Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
Nor was there certainty that the a-bomb would stop the war. If that's the burden you impose, it will never be met.
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Well, the thinking was that the bomb would either cause a surrender or it would allow the Allies to wipe out Japanese forces in the home islands.
And to Weed -- as I recall, the estimates of projected civilian casualties caused by an invasion of the home islands were based upon the Marines' experience in Okinawa. It was expected that, as a practical matter, there would be no non-combatants.
I may be biased on this one (as noted before, I probably wouldn't exist but for the bomb), but the use of the bomb almost certainly saved Japanese and American lives. Moreover, Hiroshima was a legitimate military target (I think that one of the Japanese army corps was based there). It was still a horrible thing to have done, of course. But better than all of the other awful alternatives.
I haven't really heard much justification for the firebombing of Tokyo (other than "wow, that was much more destructive than we thought it would be") and Dresden. And the USAAF's Strategic Bombing Survey made it pretty clear that strategic bombing was both ineffective and costly.
