That's my point. We never should have honored such an agreement. And when Stalin balked, that's when we should have used the nukes.
My initial response was concerning the post that said we saved millions of lives by nuking Japan. We could have accomplished the same objective with Japan with saturation bombing via conventional means.
If, and it's a big if, we had waited to reveal our nukes by blowing Stalin into eternity, then that would have saved millions, tens of millions, maybe more, lives.
We honored the agreement because while the western allies were fighting the decimated remnants of the best Axis troops, there were four Axis soldiers on the eastern front for every one facing the allies in the west. When Stalin had pushed the Axis out of the USSR, he wanted eastern Europe as payment for continuing the war (so we wouldn’t have to face those troops from the east).
The saturation bombing was killing too many civilians; the atomic bombs killed less people than the firebombing of Tokyo, and accomplished more.
“That’s my point. We never should have honored such an agreement. And when Stalin balked, that’s when we should have used the nukes.
My initial response was concerning the post that said we saved millions of lives by nuking Japan. We could have accomplished the same objective with Japan with saturation bombing via conventional means.
If, and it’s a big if, we had waited to reveal our nukes by blowing Stalin into eternity, then that would have saved millions, tens of millions, maybe more, lives.”
Captain Peter Blood (post 70) is to be praised for suggesting Richard B. Frank’s book _Downfall_ (Penguin Reissue May 2001, ISBN-10: 0141001461; ISBN-13: 978-0141001463). Other posters might benefit from perusing it, before offering additional opinions. It is at times disappointing, that forum members have not yet coordinated the depth of their knowledge of WWII with the depth of their moral certitude.
Many opportunities present themselves to unscramble misapprehension. A few specific points ought to suffice:
There was never any question of the Western Allies honoring or not honoring any “agreement” with the USSR about who would keep what. By spring 1945, the Soviet Red Army was the largest armed force on the planet, and its occupation of Eastern Europe was an accomplished fact. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American leaders were quite displeased, and did consider mounting a counteroffensive, but ultimately decided against it: they simply did not have the forces to do the job and did not have the resources to build up more (to say nothing about the chances of convincing the British and American public to go along with it). The Atom Bombs were not yet ready, and huge uncertainty then still existed, over whether any such device would even function as hoped.
Taking LouAvul’s last point next, by 1945 the saving of multiple millions of Communist victims was already impossible. The Soviet collectivization of agriculture and the purges of the 1930s had already happened before Nazi Germany launched its 1941 attack. During the wartime period of Allied cooperation with the USSR, Stalin was heard to remark that various Eastern Front offensives had indeed cost the Red Army many, many lives - but that the USSR lost many more during collectivization.
LouAvul’s second point deserves more attention.
Is it being implied that the nation was somehow committing a greater “wrong” - a decision worthier of higher blame - to kill Japanese by attacking with Atom Bombs, compared to killing Japanese by starvation due to the blockade, by conventional air attack, or by any planned invasion?
In December 1945 or thereabouts, Harper’s magazine published the results of a poll it conducted a little after VJ Day. Polled individuals were asked if the number of Atom Bombs employed by the United States during the war was (a) too many, (b) too few, or (c) about right. Results indicated a large majority (on the order of 80 percent) agreed with alternatives (b) or (c). A startling number (some 25 percent) of poll-takers offered the unsolicited opinion that the war had ended too soon: it would have been more agreeable to them if more Atom Bombs had been dropped in anger.
The moral arbiters of that day (educators, the clergy, academics, scientists, intellectuals) were shocked, and embarked on a campaign to re-educate the unwashed masses.
Today - 69 years on - it can be said they’ve largely succeeded.
Most citizens now find the mere existence of Atom Bombs to be a moral downcheck against the nation’s record, their use in wartime a uniquely odious crime against the rest of humanity, their retention in the military inventory an ongoing blot upon the acceptability of the nation’s moral state.
It appears a sobering number of forum members agree with that assessment.
In doing so, they have turned the moral equation precisely upside down: they make the claim it is more important to be moral, than to be effective. The result can never be defensible, especially not in war. Without effectiveness, defeat follows, and all talk of morality (or lack of it) ends.
Quite apart from that inversion, it is intensely disagreeable that today’s pampered, prissy, comfy, overly refined, childishly impatient Americans take a moral stance of such lofty condescension. They dare to second-guess at leisure decisions made generations ago, by people long dead, under the burden of unprecedented responsibilities. Time pressed urgently but their knowledge was contradictory and their data incomplete. All of it transpired at the culmination of a serious war; they chose to employ whatever weapons might come to hand.
Gainsaying their actions now does nothing but diminish us.