[FredPret]

Allied options were:

1. Invade. Expected Allied casualties of 300k all the way to much more than a million. Expected Japanese casualties: tens of millions, perhaps up to literally all of them. Previous Japanese strongholds fought to the last man, earlier in the war the Allies invaded an island with 11000 Japanese soldiers, and I think 47 of those eventually surrendered. The rest died. The civilian populations on these islands infamously committed suicide in huge numbers rather than be captured by the Allies. How much harder would an invasion of the home islands be!? The Japanese government issued an order that every single person must fight to the death.

2. Starve them out. The allies had submarines all around Japan and completely blocked all food and oil imports. This was working. But given the Japanese fighting spirit, likely tens of millions would have died before any change took place. It's also possible that the population could drop so low that the islands would become self-sufficient and then the war would drag on literally forever.

3. Conventional aerial bombardment. The Allies were already trying this with great gusto, to little diplomatic effect.

4. Demonstration nuke off the coast. The Allies only had two nukes left after the test one, and weren't 100% sure it would work. A failed demo would only strengthen Japanese resolve. There were concerns whether one demo nuke would be scary enough to force a surrender. Given that one actually used nuke wasn't, these concerns turned out to be valid.

5. Actually drop a nuke. This option turns out to have had the lowest bodycount in the end and had the unexpected side-effect of ushering in an unprecedented era of global peace.

[philwelch]

> Starve them out. The allies had submarines all around Japan and completely blocked all food and oil imports. This was working. But given the Japanese fighting spirit, likely tens of millions would have died before any change took place. It's also possible that the population could drop so low that the islands would become self-sufficient and then the war would drag on literally forever.

Probably the biggest share of the blockade at the end was done by naval mines. At the end, the US airdropped naval mines in Japanese harbors to prevent them from importing food, and this sunk more Japanese shipping than the submarines ever did. It was even called “Operation Starvation”.

[xcv123]

6. Accept Japan's request for peace negotiations. Stop fighting and begin negotiating their conditional surrender.

[FredPret]

And let them continue to fuck up China and the whole Pacific region, only to come back swinging a couple of decades later

[scotty79]

And now US fears China instead. You can't come out on top. Why not commit less atrocities on the way wherever you are going?

[lupusreal]

"Commit less atrocities" in this case is just code for permitting others to commit whatever atrocities they want. American "atrocities" against Japan pale I comparison to what the Japanese were inflicting on the rest of Asia.

[scotty79]

It's not a code. It's literally saying leave doing bad things to bad guys. Instead just becoming one of them but being proud about it because your atrocities were somehow better because the cause justifies the means and your cause is just. By that logic jihad is fine.

Have you noticed how in history good guys always eventually won every major conflict? What are the odds? 100% if you paint a bullseye after you shot.

[xcv123]

The good guys dropped nuclear bombs on 200k+ civilian men, women, and children. There was literally no other option. USA #1.

[Aeolun]

> This option turns out to have had the lowest bodycount in the end

Given that you don’t know the body count of the other options, given they didn’t happen, that’s a bold statement to make.

[pie420]

The firebombing of tokyo killed 200K people, more than both nukes. the firebombing was an attempt to end the war via conventional means and it did nothing to weaken japanese resolve.

The reason hiroshima and nagasaki (small cities) were chosen as nuke targets was because every other bigger city was already mostly destroyed due to firebombing campaigns.

[Aeolun]

I am not sure how this is relevant to the point I made. Lots of people died. You still don’t know (and never will) how much would have died due to the other options. It’s speculation at best.

[pdonis]

Your survey of the options is basically the one that the US government put out after the war to push back against criticism. However, historical scholarship since then has shown that it wasn't that simple.

First, there is no evidence of any actual casualty estimates made during the war that were anywhere near as high as the ones you give in option 1. Those numbers were made up after the war. The wartime estimates were about an order of magnitude lower.

Second, you left out an option: clarify the status of the Emperor if the Japanese surrendered, which the US government well knew, since they were reading Japanese diplomatic traffic and also had plenty of intelligence from spies, was the only real obstacle in the way of the Japanese surrendering. The final surrender agreement left the Emperor in place as the head of the Japanese state. If the Japanese had known that was going to be the final outcome of surrender earlier, it is highly probable that they would have surrendered earlier. The status of the Emperor was the primary weapon the military war faction in the Japanese cabinet used to quash surrender proposals.

Third, to call the time since WW II "an unprecedented era of global peace" is a bit much. What the bombs ushered in was an era of nuclear stalemate. The US does deserve credit for not using the bombs again, even though the US was the only nuclear power for at least four years after WW II. It is also true that many people after WW II expected a nuclear conflict to happen as soon as the USSR got nuclear weapons, and none did. But that didn't stop plenty of conventional conflicts from continuing to break out all over the world, nor has the US kept out of such conflicts.

[FredPret]

First, the casualty estimates are just for US soldiers and is likely low. They fough against Japanese troops with a kill ratio of between 1:1 and 1:20 (in favor of the Marines) so it’s easy to extrapolate massive US casualties when fighting the then 80 million strong Japanese on home soil.

I don’t know much about the second point, so you may be right.

Third, you have to look at stats, not emotions. Battle deaths - in absolute terms and per capita - dropped like a stone after 1945.

[pdonis]

> Battle deaths - in absolute terms and per capita - dropped like a stone after 1945.

After rising like a rocket when WW II started. If you leave out WW I and WW II, it's not clear that post-1945 was more peaceful than pre-1914.

[FredPret]

My original and subsequent posts were that the nuke made the world safer. Post-1945 battle deaths dropped to near-zero by comparison to pre-1945.

Even one battle death is too many but having them go down overall is very good.

[pdonis]

> My original and subsequent posts were that the nuke made the world safer. Post-1945 battle deaths dropped to near-zero by comparison to pre-1945.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a well known logical fallacy. That is what you are doing here.

Also, the relevant comparison, as I said before, is not post-1945 vs. pre-1945. It is something like post-1945 vs. pre-1914, so that the comparison involves peacetime conditions on both sides.

[FredPret]

I’m claiming a direct causality between how terrible the nukes were and how peaceful the subsequent decades have been.

The cold war was cold because of M.A.D.

And I will compare any periods I want. The nukes fell in 1945, so I compare all of human history before that and after that. There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.