the argument put forward was that continuing the war (with a possible drawn-out ground invasion of japan) would cost more lives than demonstrating 2 nukes.
Yes. that was the argument put forward. Similar arguments have been put forward for almost every military and major terrorist action ever taken. People can subscribe to the justifications, or not, as they see fit. The real thing to be cautious about is if you accept such justifications but only when your country is the one making them.
Yeah, but the argument put forward for everyone may not have been acceptable to some working on the project.
It is important to note that the physicists working on the gadget came from diverse backgrounds and had wildly different politics and moralities when coming to decide if they should work on what they saw as a doomsday weapon.
I always see it posed as “we either nuked Japan or we invaded”, but the nukes were absolutely used in preparation for a land invasion. Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit into the highly controversial US strategy of strategic bombing Japanese industry prior to a land invasion, and they were not even the most deadly of our strategic bombing campaigns against Japan (the fire bombing of Tokyo was worse). A proper invasion of Japan post introduction of nuclear bombs commanded by one of our most infamously nuke happy commanders, Douglas MacArthur, planned to have US troops marching through the radioactive wasteland formerly known as Japan slaughtering anything that resisted them. It wasn’t an either or, we weren’t nuking Japan as an alternative to a land invasion, we were nuking them in preparation for a land invasion
Why didn’t they send a movie of the bomb to Hirohito with demands?
Of course, they’d killed a lot of our people in really horrific ways, so patience was running thin.
Because Hirohito was completely shielded from outside communications, and only knew what his top military leaders told him. Specifically the same military leaders who though it would be poetic for the entirety of Japan to die in combat before a single individual surrendered. Nuking 2 cities was the only way for the US to get Hirohito to see the actual consequences of continuing the war
They could have dropped the bombs on the coast or a non populated area as a warning, and act if they didn’t surrender though. That’s a demonstration, dropping it in a city/town was not, that was a masacre.
They dropped the first one on a city and that didn’t get the point across, what would bombing a beach do?
Dude they dropped a bomb on a city, and they completely ignored it. In fact, there was an attempted coup by several the generals to kill the other generals who wanted to sue for peace. These were really militant military men.
The Kyūjō incident (宮城事件, Kyūjō Jiken) was an attempted military coup d’état in the Empire of Japan at the end of the Second World War. It happened on the night of 14–15 August 1945, just before the announcement of Japan’s surrender to the Allies. The coup was attempted by the Staff Office of the Ministry of War of Japan and many from the Imperial Guard to stop the move to surrender.
They attempted to place Emperor Hirohito under house arrest, using the 2nd Brigade Imperial Guard Infantry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
So when people argue that the Japanese were willing to surrender without a bomb or a major military conflict, they are completely ignorant about the trajectory of what was actually happening. We’re lucky that we didn’t have to drop five nukes AND invade. And don’t forget, the Russians were going to invade as well.
that would be very expensive (in terms of materiel) demonstration that, considering 1. japanese mindset at the time and 2. the fact that nobody has been nuked to date, would be probably not effective at all. Today, this works because everyone and their grandma knows that nukes exist and they do work
