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I used to think so, but after we won the cold war, I thought that hindsight proved caution to be the correct approach.

At the end of the war, the US was the strongest power in world history, possessing the atom bomb and no one else in the world that could oppose us for that reason. Had we known that we only had 4 years of being the only nuclear power, we might have thought about it more seriously.Especially had we known that Soviets would cause us to lose China in 1949, too.

The fact is, we could have defeated them quite quickly and easily. We would have had to attack with conventional weapons and aircraft and use our massive wartime production capabilities, to force the Soviets to retreat to strongholds and try to hold out, using their soldiers’ lives to stem our advance. That would have worked, had we been limited to conventional weapons. But once we had 10 or 20 or 30 nukes available, taking out strategic Soviet locations here and there while threatening to up the ante would have eventually forced them to capitulate. They were dedicated commies, but they were not more dedicated than the Japanese who had just given unconditional surrender. We could have marched into Moscow and had a much better Russian reset.

The reason we didn’t, and maybe couldn’t, is because Americans did not have the will to continue the fight, as noted, and also because the American government was infiltrated to the highest levels with Soviet agents who fed our leaders a load of crap to keep them from taking this approach. Without all those commies in government, and with a leader like Churchill who understood that the Russians were next, we could have perhaps engineered a crisis and a confrontation with the Soviets that didn’t give Americans the luxury of ending the war. As it was, it only took a few years for everyone to realize that the Soviets were our enemy, and then to be in a proxy war against them in Korea. Might as well have lost those men in Europe that in Korea, and been done with it forever. No Vietnam, for one thing. The peace boom would have been 10 times greater.

Bottom line, given the US that existed in 1945, probably there was no other thing to do than keep peace with the Soviets.