The unconditional surrender being whiffed on things like “execution of those most responsible” and “making sure their legal system believes in innocent until proven guilty” by MacArthur is irrelevant, a conditional surrender would almost certainly have denied any reconstruction period at all.
As for whether the bombs were necessary…
Practically the entire Japanese navy had been destroyed. Their mainland holdings were falling. Their army had already lost its heavy equipment and 2 million soldiers in China to kill 22 million people. Their wunderwaffe programs were years from completion.
They’d already executed and exiled anyone that didn’t bend the knee to the militarism cult.
They didn’t surrender. They didn’t even surrender after the first bomb. They waited until the second, and even then a fairly large portion of the IJA tried to launch a coup to stop it, the Kyuju incident. The Minister of War tried to convince others to refuse surrender, and only failed because the others were loyal to their God-Emperor’s wishes. Which implies, btw, that if the Emperor has wished to keep fighting, they would have, and the Truman administration had received no indication that the Emperor was willing to accept an unconditional surrender. They had, in fact, seemingly rejected the conditional surrender offered by the Potsdam Declaration.
You think you understand how fanatical the IJA was, you do not. You can not, and still be a sane, rational person.
And, quite frankly?
Don’t want to get nuked, don’t genocide half of Asia and then refuse to admit wrongdoing.
The unconditional surrender being whiffed on things like “execution of those most responsible” and “making sure their legal system believes in innocent until proven guilty” by MacArthur is irrelevant, a conditional surrender would almost certainly have denied any reconstruction period at all.
As for whether the bombs were necessary…
Practically the entire Japanese navy had been destroyed. Their mainland holdings were falling. Their army had already lost its heavy equipment and 2 million soldiers in China to kill 22 million people. Their wunderwaffe programs were years from completion.
They’d already executed and exiled anyone that didn’t bend the knee to the militarism cult.
They didn’t surrender. They didn’t even surrender after the first bomb. They waited until the second, and even then a fairly large portion of the IJA tried to launch a coup to stop it, the Kyuju incident. The Minister of War tried to convince others to refuse surrender, and only failed because the others were loyal to their God-Emperor’s wishes. Which implies, btw, that if the Emperor has wished to keep fighting, they would have, and the Truman administration had received no indication that the Emperor was willing to accept an unconditional surrender. They had, in fact, seemingly rejected the conditional surrender offered by the Potsdam Declaration.
You think you understand how fanatical the IJA was, you do not. You can not, and still be a sane, rational person.
And, quite frankly?
Don’t want to get nuked, don’t genocide half of Asia and then refuse to admit wrongdoing.