Quote:
Originally posted by Pacifier
How can a "what if" scenario be proven Fact?
Japan could have surrendered in the second your soldiers set a foot on japanese mainland.
The mentioned "shock effect" could have also been achieved by dropping the bomb in the sea a couple of miles away from tokyo.
all in all the bomb was a demonstation, a threat to the world what the USA is capable of, and that the USA is willing to use such weapons.
|
Japan could have - but there's a lot of difference between could and would. All of the evidence at the time pointed to an extended house to house effort that would have taken far more lives on both sides.
There was a discussion on having a test and inviting the Japanese to come witness what the weapon was capable of doing - they only had two bombs and were not sure at the time if they would even work. They chose one military target, the naval base at Yokohama and one civilian target, Nagasake after the second bomb became necessary - neither one of which was anywhere close to what could have been acheived if all we'd wanted to do was kill people - Tokyo was very reachable.
This weapon wasn't a demonstation - it was a militrary mission with the sole purpose of bringing Japan to its knees by seeing that continued efforts on their part were an exercise in futility - there was nothing left to use for an encore.
Japan was given many opportunities to surrender - it is supposedly an error in translation of surrender demands by the Japanese after the first bomb was dropped that caused the second bomb to be dropped.