[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.

[pdonis]

> I’m claiming a direct causality

You are inferring direct causality based on one event following another. That is the logical fallacy I referred to.

> There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.

That's not what I see, so I guess we'll just have to disagree.