BG Paul W Tibbets, USAF, Ret: "That's their tough luck for being there."

Today is Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the first use of a bomb so powerful that it would come to threaten the existence of the human race. Only two such devices have ever been used, but now, a decade after the end of the cold war, the world faces new dangers of nuclear attack - from India, Pakistan, Iraq, al-Qaida, and even the US. Launching a special investigation into nuclear weapons, Paul Tibbets, the man who piloted the Enola Gay on its mission to Japan, tells Studs Terkel why he has no regrets - and why he wouldn't hesitate to use it again

Studs Terkel: We're seated here, two old gaffers. Me and Paul Tibbets, 89 years old, brigadier-general retired, in his home town of Columbus, Ohio, where has lived for many years.

ST: I know. See, I'm 90. So I got you beat by three years. Now we've had a nice lunch, you and I and your companion. I noticed as we sat in that restaurant, people passed by. They didn't know who you were. But once upon a time, you flew a plane called the Enola Gay over the city of Hiroshima, in Japan, on a Sunday morning - August 6 1945 - and a bomb fell. It was the atomic bomb, the first ever. And that particular moment changed the whole world around. You were the pilot of that plane.

PT: My mother. She was Enola Gay Haggard before she married my dad, and my dad never supported me with the flying - he hated airplanes and motorcycles. When I told them I was going to leave college and go fly planes in the army air corps, my dad said, "Well, I've sent you through school, bought you automobiles, given you money to run around with the girls, but from here on, you're on your own. If you want to go kill yourself, go ahead, I don't give a damn." Then Mom just quietly said, "Paul, if you want to go fly airplanes, you're going to be all right." And that was that.

PT: Well, that was Miami, Florida. My dad had been in the real estate business down there for years, and at that time he was retired. And I was going to school at Gaysville, Florida, but I had to leave after two years and go to Cincinnati because Florida had no medical school.

PT: I didn't think that, my father thought it. He said, "You're going to be a doctor," and I just nodded my head and that was it. And I started out that way; but about a year before, I was able to get into an airplane, fly it - I soloed - and I knew then that I had to go fly airplanes.

ST: Now by 1944 you were a pilot - a test pilot on the programme to develop the B-29 bomber. When did you get word that you had a special assignment?

PT: One day [in September 1944] I'm running a test on a B-29, I land, a man meets me. He says he just got a call from General Uzal Ent [commander of the second air force] at Colorado Springs, he wants me in his office the next morning at nine o'clock. He said, "Bring your clothing - your B4 bag - because you're not coming back." Well, I didn't know what it was and didn't pay any attention to it - it was just another assignment.

I got to Colorado Springs the next morning perfectly on time. A man named Lansdale met me, walked me to General Ent's office and closed the door behind me. With him was a man wearing a blue suit, a US Navy captain - that was William Parsons, who flew with me to Hiroshima - and Dr Norman Ramsey, Columbia University professor in nuclear physics. And Norman said: "OK, we've got what we call the Manhattan Project. What we're doing is trying to develop an atomic bomb. We've gotten to the point now where we can't go much further till we have airplanes to work with."

He gave me an explanation which probably lasted 45, 50 minutes, and they left. General Ent looked at me and said, "The other day, General Arnold [commander general of the army air corps] offered me three names." Both of the others were full colonels; I was lieutenant-colonel. He said that when General Arnold asked which of them could do this atomic weapons deal, he replied without hesitation, "Paul Tibbets is the man to do it." I said, "Well, thank you, sir." Then he laid out what was going on and it was up to me now to put together an organisation and train them to drop atomic weapons on both Europe and the Pacific - Tokyo.

ST: Interesting that they would have dropped it on Europe as well. We didn't know that.

PT: My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem - you couldn't drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other. And so he said, "I don't know what to tell you, but I know you happen to have B-29s to start with. I've got a squadron in training in Nebraska - they have the best record so far of anybody we've got. I want you to go visit them, look at them, talk to them, do whatever you want. If they don't suit you, we'll get you some more." He said: "There's nobody could tell you what you have to do because nobody knows. If we can do anything to help you, ask me." I said thank you very much. He said, "Paul, be careful how you treat this responsibility, because if you're successful you'll probably be called a hero. And if you're unsuccessful, you might wind up in prison."

PT: No, I didn't know anything at that time. But I knew how to put an organisation together. He said, "Go take a look at the bases, and call me back and tell me which one you want." I wanted to get back to Grand Island Nebraska, that's where my wife and two kids were, where my laundry was done and all that stuff. But I thought, "Well, I'll go to Wendover [army airfield, in Utah] first and see what they've got." As I came in over the hills I saw it was a beautiful spot. It had been a final staging place for units that were going through combat crew training, and the guys ahead of me were the last P-47 fighter outfit. This lieutenant-colonel in charge said, "We've just been advised to stop here and I don't know what you want to do... but if it has anything to do with this base it's the most perfect base I've ever been on. You've got full machine shops, everybody's qualified, they know what they want to do. It's a good place."

PT: Well, I had mentally done it before that. I knew right away I was going to get Tom Ferebee [the Enola Gay's bombardier] and Theodore "Dutch" van Kirk [navigator] and Wyatt Duzenbury [flight engineer].

ST: And now you're training. And you're also talking to physicists like Robert Oppenheimer [senior scientist on the Manhattan project].

PT: I think I went to Los Alamos [the Manhattan project HQ] three times, and each time I got to see Dr Oppenheimer working in his own environment. Later, thinking about it, here's a young man, a brilliant person. And he's a chain smoker and he drinks cocktails. And he hates fat men. And General Leslie Groves [the general in charge of the Manhattan project], he's a fat man, and he hates people who smoke and drink. The two of them are the first, original odd couple.

PT: Yeah, but neither one of them showed it. Each one of them had a job to do.

PT: From Dr Ramsey. He said the only thing we can tell you about it is, it's going to explode with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT. I'd never seen 1lb of TNT blow up. I'd never heard of anybody who'd seen 100lbs of TNT blow up. All I felt was that this was gonna be one hell of a big bang.

ST: Twenty thousand tons - that's equivalent to how many planes full of bombs?

PT: Well, I think the two bombs that we used [at Hiroshima and Nagasaki] had more power than all the bombs the air force had used during the war on Europe.

PT: Even though it was still theory, whatever those guys told me, that's what happened. So I was ready to say I wanted to go to war, but I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it. I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb. But what should we do this time? He said, "You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there." He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave. I said, "Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics. What is tangency in this case?" He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. "Turn 159 degrees as fast as you can and you'll be able to put yourself the greatest distance from where the bomb exploded."

PT: I had dropped enough practice bombs to realise that the charges would blow around 1,500ft in the air, so I would have 40 to 42 seconds to turn 159 degrees. I went back to Wendover as quick as I could and took the airplane up. I got myself to 25,000ft, and I practised turning, steeper, steeper, steeper and I got it where I could pull it round in 40 seconds. The tail was shaking dramatically and I was afraid of it breaking off, but I didn't quit. That was my goal. And I practised and practised until, without even thinking about it, I could do it in between 40 and 42, all the time. So, when that day came...

PT: Yeah. We were in Tinian [the US island base in the Pacific] at the time we got the OK. They had sent this Norwegian to the weather station out on Guam [the US's westernmost territory] and I had a copy of his report. We said that, based on his forecast, the sixth day of August would be the best day that we could get over Honshu [the island on which Hiroshima stands]. So we did everything that had to be done to get the crews ready to go: airplane loaded, crews briefed, all of the things checked that you have to check before you can fly over enemy territory.

General Groves had a brigadier-general who was connected back to Washington DC by a special teletype machine. He stayed close to that thing all the time, notifying people back there, all by code, that we were preparing these airplanes to go any time after midnight on the sixth. And that's the way it worked out. We were ready to go at about four o'clock in the afternoon on the fifth and we got word from the president that we were free to go: "Use 'em as you wish." They give you a time you're supposed to drop your bomb on target and that was 9.15 in the morning , but that was Tinian time, one hour later than Japanese time. I told Dutch, "You figure it out what time we have to start after midnight to be over the target at 9am."

PT: Well, we got going down the runway at right about 2.15am and we took off, we met our rendezvous guys, we made our flight up to what we call the initial point, that would be a geographic position that you could not mistake. Well, of course we had the best one in the world with the rivers and bridges and that big shrine. There was no mistaking what it was.

PT: The airplane has a bomb sight connected to the autopilot and the bombardier puts figures in there for where he wants to be when he drops the weapon, and that's transmitted to the airplane. We always took into account what would happen if we had a failure and the bomb bay doors didn't open: we had a manual release put in each airplane so it was right down by the bombardier and he could pull on that. And the guys in the airplanes that followed us to drop the instruments needed to know when it was going to go. We were told not to use the radio, but, hell, I had to. I told them I would say, "One minute out," "Thirty seconds out," "Twenty seconds" and "Ten" and then I'd count, "Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four seconds", which would give them a time to drop their cargo. They knew what was going on because they knew where we were. And that's exactly the way it worked, it was absolutely perfect.

After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, "You know what we're doing today?" They said, "Well, yeah, we're going on a bombing mission." I said, "Yeah, we're going on a bombing mission, but it's a little bit special." My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, "Colonel, we wouldn't be playing with atoms today, would we?" I said, "Bob, you've got it just exactly right." So I went back up in the front end and I told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, in turn. I said, "OK, this is an atom bomb we're dropping." They listened intently but I didn't see any change in their faces or anything else. Those guys were no idiots. We'd been fiddling round with the most peculiar-shaped things we'd ever seen.

So we're coming down. We get to that point where I say "one second" and by the time I'd got that second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000lbs had come out of the front. I'm in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I've ever seen in my life. It was just great.

I tell people I tasted it. "Well," they say, "what do you mean?" When I was a child, if you had a cavity in your tooth the dentist put some mixture of some cotton or whatever it was and lead into your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I learned that if I had a spoon of ice-cream and touched one of those teeth I got this electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it. And I knew right away what it was.

OK, we're all going. We had been briefed to stay off the radios: "Don't say a damn word, what we do is we make this turn, we're going to get out of here as fast as we can." I want to get out over the sea of Japan because I know they can't find me over there. With that done we're home free. Then Tom Ferebee has to fill out his bombardier's report and Dutch, the navigator, has to fill out a log. Tom is working on his log and says, "Dutch, what time were we over the target?" And Dutch says, "Nine-fifteen plus 15 seconds." Ferebee says: "What lousy navigating. Fifteen seconds off!"

PT: Oh yeah. The shockwave was coming up at us after we turned. And the tailgunner said, "Here it comes." About the time he said that, we got this kick in the ass. I had accelerometers installed in all airplanes to record the magnitude of the bomb. It hit us with two and a half G. Next day, when we got figures from the scientists on what they had learned from all the things, they said, "When that bomb exploded, your airplane was 10 and half miles away from it."

PT: You see all kinds of mushroom clouds, but they were made with different types of bombs. The Hiroshima bomb did not make a mushroom. It was what I call a stringer. It just came up. It was black as hell, and it had light and colours and white in it and grey colour in it and the top was like a folded-up Christmas tree.

PT: Pandemonium! I think it's best stated by one of the historians, who said: "In one micro-second, the city of Hiroshima didn't exist."

PT: We're talking 1948 now. I'm back in the Pentagon and I get notice from the chief of staff, Carl Spaatz, the first chief of staff of the air force. When we got to General Spaatz's office, General Doolittle was there, and a colonel named Dave Shillen. Spaatz said, "Gentlemen, I just got word from the president he wants us to go over to his office immediately." On the way over, Doolittle and Spaatz were doing some talking; I wasn't saying very much. When we got out of the car we were escorted right quick to the Oval Office. There was a black man there who always took care of Truman's needs and he said, "General Spaatz, will you please be facing the desk?" And now, facing the desk, Spaatz is on the right, Doolittle and Shillen. Of course, militarily speaking, that's the correct order: because Spaatz is senior, Doolittle has to sit to his left.

Then I was taken by this man and put in the chair that was right beside the president's desk, beside his left hand. Anyway, we got a cup of coffee and we got most of it consumed when Truman walked in and everybody stood on their feet. He said, "Sit down, please," and he had a big smile on his face and he said, "General Spaatz, I want to congratulate you on being first chief of the air force," because it was no longer the air corps. Spaatz said, "Thank you, sir, it's a great honour and I appreciate it." And he said to Doolittle: "That was a magnificent thing you pulled flying off of that carrier," and Doolittle said, "All in a day's work, Mr President." And he looked at Dave Shillen and said, "Colonel Shillen, I want to congratulate you on having the foresight to recognise the potential in aerial refuelling. We're gonna need it bad some day." And he said thank you very much.

Then he looked at me for 10 seconds and he didn't say anything. And when he finally did, he said, "What do you think?" I said, "Mr President, I think I did what I was told." He slapped his hand on the table and said: "You're damn right you did, and I'm the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me."

PT: Second thoughts? No. Studs, look. Number one, I got into the air corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. That's what I believe in and that's what I work for. Number two, I'd had so much experience with airplanes... I'd had jobs where there was no particular direction about how you do it and then of course I put this thing together with my own thoughts on how it should be because when I got the directive I was to be self-supporting at all times.

On the way to the target I was thinking: I can't think of any mistakes I've made. Maybe I did make a mistake: maybe I was too damned assured. At 29 years of age I was so shot in the ass with confidence I didn't think there was anything I couldn't do. Of course, that applied to airplanes and people. So, no, I had no problem with it. I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we'd be doing that I thought, yes, we're going to kill a lot of people, but by God we're going to save a lot of lives. We won't have to invade [Japan].

PT: Unknown to anybody else - I knew it, but nobody else knew - there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, "You got another one of those damn things?" I said, "Yessir." He said, "Where is it?" I said, "Over in Utah." He said, "Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it." I said, "Yessir." I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over.

ST: One big question. Since September 11, what are your thoughts? People talk about nukes, the hydrogen bomb.

PT: Let's put it this way. I don't know any more about these terrorists than you do, I know nothing. When they bombed the Trade Centre I couldn't believe what was going on. We've fought many enemies at different times. But we knew who they were and where they were. These people, we don't know who they are or where they are. That's the point that bothers me. Because they're gonna strike again, I'll put money on it. And it's going to be damned dramatic. But they're gonna do it in their own sweet time. We've got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn't waste five seconds on them.

ST: What about the bomb? Einstein said the world has changed since the atom was split.

PT: Oppenheimer is dead. He did something for the world and people don't understand. And it is a free world.

ST: One last thing, when you hear people say, "Let's nuke 'em," "Let's nuke these people," what do you think?

PT: Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I had the choice. I'd wipe 'em out. You're gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: "You've killed so many civilians." That's their tough luck for being there.

ST: By the way, I forgot to say Enola Gay was originally called number 82. How did your mother feel about having her name on it?

PT: Well, I can only tell you what my dad said. My mother never changed her expression very much about anything, whether it was serious or light, but when she'd get tickled, her stomach would jiggle. My dad said to me that when the telephone in Miami rang, my mother was quiet first. Then, when it was announced on the radio, he said: "You should have seen the old gal's belly jiggle on that one."

You are the one who is a disgrace. How many wars have you fought in and helped to win for the United States? General Tibbets is a patriotic American who helped to turn the tide in WWII. He should hold his head up high in knowing that he served his country well and wore his uniform proudly. General Tibbets is a true American hero.

Just because I haven't had the honor of fighting in a war doesn't mean that I don't have a right to point out when someone makes a statement that is morally repugnant and in opposition to everything America has ever stood for. I served my country as an officer of the United States Army. BG Tibbets may be patriotic, but his comments here are simply disgraceful and reminiscent of Hitler's and Tojo's "high" ethical standards whom we fought a war against to defeat. In retrospect it seems that it was very fitting that they picked Alec "I'll leave the country if Bush is elected" "Let's kill Henry Hyde's family" Baldwin to play him in the movie Pearl Harbor.

What utter nonsense. The bombs ended the war on August 15, 1945. Case closed.

So would have the overturning of our idiotic unconditional surrender demands which could have caused the war to end in early 1945 with nearly a million US and Japanese lives saved and the exact same result--namely victory for the US. Only, had the war ended months earlier, Russia could not have intervened against Japan and occupied northern China, Korea, and Japan and thus China and Korea would be united under pro-Western Democratic governments today.

You seem to be of the opinion that soldiers deserve what they get, but “innocent civilians” should be spared. Most soldiers, worldwide and throughout history, were "innocent civilians" until their governments ordered/forced them to become soldiers, they really had no choice in the matter of becoming a soldier. How is it moral to kill these uniformed innocent civilians, but it’s not morally OK to kill someone merely because their government hasn’t yet ordered them to wear a uniform?

Quite the contrary as an Army vet, I can say that historically it is the soldiers that are the most reluctant to go to war for it is they who are called upon to make the greatest sacrifices in blood and sweat, sometimes even their lives. So you see, it is very natural for me as a former Army officer to question the strategic mistakes and moral failings of a liberal Democrap President like Truman which did not have the best interests of the country at stake and that insisted on unconditional surrender demands which prolonged the war for several months unnecessarily so it could battle-test its atomic bombs on the poor, starving, huddled masses of innocent Japanese civilians and families.

How is it moral to kill uniformed soldiers you ask? How else do you propose that we fight a war? If it were not moral than there would be no such thing as a just or moral war and I guess we could have all submitted to Global Communism. It is a very sad thing to have to kill enemy soldiers who are given no choice but to fight for their country, but in war it is an unfortunate necessity. It is simply not acceptable for an enemy soldier to kill your wife and children in war just as it is not acceptable for you to kill his. Once you figure that out, you will begin to understand why the dropping of the A-bombs on Japan was a return to barbarism as so eloquently stated by Admiral Leahy, our highest ranking military officer during World War Two. Why do you presume to know more about war than he?

You have every right to express your opinions on this subject, even though I think you are dead wrong. Service in the military is not required to voice an opinion. I deeply respect those who have served in the military. Some of them are unsavory characters to be sure. But they did serve our nation. Some of them risked their lives. On differenty levels, I respect each of them. But men of good reason who have never served must be able to voice their opinions too. Public oversight of the military is an important component of the the preventative measures needed to make sure our military does not supercede it's mandate. Keep criticizing. There will always be someone around to criticize right back. And that's healthy.

Some of what you say may be true, but why are you seemingly unconcerned about the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in our raids on German cities?

Because, thankfully, the US did not join the Brits in committing that evil war crime against the German populace. In Europe, the USAAF engaged in highly effective daylight precision bombing while in Japan they had no compulsion against destroying entire Japanese cities at a time along with hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese women and children who had nothing to do with the fight. Incidentally, as a German-American I have been VERY concerned about the British slaughter of over a million innocent German civlians, but I do not draw racial or national distinctions when serving as an advocate for the innocent dead of all countries since so few others are willing to tell their story and defend their innocence.

You and Sean Hannity get this one wrong. If a terrorist hides in an apartment building of 200 plus innocent people and the only way you have a 50% chance or better to kill him in the building is to kill everyone else in the building, do you kill 200 innocents just to kill one guilty. Sean Hannity says kill the innocent women and children to get to the terrorist, which is by definition committing a terrorist act or fighting terrorism with terrorism. So would Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Timothy McVeigh. What say you?

I say it depends on who it is we're targeting, and how much military value his death will gain us. If we have bin Laden, or Saddam Hussein, hiding in an apartment building with 200 people, then those 200 people are toast. If it's some Hamas stooge, perhaps not, but it really does depend on what value we get out of killing him.

It also depends on what our relations are with the country. If we're formally at war, then blowing up that apartment building to get some one of military significance becomes much easier. In a wartime situation, the leaders of the country are committing perfidy if they place (or even allow) military targets in a civilian environment, and the blame - legal and, I believe, moral, for the civilian deaths is on their shoulders.

In the more likely case where it's a terrorist hiding in an apartment building in an otherwise neutral country, it becomes more difficult, and we're much less likely to blow up the whole building. However, as I'm sure you're aware, our sensitivity to civilian deaths encourages unfriendly nations to place military targets in civilian environments. If we wish to spare future civilian deaths, we may have to get over this, and start targeting military targets even if numerous civilian deaths are inevitable.

In the specific case of the article - Hiroshima - we were at war with Japan. Hiroshima was a valid target, but we killed a lot more civilians than was necessary. It is certainly questionable as far as the morality of that strike is concerned. In retrospect, I think it actually improves. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war before the Soviets got involved. For all the horror those two cities endured, it is truly minor compared to what would have happened in a North and South Japan. Just look at North Korea for a shining example.

Drew Garrett

As I said, he is a man of courage. He would prove his courage to me even more so if he were to take one last trip to Japan (I suspect he has never been back) to go through the massive and rather detailed Hiroshima Museum at ground zero that I have had the chance to see. I think he would not be able to compose himself after walking through; or if he could, he has nerves of more steel and human capabilities to rationalize far beyond what I would imagine any man to have.

You know, it's interesting, but the Hiroshima museum had the exact opposite effect on me that it is supposed to. It made it clear to me that the atomic bomb isn't as horrific as it's made out to be. Why? Because the Hiroshima museum is located in Hiroshima.

Hiroshima is, I thought, the second prettiest city in Japan (Kyoto still has it beat). The buildings are well constructed and maintained, they're laid out with reasonably broad streets, and there's lots of green plants growing throughout the city. Now, the pictures in the museum were, no doubt, horrific, but they also showed that things heal - people recover and move on, and rebuild. The city seems to contradict the museum, and I thought the city had the stronger voice.

Drew Garrett

I liked your comments. I am not with you singing on precisely the same sheet, but I liked your observations.

From me, I had a different take. Perhaps the city as it is now (some people today even ask me, "did they rebuild Hiroshima after the bomb or is it all still just flat?" -- Amazing ignorant question!), is in some ways the way it was before 8:15 a.m. You can see through the museum that it was just wiped out like a huge giant just squished it with a foot. Of course, you see the new, revitalized city that it is. If anything, this (the rebuilding) is a testimony to the resilience of Japanese to come back from what ever crappy set of cards they are dealt (recovery from wartime dictators and fascism, as well as fire and atomic bombings).

One thing is for sure; in talking with survivors I think you would not get the opposite message from the museum.

Sure, there is some important things left out of the museum such as the treatment of Koreans, or the Japanese development of the nuke. If anything, though, it does show the human dimension of a split atom over the heads of hundreds of thousands, which nobody in their right mind can see is something of inherent beauty, despite it facilitating the end of the war.

I see your point. Well, the only thing I might point out D.O., (and perhaps devil's advocatedly here) is that the power of atomic weapons (only two in possession, only two used) in the late summer of 1945, is pale in comparison to what mankind has developed in that arsenal over the last 57 years and what kind of bang for the buck you get with a hydro bomb these days. Heck, I would not want a nuke of today's arsenal dropped on my head, or otherwise have it go off in my home town if I ever wanted to return to it some day later if I had been spared during the big kaboom.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war before the Soviets got involved. For all the horror those two cities endured, it is truly minor compared to what would have happened in a North and South Japan. Just look at North Korea for a shining example.

Wrongo. The bombings did not end the war before the Russians got involved. Even though the Russians did not invade until August 8, 1945, they were able to occupy the vast territory of Manchuria in northern China as well as Port Arthur, northern Japan including Sakhlain Island and ALL of the Kurile Islands which they promptly annexed and northern Korea. So there was a North and South Japan, but the Soviets annexed the northern part that they occupied. Their occupation of northern China and delivery of the tanks, artillery and aircraft from 41 Japanese Army divisions led to the Communist takeover of all of mainland China from the previously militarily superior brave Nationalist freedom fighters, a feat which would have otherwise been impossible.

Without the Russian intervention against Japan, there would have been no Communist China, no North Korea, no Communist Vietnam and no Korean and Vietnamese wars. Tens of thousands of American lives would have been saved over and above the tens of thousands that would have been saved had liberal Democrap President Truman dropped his demand for unconditional surrender and promptly accepted Japanese conditional surrender offers of the pro-peace, pro-surrender Suzuki government which took power from Tojo whom the Emporer sacked for starting the war in April 1945.

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