bomb does to a city. And that by that time bombing civilians was already pretty normalized anyway, so trying to save civilian life simply was not an issue.

[refurb]

I mean, the Allies literally bombed a major city with the first atomic weapon and Japan was like "yeah, not going to surrender". Then after the 2nd bomb, it still took days and a Soviet invasion to get them to surrender.

I'm not sure a demonstration would mean much if destroying a entire city didn't convince them.

[discardedrefuse]

The article I posted covers this (the section called Scale). When put into context, the destruction of Hiroshima just wasn't that impressive. We had already leveled 66 Japanese cities with conventional bombs. Hiroshima may have been a technical / scientific feat, but the end result paled in comparison to what we had already done before.

[daemoens]

The issue with this argument is that neither the bomb nor the imminent Soviet invasion ended the war. The bombs were certainly one of the largest factors that ended the war, but it also wasn't the sole factor that ended the war.

[bluepizza]

This is 1945, before the decades long alliance and best friendship between US and Japan, before Internet, computers, and most electronics. Americans can't even read the signposts in the streets, let alone find and interpret the results of extremely secret operations.

[Larrikin]

Are you implying that in 1945 there were no people who spoke Japanese and English and Japan itself didn't have decades of emmigration to all parts of the world? The US committed one of its greatest crimes against humanity during the war against the huge number of Japanese Americans in the US.

[the_optimist]

Which crimes are you referring to? Which war are you referring to?

[HWR_14]

He's referring to the US government rounding up US citizens of Japanese descent and moving them to camps during WWII. It was a horrific thing the US government did. Unfortunately, because humans can be horrible, I would disagree it was one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history.

[fuzzfactor]

Good observation.

1945 was about halfway between now and when slavery was still widely accepted as the norm since time immemorial.

Statistically you would have to expect attitudes of what amounts to "humanity" to have only been about halfway from slavery to what there is now. Anything considered more modern would only have begun to exist to a much smaller extent at the time.

[Larrikin]

I think slavery was a bigger crime against humanity than the internment of Japanese, but regard them as both as among the most awful crimes the US has committed to humanity as a whole.

It wasn't meant to rank the worst things humans have ever done (outside of slavery no matter the country, that is almost always a distraction to justify awful things other's have done), but they are both among the most awful things the US has specifically done to the world.