Reply To: A Somber Anniversary – August 6, 1945

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What’s important to remember here is that 80,000 died in Hiroshima, 40,000 in Nagasaki (even though the bomb was twice as powerful … yes, you can “miss” with an atom bomb).   That many people were being killed in conventional firestorm raids on places like Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, etc., on a fairly regular basis.  It just took 1,000 bombers instead of one.

The Japanese were offered terms several times through the summer of 1945, better terms than Germany ever received.  In late July, the “unconditional surrender of Japan” internationally demanded in the Potsdam Declaration was amended to the “unconditional surrender of Japanese armed forces,” meaning the Emperor could remain on the throne.

Rather than take this way out, the Japanese took it as a sign of American weakness.  Oops.

Even if you double Hiroshima and Nagasaki death tolls for wounds, radiation, etc, you wind up with 120,000.  This is less than 5-7% the projected death toll, mostly civilians, anticipated for Operation Coronet, Operation Olympic, and Operation Downfall, the planned invasions of Japan scheduled for October 1945 and March 1946.  This doesn’t include the 100,000 – 500,000 American fatalities projected, possibly doubling the entire American death toll of World War II.

It sounds crazy, but if you leave aside emotions and look at the facts and the numbers, it’s pretty much undeniable that the atom bombs saved at least five million lives, most of them Japanese civilians.

Add to this the fact that the Soviets were getting involved (they invaded Manchuria on August 9 and were preparing to invade northern Japan, they’d already invaded southern Sakhalin Island, which they hold to this day).

So we would have wound up with a North Japan and a South Japan, like we did with Korea and Vietnam.

So tack on a few more million dead from the inevitable war that would have followed in the 1950s or 60s, and flush any chance of Japan’s economic miracle along with the rest of the Pacific Rim.

Of course, what’s really important is that it never happens again.