My "I-rant"

[RobTzu]

Nukes are another matter.  At any rate we had won at that point.  The Russians had entered in the war and were mopping up in Mainland Asia, Japan knew it was only a matter of time.

[Chip Haynes]

But that doesn't mean they were busy cleaning the red carpet for our arrival. The general consensus was that there was going to be an incredible fight for the Japanese Islands if we couldn't convince them it was in their best interest to prehaps not.

And nothing says "please stop fighting now" like a couple of mushroom clouds.

[RobTzu]

The is alot of good history work being done that states the Japanese were trying to arrange a surrender but with the condition that they could keep the emperor.  The short and sweet of it is that Truman dropped the nukes mainly to show the Soviets we had them.  I do not know if I agree with that anylsis, quite honestly I do not keep up with my history like I used to, and have not read enough to form an informed opinion.  The invasion of mainland Japan would have been a bloody affair. To be sure, we did not want to have to do it.

But then again, we had killed so many Japanese (and German) civilians with carpet bombing that the nukes weren't militarily all that a big deal.  The allies killed over 300,000 Germans in Dresden with Fire Bombs, and had already killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese with both conviental and fire bombs.  Not to say nukes are not a big deal, just at that moment in history their impact was not as great as we like to remember it.

[Syberberg]

The short and sweet of it is that Truman dropped the nukes mainly to show the Soviets we had them.  I do not know if I agree with that anylsis, quite honestly I do not keep up with my history like I used to, and have not read enough to form an informed opinion.

That's the correct analysis. The Russians had already captured Berlin by then and had considerable military forces in Eastern Europe, with more on the way. Churchill despised Stalin and had several arguements with Eisenhower about the long-term sense of supporting the Soviet military and it would appear that Truman agreed with Churchill about the Soviet threat. If Japan had managed to surrender before the nukes were dropped, that would've freed up the Pacific forces to be either redeplyed to Europe or attack Russia's western end (which would've probably turned into a gross failure on the lines of Operation Barbarossa) via the port city of Valdivostok, but might not have prevented the Red Army from continuing on across Europe through the Allied forces that were there. Anyway, that kind of speculation is best left for the historical what-if novelists. We'll never know for sure what would've happened if the nukes hadn't been dropped.

As for the various death tolls from the fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, they took far more than one plane and one bomb to cause the damage they did, and that's the difference.

[Chip Haynes]

The nukes were efficient for the manpower involved in their delivery, and were tactically applicable due to the wide-spread military/industrial nature of the targets.

Plus, they really get the point across in a way no other system can. They show the opposition- and the world- that you really, really do mean it this time.