Opinion: U.S. leaders knew we didn't have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway
Opinion: U.S. leaders knew we didn't have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway
We've been taught that the U.S. had to drop atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. Historical evidence shows Japan would have surrendered anyway.
This is a really insane opinion. It is, however, also an incredible fact.
Its been a well-established fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were functionally just weapons test sites, conducted for the purpose of intimidating Stalin and discouraging their invasion of Hokkaido by way of Korea.
Even then, one could argue that the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden (and the saturation bombing of Korea ten years later) were significantly crueler by scale. We didn't need nuclear weapons to break the back of a country. Nor were we reluctant to wage hideous slaughter across a countryside with conventional munitions for the next 80 years.