The liberal view I’ve heard is that we should have told the Japanese that we had the bomb. And then warn them to surrender before it was dropped.
Liberal comedian Jon Stewart comfortable in 70 years of hindsight, said that we should have dropped the bomb offshore from Japan, to demonstrate its power. Then tell them if they don’t surrender the next one would be dropped on them.
The U.S. dropped a bomb on Hiroshima.
The Japanese didn’t surrender.
Three days later, the U.S. dropped a bomb on Nagasaki. Had the Japanese surrendered after the first bomb, there wouldn’t have been a second bomb.
Too stupid to consider that fact, I guess.
Nonsense. The Japs didn’t surrender after the first nuke, which would have been a primo demonstration. Luckily, they didn’t know what after dropping the second nuclear weapon, we didn’t have any more and wouldn’t for months.
We only had 2 nuclear bombs in hand—the untested uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb. Had we conducted a demonstration and it failed, the war would have been prolonged—with more Japanese dying from our conventional bombing raids.
Of course the Japanese didn’t know we only had two bombs—they had seen their sky filled with B-29s. Part of the point of using single planes to drop the atomic bombs was to stimulate their imaginations of hundreds of atomic bombs falling on them. As it was, the military wasn’t ready to give even after Nagasaki—the emperor overruled them.
And, of course people forget that the Soviets declared war after the first atomic attack. Strictly speaking they were honoring an agreement to join the Pacific war 90 days after Germany’s surrender. But you know they would have wanted to divide Japan just like Germany and Korea—and we know how well that worked out.
It took TWO demonstrations on occupied cities to persuade the Japs. Since they were unconvinced by the destruction of Hiroshima, I comclude that wilderness demonstrations would be similarly ineffective at persuading them.
Heck - the Japs were still arguing about whether to sign the peace treaty and were in a meeting about it when they heard the news of the second bomb. And even after that the military die-hards tried to stop the peace treaty.