Was America justified in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan?

Did you read through the earlier posts on this thread yet? Many items of interest are available for review. Some might just enlighten you a bit on the matter.

Here's some more good reading to supplement your curiosity on whether or not they deserved the bomb(s) or not.

Did the Japanese deserve the Atomic Bomb?

 

Japan started every C20th conflict it was involved in.
A death cult of militarism. 'The' militaristic death cult, even.

Reap.
The.
Whirlwind.

(As R Leonard alludes to, Mike's got a big old grinder. Google him. Why indulge the cherry-picking...)

 

We judge from the hindsight of history. If I were a fighting man with the prospects of being killed or maimed in invading the Japanese homeland, or if I was a PoW in some mine in Japan, I'd cheer for the bomb to be dropped. I know many of our guys who were PoWs did. They were told everyday that the first Allied soldier who sets food on Japanese soil, they would all be executed. Those guys DGAF and were so elated when they learned that it was dropped.

Lest we forget, if the Soviet Union landed on the northern portion of the main island, there would be a Soviet Japan. The bomb spaared the Japanese that.

 

Yes

 

Well, uh, yeah, because I was quoting the letter signed by dozens of scholars. So, yeah, when quoting a text, you have to copy and paste. That's how it works. I notice you said nothing about the contents of the letter, nor about the dozens of scholars from top universities all over the world who signed it.

Burning, blowing up, and microwaving hundreds of thousands of women and children is not the American way. It's certainly not patriotic. That's not what we do as Americans. The American way is not to brutalize an enemy when you know he's already beaten and badly wounded and trying to surrender. There were perfectly viable alternatives to dropping nukes.

Instead of helping Japan's moderates, who were trying every which way to surrender, FDR and then Truman strengthened the hand of the militarists over and over again.

 

Someone has not understood the nature of a dictatorship at all:
In a dictatorship, moderates are considered weaklings and traitors, and the more critical the situation becomes for those in power, the more extreme their measures to maintain power: There you don't want to be recognised as moderate who tries to surrender

In Germany, too, war weariness had been spreading among the population since Stalingrad at the latest. But at that time, the population no longer had the slightest say in the matter: something like "public opinion" was represented exclusively by Goebbels' propaganda. And the opposition had long since been eliminated

That will have been little different in Japan, because the country was de facto ruled by a military dictatorship that interpreted Bushido in a similarly extreme way as the Taliban interpret the Koran today.

Of course, Japan was bled dry and bombed to the brim. That is of little use if the generals prefer to let everything perish "honourably" in the ruins before the disgrace of surrender. They would have willingly sacrificed the population by the hundreds of thousands "for the honour" (as they already did). And the decision-making bodies in the USA were aware of this; they had amassed plenty of experience with the suicidal fanaticism of the enemy.
Perhaps if Japan had been invaded, everything would have collapsed like the German Western Front. But perhaps resistance would have been as fierce as on the Eastern Front.
But Truman did not have the "luxury" of throwing his soldiers into the meat grinder, as Hitler, Stalin or the Japanese generals did - it is in such details that one recognises the real value of a democracy. Not by how it deals with totalitarian regimes where human lives count for little.....
Hence they came to the cynical conclusion: if you want to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs. History has proven them right....

 

Well said, and yes, to drop the bomb, was the “American way”. No other way.

 

I strongly doubt if the Japanese moderates had any real power to influence the events; namely to negotiate a surrender. Remember the rivalry between the Japanese Army and Navy and how the Navy moved Yamamoto shipboard to protect him from assassination attempts by the Army. Applying that, any moderate is likely to be assassinated by the Army militarists.

 

“Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually
is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.”
The Peripheral, William Gibson 2014