Diplomacy? Something less than an unconditional surrender? Blockade? Some combination of the above? We don't know if any of these would have worked because they were never seriously tried. I question the "lack of ingenuity" justification as an excuse for terrorism. You can't think of a way to conduct a war to avoid what you regard as excessive casualties to your own troops, so it is OK to slaughter innocent civilians?
That's the whole point. We *do* know they wouldn't have worked. The military would not have surrendered without being ordered to by the Emperor. The Emperor would not have ordered surrender unless he thought the people were going to rise up against him, and that wasn't going to happen unless the people were pushed to the wall. The Emperor was fully complicit with the military leaders and their goals up until that point he became convinced that a revolt by the people was the likely outcome. The Americans had been fighting the Japanese for four years. We had developed an extremely accurate picture of the Japanese military culture, which totally ruled Japan. You can pooh-pooh all you want and claim that they would have found Jesus and surrendered rather than have the population starve, but that was most definitely not the case.
Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, one of the four military leaders of Japan, later called the atomic bombs "a gift from heaven" because it led to the surrender. Army Minister Korechika Anami obviously didn't agree, he disemboweled himself and slashed his own throat on August 15th.
We didn't try? We offered them the Potsdam Declaration (which is the terms they eventually accepted). It required Japan be occupied by Allied troops until a new Japanese government was established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people. According to these terms, they could have easily kept their emperor. They rejected the offer outright, and mocked it in the Japanese press.
We never formally asked for unconditional surrender. The Potsdam Declaration was the formal terms. There was no doubt in their minds that they could have kept their Emperor. Or are you arguing that an acceptable conclusion to the war would have been a cease fire, with the Japanese military leaders still in power? Like North Korea after the Korean War or Iraq after the first Gulf War?
And blockade would have definitely killed millions of Japanese, and probably tens of millions, from starvation. Even if they'd have surrendered in late August, millions would have starved. It was that close. Hundreds of thousands starved as it was.
BTW, Hiroshima was an army city The entire NE and E sidtes of the city were miiitary zones, including an Army division headquarters. About 43,000 soldiers were in the city; giving Hiroshima about the highest density of servicemen to civilians among Japan's large urban areas. Nagasaki was also a major military city; the Mitsubishi factory there is where they designed and built the torpedoes capable of running in shallow water that were necessary to attack the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Maybe the Japanese should have put their military facilities away from civilians. Or I guess we could have just blockaded them for forty years until we got GPS guided bombs perfected.
Achieving *our* military and political goals in WWII saved vastly more innocent lives than they cost, in fact, ending Japanese aggression was our goal in the Pacific. Why do you think Japan attacked Pearl Harbor? Because we embargoed them and they could no longer get the resources they needed to continue their war. Why did we embargo them? Because we didn't like the fact they were killing millions of Chinese. Even in your most fevered dreams Hamas and Al-Quada can't make the same claim. They kill innocents for the same reasons the Japanese did. They *like* it. Their goal *is* the death of innocents. Hamas' goal isn't a Palestinian state, unless it's a state that used to be called Israel and is built on the graves of millions of Jews.
So, according to you, the only moral way to deal with tyranny is to only attack the tyrants. I'm sure that there are millions of dead that are soooo impressed with your moral values. Maybe you can tell me how the Allies could have defeated the Axis nations without killing innocents?
Even in a tyranny, the people are responsible for their nation's actions. They could have overthrown their leaders. They could have abandoned the cities and the factories. "I was just following orders" is not a morally acceptable excuse for participating in atrocity. Or is it your belief that it is?
Allied troops forced German civilians to go through the death camps and bury the dead, because they thought those civilians bore some responsibility. Would you have absolved those civilians of all responsibilty?
If the US hadn't dropped the bombs, millions more would have died. What reason do you have to think otherwise? You think the Japanese military leaders would all of a sudden go "me bad" and surrender?
And if you think it's worth noting that bin Laden cited Hiroshima as precedent for the 9/11 attacks, and you can follow and agree with his chain of reasoning, you're fucking insane.
The "Big Eight" leaders of Japan (one of which was the Emperor) learned about Nagasaki at about noon, the Emperor told the military leaders to surrender about 12 hours later. Hell of a lot less than three days. Didn't take them long to absorb *that* impact.
WTF does bin Laden have to do with anything? Is there now a 21st century equivalent to Godwin's Law? You *do* know that the Japanese had caused the deaths of about 17 million people, right? They needed to be put down like the mad dogs they were. If the only way to do that was to make the Emperor shit his pants, so be it.
And as far as risking prolonging the war, by early August it had become obvious to the US military leaders in the Pacific that an invasion would cost too much in blood, and that firebombing and blockade would utterly destroy Japan, even without atomic bombs. King and Nimitz had already agreed to counsel Truman against invasion. Just bombing Japan's railways would have caused millions of deaths from famine that winter (as it was, with an early end to the war and massive food aid from the US, several hundred thousand Japanese died from famine that winter). BTW, that would have been unintentional; the US military didn't know the Japanese were that bad off for food; they just wanted to keep the Japanese from moving troops and weapons around.
Of course, I never fail to notice how the people on your side of the argument never mention the 200,000 to 300,000 Asians dying at the hands of the Japanese military each month towards the end of the war. Or over a hundred thousand POWs starving to death or being used as test subjects for biological and chemical weapons. 40,000 Japanese died in Nagasaki. That many people died from Japanese atrocities in Asia every four or five days.
Japan was far more vulnerable to bombing and blockade. Japanese cities were mostly wood, and they had almost no air defense systems and few air raid shelters. Most of the freight transport was done by ships, even between cities on the same island. There wasn't much railroad transport (most of it was to take freight to ports) and their road system was abysmal. B-29s were also used to drop mines in harbors; between that, submarines, and carrier-base planes, the Japanese merchant marine was decimated. About all they had left was their railroads, and they would have been easily destroyed. Japan didn't have the capability to repair their infrastructure like the Europeans did; I guess their arrogance caused them to totally dismiss the need for civil defense preparations. By the end of the war one of their main sources of metal was US bomb fragments. Strategic bombing and blockade would have utterly crushed Japan.
Just got done reading "Downfall" by Richard Frank; it's got some pretty interesting stuff about the end of the war in Japan.
Other than the "young tigers" incident, about the only other change in the power structure that was in the offing was the military preparing to declare martial law and moving the Emperor out of Tokyo for his own safety (and to make sure he doesn't do anything silly, like order surrender). That would have made surrender far less likely. If you think there was another change in the power structure near the end of the war, please post proof, because I *know* the military nutjobs were still running the country through the whole thing. Politicians up to and including Prime Ministers that didn't toe the military line had a bad habit of getting shot.
Those lunatics were still in charge when the Emperor ordered them to surrender. It was *not* a sure thing that they would follow his orders. And most of them suicided before the formal surrender took place.
Again, we were decrypting all their military and diplomatic traffic. They knew it was a nuke. They thought it unlikely we'd have more than one. They were going to continue fighting. And the US leaders knew it.
Mass slaughter of civilians by firebomb attack didn't sway them, why would a nuclear attack? The only reason the Emperor surrendered was because he was afraid the Japanese people would rise up against him if it became obvious to them that cities could be destroyed on a regular basis by one bomb. The deaths of innocents didn't bother him; fear of them revolting terrified him.
If we'd waited a few weeks before dropping the second bomb, they'd have been *less* likely to surrender; they wouldn't mind losing a city every few weeks. That had already been going on for months. But losing one every few days, they would fear the people would revolt.
Neither. You said the govt was beholden to the voters, in a reply to someone stating that a democratic govt could consolidate enough that the power is taken away from the voters.
I gave a counter-example to demonstrate you are wrong; the democracies of Europe are becoming subordinate to the non-elected leaders of the EU.
Come to think of it, I don't remember voting for the Secretary-General of the UN, either.
If the Chinese can get 500 million people living in space, they *deserve* to rule the world. Don't worry, they'll be a democracy waaaaay before that happens.
BTW, economics has everything to do with it. Worst case scenario is, as soon as China does something in space nobody else has done (moon base, person on Mars), they'll stop just like the US did.
Too bad that surplus was from capital gains and inflated wages caused by the smoke-and-mirrors tech bubble, and it's a miracle it lasted as long as it did (odd, isn't it, how the good times just managed to last to the election?) Or did you think is was because the federal govt was showing fiscal responsibility?
To extrapolate govt spending over the next ten years based on this year's budget is just as stupid as doing the same thing with the 1999 budget and forecasting paying off the national debt by 2012.
The main thing that will affect the federal budget over the next few decades is how long it will take the morons running this country to raise the retirement age to 72 or so, because if they don't, things will get very sucky very fast.
The Apollo 13 LEM did an uncontrolled re-entry with no heat shield, and it had a lump of plutonium in it running an RTG. Guess what, the human race didn't go extinct because of it.
Properly designed and shielded, stuff like that can easily survive a shuttle explosion. Hell, the Challenger astronauts were still alive when they hit the water.
As long as a NERVA doesn't actually emit any radioactive material, it's OK to use in LEO. If it does, they'd probably want to get out past the Van Allen radiation belts first.
Tell you what, you live in a house the size they had in the 50's/60's, have one car for your family, no cable, no A/C, just one phone, and have wifey cook your meals every night instead of going out, you'll do A-OK with one income. Well, unless you live in a big "popular" city with obscenely inflated real estate prices, where you'll be competing with all the other imbeciles trying to live beyond their means.
They were planning manned missions to Saturn by the mid-70's. The specific impulse of an Orion far exceeds anything else the human race has come up with. The disadvantage is each launch would have caused an estimated ten cancer deaths somewhere in the world. Using it outside the Van Allen belts, though, would keep the radioactive by-products out in space. Something like an Orion is about the only thing we could come up with that could divert an asteroid on an intersecting orbit with Earth (and that't be about the only good reason to launch one from Earth).
They built and succesfully tested a test vehicle that used five charges of high explosive.
You fail to realize the main purpose of the bomb. It doesn't exist to kill people. It exists to keep other people from using the bomb on you. Or, for that matter, to keep them from engaging in major hostilities with you. NK doesn't want the bomb so they can nuke Japan and San Francisco. They want it so Kim Il Jong II can keep on having orgies with Swedish hookers without worrying about the US and South Korea attacking him and ruining his party.
And according to Kurt Vonnegut, who was a POW in Dresden and survived because their air-raid shelter was an air-tight meat locker (Slaughterhouse 5), the people in regular air raid shelters (not air-tight) were rendered down to about a half-inch of lard on the floor.
There were quite a few Japanese that survived firebomb attacks by running like hell at the first sign their city was being bombed. Not all the bombs hit at once, and it took a while for the firestorm to develop.
After the first few missions, US planes started dropping pamphlets on cities telling them when they'd be bombed.
They knew it was a nuke that hit Hiroshima. A well respected general went there, looked around, and came back and gave an accurate report to the Emperor and the military leaders. They didn't care. They didn't think we had more of them. The military was raring to keep fighting even after Nagasaki; only when the Emperor told them to surrender, and explicitly gave the bomb as the reason for surrendering, did the military leaders order the surrender. And Truman knew exactly what they were doing and thinking, because we had all their codes broken.
The Emperor was completely OK with the Japanese strategy of trying to kill enough Americans in an invasion to force a negotiated peace; he changed his mind only after Nagasaki. If it weren't for the fact that he came in handy to make the occupation run smoothly, he'd have been hung for war crimes.
Yeah, we should have just blockaded Japan and continued firebombing their cities until the Japanese people rose up against their military and the Emperor. Tens of millions would die from starvation and disease, but the US wouldn't have to bear the shame of being the only nation crazy enough to use nuclear weapons.
And yeah, we wouldn't have to worry about nuclear brinksmanship either. Right. If the US isn't going to nuke a country that attacks without declaring war, doesn't that kinda render the whole concept of nuclear deterrence untenable?
You may be interested to know that there were over two million Japanese soldiers in Korea, Manchuria, China, and SE Asia and if the US Navy had "simply turned around and gone home" those soldiers would have continued killing those Asians to the tune of about 200,000 a month.
Your parent poster didn't mention the USSR. The fact that ending the war early saved an enormous number of lives. If the war had gone on just a few more weeks, it's likely that *millions* of Japanese would have died of starvation that winter.
Well, since they didn't surrender after a low altitude detonation over Hiroshima, I'm kinda doubting that blowing one up over Tokyo bay would have done annything but delay nuking a few of their cities.
And in the meantime an ungodly number of Asians would have died at the hands of the Japanese military.
I'm going to have to call BS on you. The only coup in Tokyo near the end of the war was the one by the "young tigers" to keep the Emperor from surrendering.
And yes, the bombs ended the war. Even after Hiroshima, from their research into nuclear weapons the Japanese thought we couldn't have more than one bomb (they had some idea how difficult it was to enrich uranium). It was only after Nagasaki that the Emperor told the military to surrender, and even then it wasn't a sure thing they would follow his orders.
Remember, we'd broken their diplomatic (Magic) and military (Ultra) codes. We knew what their strategy was. Up until after Nagasaki, it was to cause so much bloodshed that the US would negotiate a peace that would leave the militarists in power. After Nagasaki, they realized we didn't have to invade to kill them all.
Compared to the 17 million people whose deaths were caused by Japanese aggression, yes, 100,000 people *is* a minor affair. Even if you scale it up a little for radiation poisoning.
At the time Hiroshima was bombed, between 200,000 and 300,000 Asians were being killed every month by the Japanese.
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Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, one of the four military leaders of Japan, later called the atomic bombs "a gift from heaven" because it led to the surrender. Army Minister Korechika Anami obviously didn't agree, he disemboweled himself and slashed his own throat on August 15th.
We didn't try? We offered them the Potsdam Declaration (which is the terms they eventually accepted). It required Japan be occupied by Allied troops until a new Japanese government was established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people. According to these terms, they could have easily kept their emperor. They rejected the offer outright, and mocked it in the Japanese press.
We never formally asked for unconditional surrender. The Potsdam Declaration was the formal terms. There was no doubt in their minds that they could have kept their Emperor. Or are you arguing that an acceptable conclusion to the war would have been a cease fire, with the Japanese military leaders still in power? Like North Korea after the Korean War or Iraq after the first Gulf War?
And blockade would have definitely killed millions of Japanese, and probably tens of millions, from starvation. Even if they'd have surrendered in late August, millions would have starved. It was that close. Hundreds of thousands starved as it was.
BTW, Hiroshima was an army city The entire NE and E sidtes of the city were miiitary zones, including an Army division headquarters. About 43,000 soldiers were in the city; giving Hiroshima about the highest density of servicemen to civilians among Japan's large urban areas. Nagasaki was also a major military city; the Mitsubishi factory there is where they designed and built the torpedoes capable of running in shallow water that were necessary to attack the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Maybe the Japanese should have put their military facilities away from civilians. Or I guess we could have just blockaded them for forty years until we got GPS guided bombs perfected.
Achieving *our* military and political goals in WWII saved vastly more innocent lives than they cost, in fact, ending Japanese aggression was our goal in the Pacific. Why do you think Japan attacked Pearl Harbor? Because we embargoed them and they could no longer get the resources they needed to continue their war. Why did we embargo them? Because we didn't like the fact they were killing millions of Chinese. Even in your most fevered dreams Hamas and Al-Quada can't make the same claim. They kill innocents for the same reasons the Japanese did. They *like* it. Their goal *is* the death of innocents. Hamas' goal isn't a Palestinian state, unless it's a state that used to be called Israel and is built on the graves of millions of Jews.
So, according to you, the only moral way to deal with tyranny is to only attack the tyrants. I'm sure that there are millions of dead that are soooo impressed with your moral values. Maybe you can tell me how the Allies could have defeated the Axis nations without killing innocents?
Even in a tyranny, the people are responsible for their nation's actions. They could have overthrown their leaders. They could have abandoned the cities and the factories. "I was just following orders" is not a morally acceptable excuse for participating in atrocity. Or is it your belief that it is?
Allied troops forced German civilians to go through the death camps and bury the dead, because they thought those civilians bore some responsibility. Would you have absolved those civilians of all responsibilty?
If the US hadn't dropped the bombs, millions more would have died. What reason do you have to think otherwise? You think the Japanese military leaders would all of a sudden go "me bad" and surrender?
And if you think it's worth noting that bin Laden cited Hiroshima as precedent for the 9/11 attacks, and you can follow and agree with his chain of reasoning, you're fucking insane.
The "Big Eight" leaders of Japan (one of which was the Emperor) learned about Nagasaki at about noon, the Emperor told the military leaders to surrender about 12 hours later. Hell of a lot less than three days. Didn't take them long to absorb *that* impact.
WTF does bin Laden have to do with anything? Is there now a 21st century equivalent to Godwin's Law? You *do* know that the Japanese had caused the deaths of about 17 million people, right? They needed to be put down like the mad dogs they were. If the only way to do that was to make the Emperor shit his pants, so be it.
And as far as risking prolonging the war, by early August it had become obvious to the US military leaders in the Pacific that an invasion would cost too much in blood, and that firebombing and blockade would utterly destroy Japan, even without atomic bombs. King and Nimitz had already agreed to counsel Truman against invasion. Just bombing Japan's railways would have caused millions of deaths from famine that winter (as it was, with an early end to the war and massive food aid from the US, several hundred thousand Japanese died from famine that winter). BTW, that would have been unintentional; the US military didn't know the Japanese were that bad off for food; they just wanted to keep the Japanese from moving troops and weapons around.
Of course, I never fail to notice how the people on your side of the argument never mention the 200,000 to 300,000 Asians dying at the hands of the Japanese military each month towards the end of the war. Or over a hundred thousand POWs starving to death or being used as test subjects for biological and chemical weapons. 40,000 Japanese died in Nagasaki. That many people died from Japanese atrocities in Asia every four or five days.
Japan was far more vulnerable to bombing and blockade. Japanese cities were mostly wood, and they had almost no air defense systems and few air raid shelters. Most of the freight transport was done by ships, even between cities on the same island. There wasn't much railroad transport (most of it was to take freight to ports) and their road system was abysmal. B-29s were also used to drop mines in harbors; between that, submarines, and carrier-base planes, the Japanese merchant marine was decimated. About all they had left was their railroads, and they would have been easily destroyed. Japan didn't have the capability to repair their infrastructure like the Europeans did; I guess their arrogance caused them to totally dismiss the need for civil defense preparations. By the end of the war one of their main sources of metal was US bomb fragments. Strategic bombing and blockade would have utterly crushed Japan.
Just got done reading "Downfall" by Richard Frank; it's got some pretty interesting stuff about the end of the war in Japan.
Other than the "young tigers" incident, about the only other change in the power structure that was in the offing was the military preparing to declare martial law and moving the Emperor out of Tokyo for his own safety (and to make sure he doesn't do anything silly, like order surrender). That would have made surrender far less likely. If you think there was another change in the power structure near the end of the war, please post proof, because I *know* the military nutjobs were still running the country through the whole thing. Politicians up to and including Prime Ministers that didn't toe the military line had a bad habit of getting shot.
Those lunatics were still in charge when the Emperor ordered them to surrender. It was *not* a sure thing that they would follow his orders. And most of them suicided before the formal surrender took place.
Again, we were decrypting all their military and diplomatic traffic. They knew it was a nuke. They thought it unlikely we'd have more than one. They were going to continue fighting. And the US leaders knew it.
Mass slaughter of civilians by firebomb attack didn't sway them, why would a nuclear attack? The only reason the Emperor surrendered was because he was afraid the Japanese people would rise up against him if it became obvious to them that cities could be destroyed on a regular basis by one bomb. The deaths of innocents didn't bother him; fear of them revolting terrified him.
If we'd waited a few weeks before dropping the second bomb, they'd have been *less* likely to surrender; they wouldn't mind losing a city every few weeks. That had already been going on for months. But losing one every few days, they would fear the people would revolt.
Neither. You said the govt was beholden to the voters, in a reply to someone stating that a democratic govt could consolidate enough that the power is taken away from the voters.
I gave a counter-example to demonstrate you are wrong; the democracies of Europe are becoming subordinate to the non-elected leaders of the EU.
Come to think of it, I don't remember voting for the Secretary-General of the UN, either.
If the Chinese can get 500 million people living in space, they *deserve* to rule the world. Don't worry, they'll be a democracy waaaaay before that happens.
BTW, economics has everything to do with it. Worst case scenario is, as soon as China does something in space nobody else has done (moon base, person on Mars), they'll stop just like the US did.
Too bad that surplus was from capital gains and inflated wages caused by the smoke-and-mirrors tech bubble, and it's a miracle it lasted as long as it did (odd, isn't it, how the good times just managed to last to the election?) Or did you think is was because the federal govt was showing fiscal responsibility?
To extrapolate govt spending over the next ten years based on this year's budget is just as stupid as doing the same thing with the 1999 budget and forecasting paying off the national debt by 2012.
The main thing that will affect the federal budget over the next few decades is how long it will take the morons running this country to raise the retirement age to 72 or so, because if they don't, things will get very sucky very fast.
The Apollo 13 LEM did an uncontrolled re-entry with no heat shield, and it had a lump of plutonium in it running an RTG. Guess what, the human race didn't go extinct because of it.
Properly designed and shielded, stuff like that can easily survive a shuttle explosion. Hell, the Challenger astronauts were still alive when they hit the water.
As long as a NERVA doesn't actually emit any radioactive material, it's OK to use in LEO. If it does, they'd probably want to get out past the Van Allen radiation belts first.
Tell you what, you live in a house the size they had in the 50's/60's, have one car for your family, no cable, no A/C, just one phone, and have wifey cook your meals every night instead of going out, you'll do A-OK with one income. Well, unless you live in a big "popular" city with obscenely inflated real estate prices, where you'll be competing with all the other imbeciles trying to live beyond their means.
I don't know about you, but after the next hundred years, I expect to be dead.
They were planning manned missions to Saturn by the mid-70's. The specific impulse of an Orion far exceeds anything else the human race has come up with. The disadvantage is each launch would have caused an estimated ten cancer deaths somewhere in the world. Using it outside the Van Allen belts, though, would keep the radioactive by-products out in space. Something like an Orion is about the only thing we could come up with that could divert an asteroid on an intersecting orbit with Earth (and that't be about the only good reason to launch one from Earth).
They built and succesfully tested a test vehicle that used five charges of high explosive.
You fail to realize the main purpose of the bomb. It doesn't exist to kill people. It exists to keep other people from using the bomb on you. Or, for that matter, to keep them from engaging in major hostilities with you. NK doesn't want the bomb so they can nuke Japan and San Francisco. They want it so Kim Il Jong II can keep on having orgies with Swedish hookers without worrying about the US and South Korea attacking him and ruining his party.
Well, to be fair, Oppenheimer *was* a communist when he was younger.
Man, if I was old and famous, it'd be kind of cool to see if I could get a copy of my own obituary from the Times.
Hopefully none of them were written by Jason Blair.
And according to Kurt Vonnegut, who was a POW in Dresden and survived because their air-raid shelter was an air-tight meat locker (Slaughterhouse 5), the people in regular air raid shelters (not air-tight) were rendered down to about a half-inch of lard on the floor.
There were quite a few Japanese that survived firebomb attacks by running like hell at the first sign their city was being bombed. Not all the bombs hit at once, and it took a while for the firestorm to develop.
After the first few missions, US planes started dropping pamphlets on cities telling them when they'd be bombed.
They knew it was a nuke that hit Hiroshima. A well respected general went there, looked around, and came back and gave an accurate report to the Emperor and the military leaders. They didn't care. They didn't think we had more of them. The military was raring to keep fighting even after Nagasaki; only when the Emperor told them to surrender, and explicitly gave the bomb as the reason for surrendering, did the military leaders order the surrender. And Truman knew exactly what they were doing and thinking, because we had all their codes broken.
The Emperor was completely OK with the Japanese strategy of trying to kill enough Americans in an invasion to force a negotiated peace; he changed his mind only after Nagasaki. If it weren't for the fact that he came in handy to make the occupation run smoothly, he'd have been hung for war crimes.
Yeah, we should have just blockaded Japan and continued firebombing their cities until the Japanese people rose up against their military and the Emperor. Tens of millions would die from starvation and disease, but the US wouldn't have to bear the shame of being the only nation crazy enough to use nuclear weapons.
And yeah, we wouldn't have to worry about nuclear brinksmanship either. Right. If the US isn't going to nuke a country that attacks without declaring war, doesn't that kinda render the whole concept of nuclear deterrence untenable?
You may be interested to know that there were over two million Japanese soldiers in Korea, Manchuria, China, and SE Asia and if the US Navy had "simply turned around and gone home" those soldiers would have continued killing those Asians to the tune of about 200,000 a month.
Your parent poster didn't mention the USSR. The fact that ending the war early saved an enormous number of lives. If the war had gone on just a few more weeks, it's likely that *millions* of Japanese would have died of starvation that winter.
Well, since they didn't surrender after a low altitude detonation over Hiroshima, I'm kinda doubting that blowing one up over Tokyo bay would have done annything but delay nuking a few of their cities.
And in the meantime an ungodly number of Asians would have died at the hands of the Japanese military.
You must not be an elderly Chinese, Korean, or Fillipino citizen.
I'm going to have to call BS on you. The only coup in Tokyo near the end of the war was the one by the "young tigers" to keep the Emperor from surrendering.
And yes, the bombs ended the war. Even after Hiroshima, from their research into nuclear weapons the Japanese thought we couldn't have more than one bomb (they had some idea how difficult it was to enrich uranium). It was only after Nagasaki that the Emperor told the military to surrender, and even then it wasn't a sure thing they would follow his orders.
Remember, we'd broken their diplomatic (Magic) and military (Ultra) codes. We knew what their strategy was. Up until after Nagasaki, it was to cause so much bloodshed that the US would negotiate a peace that would leave the militarists in power. After Nagasaki, they realized we didn't have to invade to kill them all.
Compared to the 17 million people whose deaths were caused by Japanese aggression, yes, 100,000 people *is* a minor affair. Even if you scale it up a little for radiation poisoning.
At the time Hiroshima was bombed, between 200,000 and 300,000 Asians were being killed every month by the Japanese.