[jncfhnb]

It’s not speculation. It’s basically common sense. How awful and long would a ground invasion of these areas have been? Would it even be possible? How many of your troops are you willing to sacrifice to spare the lives of your enemy’s civilians?

[pineaux]

It is literally speculation, in the literal sense of the word. Speculation, as defined by the Cambridge dictionary: the activity of guessing possible answers to a question without having enough information to be certain.

The question here is if japan would have surrendered without the Atomic bombs. There is not enough evidence for it being True or False.

Many modern historians claim that japan would have surrendered anyway because its military was in shambles. They hoped for a conditional surrender. The bombs were frightening, but didnt create more damage than the previous firebombings. The fact that the Soviet Union joined the was on the western flank of japan was probably the straw. It blocked all future possibilities of diplomatic conditional surrender by pleading with the Russians. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bomb test sites and at least a hundred thousand innocent people died just to see the end-product of the most expensive weapons program ever. If Germany would have done it, all the people in the chain of command would have probably been hanged for war crimes.

[jncfhnb]

Great. Now answer the question. How many of your own troops are you willing to sacrifice for the chance to avoid bombing Hiroshima?

Because we got to 350k casualties from just the US with the bomb.

[brabel]

Why do you think a ground invasion was necessary? WWI finished without a ground invasion of Germany. Completely occupying enemy's territory was not a common way to end a war. The "normal" way was to end your enemy's capacity to fight, and then negotiate surrender. You can argue that the Japanese would refuse to surrender for a lot longer, but to think the "only way" to end their resistance was to either nuke innocent civillians (and I hope no one here thinks "there are no innocent" people, like they did at the time) or occupy the whole country on the ground seems to be ignoring basically every conflict prior and since then.

[jncfhnb]

What are you talking about? There was absolutely a ground invasion of Germany.