Originally Posted by
at6d
You have to include the projected casualties in an invasion of the Japanese mainland in the nuke decision…it wasn’t just a “I’m tired of this” moment. The war in the pacific was beyond brutal for all involved. Just saying.
Yes it was an "All Hands on Deck Total War". Hard for us to even understand how Americans felt about it. To say nothing of our allies, who were also all hands on deck, but with their cities bombed to rubble.
Perfectly justified to use nukes to save even one US life and one US dollar. But it also saved years and presumably north of 1 million Japanese lives too. Also... nobody at the time really understood the longer-term side-effects from the use of such weapons so you have to look at it in the context of just a very large Boom. Not sure it would have mattered if they had known, but you can't blame them for hypotheticals.