[PieterCasparzen]

“Take your time,”

We didn’t have ‘time’.

??? There was no way they could attack the US homeland. Their navy and air forces were wiped out by June/July or so in '45.

They were sitting on their island with defeat inevitable, not a matter of if, but when.

Carriers gone, airplanes mostly gone.

Why risk American lives, why target Japanese civilians en masse ?

[TexasGator]

“???”

Russia ...

[discostu]

Just because they had no way to win doesn’t mean they were going to surrender. They made us basically commit genocide on Okinawa, and they were prepared to do the same for the homeland. Ready to fight with every single person, they put up posters teaching their people how to build small bombs, make them look like swaddled injured babies, then use them to blow up American GIs. They were then supposed to take the GI’s weapons. The nukes were to show them that if they were going to force us to kill them all we were going to do it from the air and not lose our own people.