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American military strategists had estimated that the invasion of the Japanese home island of Honshu would probably cost a million American dead plus 3-4 million Japanese dead. Japanese resistance on Okinawa had been fierce, and the invasion of Honshu would have left the entire island in rubble.

The nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima killed fewer than 350,000 Japanese, and broke the will of the Japanese resistance. (The firebombings of Tokyo had killed nearly as many Japanese without result.)

So yes, the use of the atomic bomb was justified. It saved a million American lives, and probably 3 million Japanese lives. And substantial parts of Japanese civilization and society didn't have to be destroyed to achieve this result.

Some people argue that the Americans wouldn't have needed to invade; that the blockade and submarine warfare was strangling the Japanese economy, which would have collapsed. Perhaps true. However, famine would still have killed millions of Japanese, and left the remainder debilitated and susceptible to any number of diseases before they finally collapsed, probably in the winter of 1946/47.

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11y ago

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