re: #159 lawhawk

Considering that Truman’s alternative was to consider authorizing Operation Downfall - comprising Coronet and Olympic, which had projected American casualties alone of upwards of 1 million, the prospective use of a nuclear weapon was seen as the least bad option. Coronet and Olympic would have each been larger than the D-day invasions at Normandy. And the Japanese knew that the invasion was being planned, and where it was likely to occur knowing just how few beaches and easily accessible shore points there are around Japan. That meant that the Japanese were able to throw all of their remaining defenses to those places assuring a massive amount of casualties on both sides.

But remember too that the nukes each delivered the kind of damage and carnage that would have otherwise taken multiple air raids and hundreds of bombers to do the same kind of damage. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared the air raids that other major Japanese cities endured so that the damage could be compared from the atomic bombs to the standard incendiaries and HE bombs. For instance, Tokyo endured a bombing in March 1945 that saw likely 100,000+ killed.

Coating someone with white phosphorous is immensely more moral than vaporizing them with plasma. This argument restarts every year and every year it’s bullshit.