“You perhaps would have preferred the Japanese to defend their “divine” emperor to the last man? Doesn’t the fact that before the A-bombs dropped, the military had ordered enough purple heart medals that they lasted most of the way through Vietnam mean anything to you?”
You seem to think that I was/am against the dropping of the atomic bombs. That is not my point. If you want to know my opinion on that then here it is as follows: Atomic bombs should have continued to rain down upon Japan until there was nothing left to rain down upon. The administration held it out to the world that it was ‘unconditional surrender’ when it was not. Letting the emperor in power is not ‘unconditional surrender’.
. . . and you know how many A-bombs we actually had after the first two, I suppose . . .Or maybe you don’t - because the number was a close secret. I think I read many, many years after the war that that number was zero, and that when Truman threatened the use of nukes to forestall Stalin’s invading Iran, that was entirely a bluff.
If that number is correct or very close, the Truman Administration was bluffing Japan as it was - and you are bemoaning the fact that they didn’t push their bluff far enough to suit you.
Actually, the worst thing Truman might have done to Japan at that point might have been - nothing. Nothing except give Japan time to work itself up into an extreme, unsustainable state of alert - and then try to survive for a year with an utterly disrupted national economy. The damage would have at least been comparable to the two A-bombs - and Truman could have had more of them by that time.