Apart from the years longer, that was the logic used by Truman for decades and the casualty figures increased each time he spoke about it publicly. Unfortunately his own military disagreed with him

"Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary." Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet

"The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman

It is also useful to remember that the atomic bombs killed nowhere near as many as the firebombing did. So the question is why? Well the answer lies in the summit of Yalta of February that year. Stalin had at his disposal the largest fighting force the world has ever seen and the Allies knew it. At the summit Stalin demanded that he keep all the territory he had annexed the previous year and with having nowhere near the same military force and not knowing if the atomic bomb would work the Allies conceded. However they did get one concession. 90 days after the end of the War in Europe, Stalin would declare war on Japan.

So the War ended on May 8. 90 days later would be August 8. The first successful test was on July 15th so the race was on. Given how much land Stalin had claimed in Europe it made perfect sense he would do the same in the East so every day counted. The Chinese Civil War loomed large as well and the worry was the the whole of South-East Asia would go "Red" with the help of Stalin. So after defeating Fascism and Japanese Imperialism, the US could find that it handed the cake to the other nemesis, the Communist.

So August 6th the first bombed was dropped and Stalin, who did follow through with his promise, declared war on the 8th. 3 days later the second was dropped and on the 14th the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. As Major General Curtis LeMay put it "The War would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the War at all."

As for timing of any invasion, that was at best going to happen in early November at probably in late December. This is a full 3 months and hardly a pressing concern in August.

I can certainly entertain the argument the Truman did indeed have to "stare down" Stalin as he did have a frightening amount of raw materials, people and weapons. Combined with the numbers in South East Asia and China that did indeed present a very real shift in power in global politics. The Allies faced with those numbers did indeed have to display their power and the willingness to use it. Killing thousands of civilians certainly wasn't beyond the pale for the Allies in Germany and Japan with pretty distasteful mean such as firebombing. This was just the exact same tactic but with a different weapon but with the side bonus of giving Stalin a serious warning.

/can of worms

PBS's American Experience did a great show on this, called "Victory in the Pacific".

Japan was, indeed, beaten. However, Japan was unflinching in the concept of "death before surrender".

The show has videos of Japanese people committing suicide by jumping off an island cliff, rather than let the Americans reach them, when they captured Saipan. It was one of many, many instances of Japanese civilians killing themselves rather than letting the Americans come near them.

That quote was from someone who survived the Saipan suicides because his 5 year old body was caught by a tree branch.

Bombing wasn't about defeating Japan. It, American Experience argues, was partly to save Japanese lives, as soldiers had shown themselves willing to fight to the very last man, and civilians were being trained to fight on the mainland with sharpened sticks. It was also to save the American lives that would be lost in what would have been a bloody battle of attrition on the Japanese mainland.

The Emperor had approved Ketsu-Go, a plan that was basically a "last stand" that involved every single Japanese person fighting to the end.

It's like a little brother who can't win the fight but isn't smart enough to stop attacking you. It makes finishing the combat difficult, even though the little brother has been "beaten".

I don't make claims as to how accurate or thorough American Experience's research was, but from a viewer's standpoint, it appeared unbelievably convincing. If nothing else, it showed from interviews with civilians and children of civilians that the civilian mindset was very much in line with "death before surrender", incredibly so. The Japanese civilian was prepared to die, right down to indoctrinating pre-schoolage children with that mindset.

From American Experience:

Even after the second bomb, the war cabinet was a 50/50 split. It would seem to have been even less convinced if Anami, Japan's war minister, still had the "they've only got one bomb" argument.

It's quite amazing the resolve some of the Japanese had, even in the face of TWO bombs (not to mention the far more horrendous firebombing).

I think to put perspective on the pictures above, you need to look at them only after watching every single second of every war film recorded from the Pacific theater up until that point. After hundreds of hours of fighting and death films, maybe, just maybe, we (50 years later) can just slightly begin to be in a position to pass judgment on the decisions the leaders had to make then and there. I think that we too often apply today's mentality to actions of the past. To imply that sending a message to Stalin was some primary (or only) reason for dropping the bombs is a very simplistic reduction of a situational decision so complex that we (of today) probably can not even begin to comprehend it. Why? Because none of us know what it is like to live under the weight of a full fledge world war that had been going on for years. Could the message to Stalin been some part of it it? Sure. But to think that after 5 years of hard, hard war anything other than ENDING it was the primary reason for dropping the bomb is intellectually folly for people 50 years removed from the situation.

I recommend that anyone who has not visited the WWII museum in New Orleans take time to visit it some day. If you have a chance and the privilege to talk to a WWII vet, do. My grandfather passed away last August, but he fought in the Pacific in the Marines. He told me that there were events from that time that he just never were right to ever tell another person (once he returned back home). Some things were better left unsaid from his experiences. He was going to be in the invasion of Japan -- they were already preparing for it when the bombs were dropped.

Hmm. You know my vote on that.

Call me callous if you want, but it is hard for me to get too worked up about the Japanese getting pimp-slapped when they were the ones committing heinous attrocities pretty much everywhere they went. Just so you know, pictures of Dresden elicit similar reactions from me and my Jewish friends (ie: couldn't happen to a nicer group of Nazis).

One can talk about civilians being "uninvolved", but WW2 was about as good an example of total mobilization as there is in history. Whether or not the two atomic bombings were bourne out of military necessity, political convenience, or straight up vengeance, it is pretty unarguable that the Japanese brought it on themselves. Whatever claim to moral victimhood pretty much became laughable when the world discovered their rape factories, vivisection circuses, and ethnic cleansing programs.

Paleocon, among the ash and rubble they found a little girl's lunchbox. They actually were able to identify her by name because of the distinctive look of the box. Her mother had made her a special lunch that day, including peas which were hard to come by because of the war effort. The heat of the nuclear event caused the contents of her lunchbox to carbonize. The girl herself, vaporized.

Yeah, the citizens supported the war effort, but what choice did they have? Do you expect them to up and move because they don't agree with it? They were just people. People who happened to live under a government that made some monumental mistakes. As someone who lives in a state with a strong military economy (Connecticut), I don't feel I deserve to die because of the US's misadventures in Iraq.

If you think they deserved to be converted to radioactive ash for their sins, then yeah, you're callous.

It's just a f*cked up situation, with pages of rationale on each side of the argument.

I'm sad that that little girl was vaporized instead of getting to eat her peas. That's actually pretty heartbreaking. But, that's what happened. Can't change it. Can't argue it to the point where it doesn't matter.

I don't think pictures like that are to fuel the debate of "should we have" but to influence the future debate of "should we ever again."

Paleo,

As far as your rhetoric goes (taking umbrage unto the civilian populations that largely support their war-mongering regimes), then there is very little room remaining to manoeuver away from the inevitable hoary "America asked for 9/11" argument.

The short way to say "Deliberate and brutal targetting of non-combatant citizens" is terrorism. When it's perpetuated by military, it is callled a war crime.

Was so then. Is so now.

That's kind of an understatement of Japan's actions in WWII.

Why is that? Because it was the US they attacked?

Yup. You vivisect someone's prisoners of war in spectacular circus fashion and they tend to get pissed enough to drop nukes on you. I suppose one could make the tenuous argument that we should have been "bigger people" than to want to extract vengeance, but, as the Talmud puts it "only the injured party can forgive".

Axon,

I'm not sure I disagree that the targetting of non-combattants is a moral wrong. That said, it is a whole lot to ask of anyone to forego such tactics when either 1) they are bourne out of military necessity (e.g.: "countervalue" as deterrance in nuclear warfare) or 2) your population is fully mobilized (e.g.: the example of the total war against Japanese imperialism). Whatever damning examples you can give of American behavior during the Pacific War, it is hard to make the case that Japanese conduct did not make it very difficult to treat them with human dignity.

As to the contention that the Japanese were negotiating their own surrender, it is pretty clear that the terms for such a surrender they were looking for did not include the dismantling of their colonial "properties". They seemed of the delusion that surrendering to the Americans would allow them to keep "their" territories in Korea and Manchuria. Needless to say, there are more than a few denizens of Asia that had different opinions on that course of action. To Truman's credit, America insisted on surrender without conditions. To this day, Japanese revisionist historians insist that this, and not their intransigence, was responsible for hundreds of thousands of additional Japanese deaths. My own opinion on this is vie victus. The beaten don't dictate terms.

While I agree that the attack was horrible, Axon's appraisal of the situation leads me to conclude that Truman made the correct decision. Considering what Stalin had done in Eastern Europe, why wouldn't trying to keep the Soviets out of the Pacific Theater be a major concern for us?