alt Hacker News>It gets into messy areas where it's hard to convince people that the damage was lesser than it otherwise would have been in the future.
Morbidly adjacent, the US is still getting dragged over the coals for using nukes on Japan rather than a ground invasion.
Replies
polemicfire • yesterday at 4:49 PM
[dead]
The main reason is there are alternative paths where neither were required. Japan was already fishing around for diplomatic end to the war with the major sticking point being conditional vs unconditional surrender and their main condition iirc was protection for the Emperor which the US ended up not messing with significantly anyways (at least in terms of execution for various war crimes committed by Imperial Japanese forces). That's usually the main argument I see and honestly I see the points there, Japan really was putting out fairly significant feelers about a possible negotiated end to the war before the Soviet Union was able to pivot to the Far East theater.
We'll never /really/ know what the outcome of a negotiated peace would have looked like since it was obviated so soon after it started by the bombing and Japan's unconditional surrender afterwards. We don't really know how much that path would differ from the outcome of the unconditional surrender turned out to be. The main point is it's not an either or situation between bomb and the bloody full on land invasion scenarios as presented by the bomb apologist [0] camp.
[0] I mean this in the neutral dictionary sense of simply "one that defends a controversial position", just to clarify.