Thread by @nudgestradamus

Let's clear up some mistakes in the popular narrative about the atomic bombings.

"Japan wouldn't have surrendered without nuking two cities - so it saved lives compared to a ground invasion." This is false.

Reason 1: Japan was already trying to surrender, and the US knew it.

https://twitter.com/nudgestradamus/status/1688334037578895360

MAGIC intercepts show that the Japanese leadership had reached out to the USSR in July 1945 to seek a brokered peace.

The Showa Emperor had directly instructed the cabinet to seek a generous peace in a meeting on 22nd June 1945.
nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28458…

Of course, unbeknownst to Japan, Stalin had already agreed to enter the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany, at the Tehran Conference in 1943.

Stalin also had his eye on the wealthy and industrialised Japanese colony of Manchuria, which he stripped bare in 1945.

A final advantageous side-effect of entering the war against Japan was ensuring that China became Communist at the conclusion of its civil war in 1949, though that's another story.

The Japanese leadership was amenable to a conditional surrender on generous terms, including near-total disarmament and relinquishing all colonial possessions pre-1941.

Manchuria, Taiwan, and Korea were considered integral to Japan and would not be surrendered easily.

The suicidal bushido-banzai spirit of Japanese people is also exaggerated by the west. Contemporary diaries show that ordinary Japanese knew the war was doomed well before 1945.
The inventor of the Zero described leadership as 'dragging Japan into a hellish couldron of defeat'.

So the 'Japan would not surrender' narrative is a myth.

That Japan would not yet *unconditionally surrender* is true. But a combination of diplomatic and military pressure would have achieved all political objectives save the vassalisation of Japan to the USA.

Reason 2: the popular trolley-problem of choosing between nuking cities versus a costly ground invasion is a false choice.

Any nation today which escalated a conventional conflict to a nuclear one, by wiping out cities, would rightly be viewed as a monstrous regime.

The power of the atom bomb could have been demonstrated in unequivocal terms, achieving an unconditional surrender *without* liquefying cities.

But this was not even considered. Instead, two nukes were dropped in the space of 3 days, killing over 220,000 people.

One argument is that the failure of Japan to surrender immediately after the first bomb justified the nukes. But 3 days is simply too short a time for an empire to understand what was happening and organise itself to surrender.

The initial plan was to keep wiping out cities as soon as the next bomb was ready, and they estimated it would take 4-8 bombs for Japan to surrender.

Truman countermanded this order after Nagasaki, requiring explicit Presidential authorisation for further bombings.

I understand why the Allies engaged in so-called strategic bombings in WW2, killing many civilians and wiping out historic cities. They got carried away, drunk on the fumes of propaganda. I also understand that these were moral evils, and warcrimes, which must never be repeated.