There appears to be 2 theories regards the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

1. The bombing brought a swift end to the war, and limited the number of causalities likely to have occurred during a final assault on Japan.

2. The nuclear bombing was not the main reason why Japan surrendered. Due mainly to firebombing, Japan had lost many towns and cities, and the loss of 2 more cities was of little concern to the military. It was Russia entering into the Pacific conflict that was the main reason for the surrender, as the Japanese believed that Japan was going to be conquered eventually by both US and Russian forces, and Japan would then be annexed between the two, with minimal possibility of the country being reunited in the future.

However, the bombings that took place of all the cities and towns throughout Japan killed mostly civilian people (with estimates of nearly a million killed), although Japanese forces had killed many civilians in other countries, and had specifically bombed many civilian areas throughout the war.

Of importance in the longer term, has been the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the world.

Also somewhat prophetic were these words from Oppenheimer:-
"if you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed…. You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster."

Josh Ushay raises excellent points in a well constructed article. I however, can't understand why anybody could have the view, as some of the naive leftist ideologues have been known to express in their rabid pursuit of the US, that the dropping of the atomic bomb was in any way a negative event.

The simple fact is, although the Japanese don't have a problem with erasing such facts from their history books, they needed such a demonstration to pull them into line. People can argue for against it in a moral sense, but one can't act like Jesus Christ in a world full of immoral, savage cultures who would consume us in a second ever given the chance.

I seriously believe that the bomb was the best thing to happen to Japan, and you can take that any way you like. Japan has gone from being an aggressive, domineering & threatening to a world leader in sixty years!

Aren't those Americans awful! Their greatest enemy, who tried to conquer the pacific no less, yet they don't keep them on their knees (which is exactly where we'd be if Japan won), they help them up, build their economy, in which everybody wins. Japan still gets to have influence in the region in an economic sense, and the US wins through opening up the Japanes market, which is what the US wants of the entire world.

I sincerly hope that the Japanese lecture the Iraqi's on how the US is not their enemy, but their best chance at going foward, as it was for them all those years ago.

I think you raise some interesting points Benjamin

About 60 – 80 years ago, Japan was an aggressive country, and had viciously attacked China and other Asian countries as well as the US. However it now appears in time, that this level of aggression was a political type construct, and was not innate within the Japanese people.

There has been very little immigration into Japan, and if tests were undertaken, the DNA characteristics of the average Japanese person today would be no different than what they were prior to WW2. The gene pool is the same, but most of the Japanese people who fought in the war were reletatively uneducated, had little knowledge of the outside world, and many had never been outside of their own town or city until they were conscripted to fight in a war in another country.

So Japan attacking other countries was politically motivated by a relatively few people who were in power at the time, but through different forms of propaganda and indoctrination, they had convinced the general population of Japan that war with other countries was necessary. The general population was brainwashed into believing this and they were used as a political and military tool by a very few people who wanted to achieve more power for themselves.

Eventually, the general population of Japan suffered terribly because of this. Over 50 Japanese cities and major towns were destroyed by bombing prior to the first nuclear bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the levels of depravation throughout the country was extreme, but the Emperor remained alive throughout and living a life of splendour.

So to me, the real lesson from Nagasaki and Hiroshima is that most people are born the same, but a whole population of people can be easily lead by a very few individuals who seek more power for themselves. The whole population can suffer terribly because of that.

As a famous person once said the dead can rest easy knowing that they were killed for a just cause using conventional weapons.

McCullough's biography of Truman suggests that the huge losses on both sides resulting from the invasion of Okinawa convinced him to try to avoid an invasion of the Japanese mainland, even at the cost of using the devastating atomic bombs. Remember too that most of the major Japanese cities had already been nearly destroyed by "conventional" bombs, with (in some cases) even larger civilian casualties than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and still the regime in Japan did not surrender.

Early in Truman's presidency he seems to have underestimated the threat the Soviets would pose post-war. At the Potsdam Conference of July 1945 (where he received word of the successful first nuclear bomb test) Truman, unlike Churchill, thought Stalin could be negotiated with, and even thought he could establish a personal rapport with him. So the argument that the bombs were dropped on Japan to send a message to the Soviets does not seem to hold much water.

I think the debate over whether the use of atomic bombs against Japan was justified or not will rage on for a long time to come, and I personally think it will never be resolved.

The idea that there has been a "long-standing debate" about the use of the atomic bomb is a myth. People were generally relieved that the war was over and the bomb saved perhaps millions who would have died through conventional warfare. There has, though, been a recent anti-american push to raise the debate to the level of public consciousness and rewrite history to claim there has always been a debate about its use.

The truth is that regret about the necessity of its use has always been present but this is entirely different the claim that a realistic option was ignored.