mabrookes said:
It was common knowledge they were close to defeat, they were surrendering in parts and being driven back easily in other parts, the nukes were no in any way justified.
Worse case scenario was that a few more thousand soldiers died (you know, those guys paid to fight and die). Who in their right mind thinks it is justified to kill a few hundred thousand civilians, plus the generations of mutations, cancers and horrific deaths still happening today, to prevent that.
They were willing to surrender on their own terms.
The US wanted unconditional surrender so that they could make sure that stupid shit didn't happen again. They needed a legitimate ground to claim that they did what they set out to do, and frankly giving the Japanese emperor a slap on the wrists and sending him home wasn't going to cut it. Its why they didn't accept German surrender. It's why they didn't accept Japan's attempt to surrender. The US just barely got involved in WW2 because they were tired of this stupid shit in Europe.
Claiming that soldier deaths are some how acceptable because they're being paid to fight is hilarious considering that most of them were drafted. They had no say in it. The US government had every reason to believe that an actual mainland invasion of Japan would be the most brutal fighting of the entire war, especially after how the Japanese fought on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. We simply had no idea of what Japanese production was at, and if was any guess they were taking it underground just like the Germans. Incidentally, it's hard to see a nation as being on the verge of surrender when they're flying airplanes into your aircraft carriers and battleships, and claiming that they'll fight to the last man.
And briefly, some loss counts on US victories in the Pacific:
Guadalcanal: 7,100
Solomon Islands: 10,600
Philippines: 14,000
Borneo: 8,000
Iwo Jima: 6,800
Okinawa: 12,513
And that's bearing in mind that there was many more Japanese living on mainland Japan, and that it'd likely be the most imposing target to strike considering that it's mostly mountainous terrain.
No serious scholar of war will tell you anything but that the dropping of the nukes was justified. The US needed to end the war fast before either public opinion turned against it, or the Russians got involved, or Japan turned communist (This was something the Japanese emperor was actually concerned about.) and the Japanese kind of flagged their right to a somehow "moral" war after their own atrocities. No, I won't claim the US is without fault, but trying to claim that the US somehow wasn't justified in using every means necessary to bringing the swiftest end to the war is ludicrous.
You can claim that there was alternatives to nuking Japan, but none of them posed the chance of ending the war in days rather than months while also giving the US a legitimate, clear cut victory.