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I really got into Gordon Prange's works, especially his notes from interviews with Japanese when he (Prange) was in post-war Japan on McArthur's staff. Prange's works were the first suggestion I saw that much of internal Japan was becoming convinced that the entire empire would die where they stood. Even the fundamentalists that refused to have the royal family admit defeat were seeing no hope for a future.
I still think we could have blockaded Japan into inertness.
And that idea came from one of those interviews, a Japanese who thought America would do that and strangle the empire. If I remember correctly, he preferred suicide over begging for imported food, particularly chinese rice.
But, IMHO.

If we blockaded Japan, do you think that the ever-scarcer resources would have been shared by all until they decided to surrender? Not a chance. They would have been consumed by the army, just as Saddam is doing now. And the babies would have starved. The only difference is that back then there weren't so many squishy whiners. They would have condemned us for the starvation or for attacking, just as is done today, because some people just cannot recognize the existence of evil. There is no way to deal with it except to comfront and crush it. How many would have died of malnutrition? I'll bet many more than we vaporized from the air.

Aside form reading history books and accounts, I had the opportunity to talk directly to my father and others who went thru the Pacific theatre and ended up in the early occupation forces. Based on their investigative work and interrogations, they were of the opinion that the bomb stopped that nation from committing suicide at the hands of the Japanese army. Also, check into (1) what Stalin was planning just prior to the bomb and (2) what Japan had been doing in the area of chemical/biological warfare. IMHO and in the opinion of everyone I knew who was there, the bomb saved a lot of time and lives, probably millions.

By the way, how would you have blockaded Japan's armies in Japan, China, Korea, etc. with Stalin ready to attack Japan from the North?