It's been more than a week since my wife and I watched #Oppenheimer at our local cinema and I still can't stop looking into it. Most importantly, the moral question of the bombings themselves. If indeed the bombings didn't influence the thinking of Japan's government as some new narratives suggest, then why did Emperor Hirohito mention it in his speech announcing Japan's surrender? Obviously it did play a role in conjunction with the USSR's war declaration.
@absamma It was the one-two punch of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki plus Soviet declaration of war. Important to remember is that the Japanese war council was deadlocked on whether to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. Hirohito himself broke the deadlock to decide to accept the terms of surrender. Even then, that was followed by a failed coup to prevent the surrender.
Point is, Japan barely surrendered. I'm not convinced that if we change one aspect of how things went (don't drop the bombs, drop only one bomb, Soviets don't declare war) that a surrender happens. That leads to either further atomic bombs or a mainland invasion, both of which lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more. Soviet intervention could even lead to a division of Japan similar to how Germany was handled.
This sounds horrible to say, but the way things went may have been the best case scenario, at least if you only look at this as a metric of how many people have to die. You can object to the usage of atomic weapons in any capacity, which I don't think is necessarily a wrong opinion, but I don't think there was a clean way out of this.
@absamma The bombings had nothing to do with Japan. Japan was on the ropes already. They were a warning to the USSR not to attempt to sweep up more territory in the aftermath of the war. The second one, on Nagasaki, was meant to demonstrate that Hiroshima wasn't the only A-bomb, and that we were willing to use it again.
The Emperor's speech makes for a fascinating read, like announcing the surrender without saying it explicitly, thanking East Asian countries for their "cooperation" when it was anything but that. Recorded human history can be very ugly. #Oppenheimer
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