Do you think it was morally wrong to NUKE Hiroshima & Nagasaki ?

They unearthed documents that seem to show that the majority of the Japanese leadership, led by the Emperor, was ready to surrender within a matter of weeks at most, impeded only by a small clique of extremists within the military, and that American and British intelligence intercepts made this clear.

This "small clique of extremists" was the war cabinet and the bulk of the military commanders. So it is true that, with the exception of the the people with the actual authority to surrender, the Japanese gov't was interested in peace. a

2) The people that actually *had* the authority to surrender (the war cabinet & the military leaders) were simply not interested in surrender under anything close to acceptable terms. We certainly could have negotiated a truce with the Japanese that allowed them to keep conquered territories and maintain their military leadership, but who the hell thinks that would have been a good idea?

Allied leaders saw what the negotiated settlement in WWI led to a generation later.

I would agree that the insistence on unconditional surrender resulted in more deaths in the short-term, but I would argue that it saved countless more in the long-term. Japan & Germany's will to make aggressive war was broken, and their civilian populations were brought face-to-face with the results of their governments' actions.

The fact that Japan & Germany show absolutely no inclination to return to their former ways does seem to indicate that insistence on unconditional surrender was correct.

Funny, I thought that they surrendered because their plans for total conquest of the Pacific Rim had failed utterly, leaving tens of millions dead in their wake. The Japanese of the early 20th Century were some bad, bad motherfuckers. Have you read much history about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria? How about what happened at Nanjing? The Philippines? Korea? Burma? Give it a try sometime and let me know what you find out.

Did you know that about 30,000 Koreans died as a result of the the atomic weapons? Wanna know why? Because Japan had hundreds of thousands of slaves being worked to death on their home islands. That was in addition to the millions of slaves they worked to death in their conquered territories. How many slaves did the U.S. work to death during WWII again?

When you find U.S. actions during the war that are anywhere approaching the scale of these Japanese actions, get back to me.

They failed in their conquest because the U.S. opposed them. In doing that, we made horrible mistakes, and did horrible things. in the end, however, the world is a far better place for Japan having lost that war. We dropped the bombs to put a swift end to a war that had claimed tens of millions of lives already, and would claim hundreds of thousands more if allowed to continue.

Do you think the world would be better off had Japan been allowed to succeed in its ambitions?

You seem to think that there was no other option than to kill kill kill.

There were certainly a lot of other options. We could have allowed the Japanese to keep their conquered territories and left them to their own devices. We could have blockaded the Japanese home islands for months and let hundreds of thousands of civilians starve to death. Or we could have invaded Japan at a probable cost of millions of casualties.

What is the option that you would have preferred?

I'm not at all sure how you can justify a statement like that. If the Japanese military kept fighting, the war was, by definition, not over. The thousands of Allied soldiers that were still fighting all over the pacific rim would certainly not consider it "irrelevant" that the Japanese military was not surrendering.

Truman's motivations were to satisfy a bloodthirsty American public and scare the Russians.

That's not accurate. America's mood in August 1945 was far, far more war-weary than bloodthirsty. Truman certainly considered the bombing as a statement to the Soviets, but that does not negate the larger, more direct purpose that the bombings served (namely, the immediate end to a war that had claimed tens of millions of lives).

That they refused to acknowledge it is like a boxer who has been counted out and refuses to accept the decision.

If that boxer's refusal to submit had the effect of adding hundreds of thousands of deaths to the tens of millions he had already caused, your analogy would be perfect.

There were still some soldiers fighting on but it was a futile gesture.

I'm willing to bet that the thousands upon thousands of civilians and soldiers killed by the Japanese army during its final days take would take little comfort in the fact that it was ultimately a "futile gesture". And I'm sure as hell positive that the hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers that were certain to die if the Japanese military was allowed to fight to the end were glad to see those "futile gestures" cut short.

We didn't start the war with Japan. We didn't try to enslave the entire pacific rim. We didn't invade China and kill millions upon millions of civilians. We didn't provide our army with tens of thousands of sex slaves taken from conquered territories. If we *had* done these things, to say nothing of the many other Japanese atrocities, and Japan dropped nuclear weapons on our cities to stop the war we started, then I would agree that we probably had it coming.

It was the reprehensible act of a nation of White people against a nation of people of color.

You are aware that with the possible exception of Nazi Germany, Japan was the most virulently racist society on earth during that period? We were a pretty racist society by today's standards, I'll agree, but the Japanese made us look like amateurs.