Ending The War With Japan

First of all some pictures:

You may think that these are pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, they are Tokyo and Osaka after bombing in 1945. In fact, at least 66 Japanese cities were bombed before the dropping of the atomic bombs, killing more people than the atomic bombs. This brings into question whether the atomic bombings were the determining factor in the Japanese surrender¹. If your capital city has been flattened as shown in the top image and over 100,000 people have been killed in that raid, then how many civilians would they have to kill to bring the end of the war. The Japanese rules did not seem to be interested in how many of their civilians were killed -would our governments be any different?

It is also interesting to note that the Japanese cabinet met to discuss ending the war on the 9th of August – three days after the Hiroshima bombing but before the bombing of Nagasaki, which actually occurred during the meeting. Could the meeting have something to do with Russia entering the war against Japan on the 9^th, rather than the Nagasaki bomb?

I am not going to go into the various arguments here but note that many military commanders including Eisenhower and MacArthur² have criticised the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

As it has been pointed out, the Japanese surrender is one of the main empirical arguments for the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons¹.

• Nuclear Weapons: Keeping the peace for 60 years?
• Nuclear Weapons: Ending The War With Japan
• Nuclear Deterrence: Cuban Missile Crisis
• Deterrence: Terrorists

¹ The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan… Stalin Did, Ward Wilson, Foreign Policy, MAY 29, 2013 (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii) or on video: Four Myths About Nuclear Weapons: Hiroshima, H-bomb …, Ward Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bB9_hsETP4)

² The REAL Reason America Used Nuclear Weapons Against Japan (It Was Not To End the War Or Save Lives), WashingtonsBlog, October 14, 2012 (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-to-contain-russian-ambitions.html)