The real hard underlying truth is that the two bombs prevented the Japanese people from being virtually annihilated and reduced to the same status of today’s North Korea.
One has only to read the Japanese accounts of the dire circumstances of the home islands population. They were on the verge of starvation. Rations were drastically reduced with no food being imported. They were eating acorns when they could find them. Pulling up ditch weeds for food. Their young men were already dying in untold numbers. The losses of another million or more would have left with with a stunted postwar population with little chance of recovery for generations.
And the Japanese War Council was telling them to gather rocks, to sharpen sticks and farm tools to fend off the coming invaders. This across the land that had been devastated by the huge regular convenional bombing raids that did far greater damage with their incendiary loads. Their industrial base was crumbled into dust. An American naval blockade would have denied them fuel, food, and raw materials. Totally cut off from the rest of the world and winter coming on, a winter that would have killed many, many more. Freezing, starvation and disease was what was in store for them.
The Japanese should mark August 6 as the day that ended the insane war set upon them by their Emperor and his General Staff. Every post war advance and their economic rebirth with the attendant improvement in their health and living standard stems from those two bombs. They weren’t the last bombs but they signaled the end,
My advice for the Japanese is to kneel and bow to the rising sun in the east on August 6 and thank whatever god they worship for the mercy extended to them by the USA.
And the sad part was the most of the Japanese population believed the advice of the War Council, too. The result was that if we never dropped the atomic bomb and carried out Operation Olympic to invade southern Kyushu, the resulting bloodbath would probably have killed 150,000 American soldiers, most of the 1 million Japanese soldiers defending southern Kyushu and maybe 2 million Japanese civilians. And the two largest cities in southern Kyushu--Kagoshima and Miyazaki--would be razed to the ground from the horrible street-to-street fighting.