Ozandy is right.
I think Trumans words are very illustrative of how the septics saw the promise of nuclear weapons.

"Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare."

Looks to me like revenge.

Ozandy is correct when he says that they did not need to drop the nukes to end the war.

The war was already lost and the Japanese were frantically looking for a way to surrender honorably. The Russian forces were returning from Europe and preparing to attack Japan from the north and this would has split their country in two, like Berlin.

Meanwhile the scientists were frantically trying to field-test their new toys (two bombs, two different models) before the war finished.

As the author suggests, it also put the Russians on notice and effectively started the cold war.

No amount of warm, fuzzy revisionism and noble excuse-making changes these facts.

The idea of dropping nuclear weapons on Japan to bring about a swift conclusion to WWII was a reasoned and logical decision.

Starting from the premise if one to decides or is forced to fight a war, do it absolutely and with all the weapons and craft at ones disposal because, you are not responsible for your enemy losses, only your own.

Any bull dust theory which does not recognise the above is merely the thinking of the sanctimonious,, lazy minded dullards who would have nothing to lose from defeat.

The benefits were

With the Japanese military machine determined to fight a fight to the death this would have meant significant allied losses and injuries. These losses were all averted.

Not to mention greater Japanese civilian losses through Japanese inflicted disease and starvation.

Having ended the war in Europe, the imperative was to conclude the capitulation of Japan so the world could move off a war footing and back to more normalised social practices.

Allied prisoners of war would likely be executed before they could be liberated in a fight on the Japanese homeland.

Now, maybe someone (Ozandy for instance) can comment on the benefits of a prolonged military invasion of Japan and I will make a proper analysis and disembowel it.

As for “There is a very high probability that without the USA’s image of itself in 1945 as being the world champ, there would not be a single nuclear weapon in the world today.”

Pure speculative bunkum based on personal bias and half-witted conjecture

Add to that there would be no nuclear power generation and we would be burning more fossil fuels for the greenies and other wannabes to whine about.

Oh and the cold war... the risk of a nuclear Armageddon is what stopped Europe being engulfed in a "hot war", initiated by Stalin & Co... or were the Berlin Airlift 1948, Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 the figment of western media propaganda?

Col Rouge

“Speculative” – yes - but please not “bunkum”. Its an opinion - and OLO is about opinions.

Many believe that an invasion of Japan would have cost many US lives. But, why invade an enemy who is on the ropes?
It is to dismantle the regime so that there is no chance of it bouncing back.

What would be the chance of the Japanese or German people allowing their hawkish governments ever to get the power they once had which depended heavily on lies, when the lies can no longer be believed? We can speculate on that.

A blockade for 10 years would have cost far, far less than an invasion. This is not speculation as the 10 year blockade of Saddam’s Iraq was easily affordable. Some governments in the Arabic world would have liked to smuggle stuff into Iraq. After 1941, Japan had no friends. No government would have wanted to smuggle stuff into Japan once it was blockaded.

The essence of the article was that the Cold War was a very costly byproduct of letting off the first bomb. That is not speculative either as we witnessed its reality

There was a huge stockpile of weapons assembled on Okinawa that was intended for a possible land invasion of Japan.

Ever wondered what happened to them after the war?

Instead of the usual method of post-war disposal, some eventually went to arm South Korea but the rest were secretly sold to the North Vietnamese for the token amount of one dollar, to help them evict the French so that US companies would be free to drill for oil and gas off their coast.

Does that change anybody's outlook on the traditional view of the popular historical narrative? Things may not necessarily be as clear-cut as they seem and this topic is a prime example.