Replies

Yes the bomb could have not been dropped, but it was.

If it wasn’t, the post-WW2 world would have been much different because the US wouldn’t have ended the war on its terms but accepting the terms that the Russians negotiated because Russia was steaming through Manchuria with a million man army and the US was getting ground up in Okinawa and needed to move troops from Europe to the Pacific to have enough forces to sustain expected casualties from a mainland assault.

FDR had the gall to die in April 1945, before the Trinity test. Truman didn’t even have full understanding of the Manhattan project or its readiness until assuming office and he had to look like a strong war leader around Stalin almost immediately.

If Truman didn’t end the war as quickly as possible, he would be seen as weak against Stalin and Churchill, and if didn’t use the bomb, his other option was to commit a million US troops to be eaten up by the Japanese in a full invasion after the horrors of Okinawa.

Truman was thrust in charge of a government nearly at the end of a world war, which spent all of the war developing this terrible new weapon for exactly the type of mission it eventually was used for.

All of this second guessing and “we didn’t need to drop the bomb” stuff is great monday-morning quarterbacking, but it is also greatly oversimplifying history in a way that, amazingly, is making America look like bad guys and the Soviets look like the good guys.

If the soviets dictated the terms of peace in Japan, all of asia would be communist by the 1960s and the Soviets would still have gotten the bomb.