[subsubzero]

I agree and also disagree.

> There was no nuclear weapons race; once it became clear that Germany had no chance of building atomic bombs, several scientists left the MP in protest

You are forgetting Japan in WWII and given casualty numbers from island hopping it was going to be a absolutely huge casualty count with US troops, probably something on the order of Englands losses during WW1. Which for them sent them on a downward trajectory due to essentially an entire generation dying or being extremely traumatized. If the US did not have Nagasaki and Hiroshima we would probably not have the space program and US technical prowess post WWII, so a totally different reality than where we are today.

[__loam]

I'll try to argue his point. The idea that Japan would have resisted to the last man and that a massive amphibious invasion would have been required is kind of a myth. The US pacific submarine fleet had sunk the majority of the Japanese merchant marine to the point that Japan was critically low on war materiel and food. The Japanese navy had lost all of its capital ships and there was a critical shortage of personnel like pilots. The Soviets also invaded and overran Manchuria over a span of weeks. The military wing of the Japanese government certainly wanted to continue fighting but the writing was on the wall. The nuclear bombing of Japanese cities certainly pressed the issue but much of the American Military command in the Pacific thought it was unnecessarily brutal, and Japanese cities had already been devastated by a bombing campaign that included firebombing. I'm not sure that completely aligns with my own views but that's basically the argument, and there are compelling points.

[jordanb]

Nimitz wanted to embargo Japan and starve them out.

The big problem that McArthur and others pointed out is that all the Japanese forces on the Asian mainland and left behind in the Island Hopping campaign through the Pacific were unlikely to surrender unless Japan itself was definitively defeated with the central government capitulating and aiding in the demobilization.

From their perspective the options were to either invade Japan and force a capitulation, or go back and keep fighting it out with every island citadel and throughout China, Indochina, Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria.

[subsubzero]

I am looking at the numbers from operation downfall that Truman and senior members of the administration looked at which had between 500,000 to 1,000,000 lives lost on the US side for a Japan invasion/defeat. 406k US soldiers lost their lives in WW2 so that would have more than tripled the deaths from its current numbers. And as for WWI and British casualties which I mentioned earlier, the British lost around 885k troops during WWI so US would have exceeded that number even on the low end of casualties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#:~:text=Tru....

[__loam]

Yeah it would have been a bloody invasion. I'm saying it probably would not have been necessary since Japan was under siege and basically out of food already.

[digging]

Did you stop reading my comment there? I debunked this already.

[fakedang]

> the atomic bombs weren't necessary to end the war with Japan either. (It can't be said with certainty one way or the other, but there's pretty strong evidence that their existence was not the decisive factor in surrender.)

Well, you didn't provide any evidence. Island hopping in the Pacific theater itself took thousands of lives, imagine what a headlong strike into a revanchist country of citizens determined to fight to the last man, woman and child would have looked like. We don't know how effective a hypothetical Soviet assault would have looked like as they had attacked sparsely populated Sakhalin only. What the atom bomb succeeded was in convincing Emperor Hirohito that continuing the war would be destructively pointless.

WW1 practically destroyed the British Empire for the most part. WW2 would have done the same for the US in your hypothetical scenario, but much worse.

[koops]

Asserting that there is strong evidence against a claim is not "debunking" a claim.

[digging]

You're right, that was overstated. I should have just said addressed. But my word choice doesn't make the gp comment any more valid.

[__loam]

You did not lol