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In reply to the discussion: No Choice: Why Harry Truman Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan [View all]Leith
(7,809 posts)They were already surrounded.
Near the end of WW II, everything - and I mean everything - was reserved for the military. Japanese civilians starved every day. Some resorted to trying to eat inedible plants like grass. They still trained children as young as 3 with sharpened bamboo sticks to fight off the foreign devils. Civilian deaths did not concern the military so that would not have been a deterrent.
The reason for The Bomb dropped on Hiroshima was to show Japan's power center that we had the technology, we could use it, and we were not afraid to use it. The reason one was dropped on Nagasaki was to show them that we had more than one. At that point, they did not know how many we had or where more would be dropped. They knew that they were vastly outgunned and that was only thing they understood and respected.
In terms of the situation at the time, hindsight is not 20/20 when one refuses to look at all the facts. They were not going to surrender until it was proven to them beyond all doubt that they had irreparably lost.
I am not approaching this as a racist, but a realist. When I was in my 20s, I lived in Tokyo for 3 years. I lived among the Japanese, spoke the language, shopped on the local shopping street, made friends with the proprietor of the nearby coffee shop, the whole deal. Almost every day I saw old women bent over and deformed from wartime privation. My neighborhood was evacuated because an old WW II bomb had been discovered at a nearby building site (the year was 1982). Nearly 40 years later, it still wasn't "over" for Tokyoites, myself included. Truman had complete knowledge of the situation and made his decision. He made the right one.