The author brings up a a very good point; suppose we did not use nuclear weapons and the war went on for another year.
How many people living the hundreds of slave labor camps would have died? I am sure it would have been hundreds of thousands.
My mother in law and her mother would have been killed for sure. She loves the US Marines for coming to their camp in Indonesia and liberating them. She is Indonesian/Dutch. They moved to Holland after the war and her father was one of the officers who help met out the punishment for the Japanese war criminals.