But how long would that have taken considering every month you take 100thousand more innocents die?
It's easy to talk about it now, but back then WW2 was a war of dehumanisation, no side considered the other even human and where willing to perform terrible acts on them because of it.
NEgotiations have gone on during cease fires MANY times in history before, if you aren't pushing on into Jap territory while negotiating, why would 100,000's or lives be lost?
If they had indicated they would surrender conditionally, it CLEARLY and catagorically shows they were fully willing to surrender. SO the argument that they'd never ever surrender is completely and utterly wrong, and this is often the main argument used in saying we had to drop the bombs. Why would negotiations of had to take a month, or a week or a day. AFAIK this was back channel negotiation, no direct contact, was any attempted? Isn't there lots of proof that lots of people in high level uk/usa army/political positions didn't think bombing was necessary, and many of the people who agreed now think they were wrong but somehow we can't?
You've seen band of brothers, and the last eps where whole batallions surrendered peacefully and with good manners and willingness to do so. AT the end of the day most soldiers are the same whatever country they come from, they follow orders, if the order is to kill, or do bad things, they tend to do them, if they are told to surrender, they would.
Frankly, did anyone high up even communicate with them and ask for different terms.
Again, in basically any negotiation in the history of the universe, there is leeway, and you ask for more than you expect to get. This wasn't a complete madman(afaik), given the choice, we will nuke 2 cities, causing 200k deaths+ , or you can accept a surrender with a forced withdrawal of all forces back to your own, original territory. The main, and only significant question for me is, did they ask? No more complicated, just, did they ask for different terms before dropping the bomb. If they didn't, its an unforgiveable attrocity. If they did, and Japan weren't budging then at least at face value that would alter the situation drastically. If someone starts to ask for a surrender, its simply wrong to kill some of them, before talking to them. Someone comes to the table with an offer of peace, its not perfect, why would you expect it to be, you get to the damn table and see what can be done before anything else. Assuming they didn't ask, what if they simply sent a communication back saying unacceptable to stay in occupied territory, accept surrender with withdrawal and see what happens.
THe years after the bombs dropped and the likelyhood that attack caused a huge amount of fear in attacking countries with the bomb since, is fairly useful, but could probably have been achieved attacking a far smaller target, or simply leaking that footage. Its not hard to see what you're dealing with against a country with nuke capability, without them blowing up quarter of a million people. That first(i think first) historic video of the nuke being tested, anyone with any sense can see from the video all they need to see for the same effect.
