LEST WE FORGET - TODAY 73 YEARS AGO

[obijohnkenobe]

I don't think that enough people understood that Truman really had no choice. By August 1945, there was no Imperial Japanese Navy... it had been sunk. There was no Air Force... it had been shot down and the pilots had been killed. What was left of the Japanese Army was mostly stuck in China. The USAAC had destroyed every industrial site, and all of the larger cities. Tokyo was effectively razed. We (US) demanded the Japanese to surrender unconditionally, they told us to go pound sand... so we dropped the first Bomb on Hiroshima. A day later we demanded surrender again, or another Bomb, and they again refused... the Emperor and the military leadership were United. Then we dropped the Bomb on Nagasaki. At this point, the Emperor was ready to surrender, having realized that they couldn't kill Americans any more, and the only thing they could control was whether or not more Japanese would die. The military still refused, considering surrender as shameful. The Emperor insisted, the military leaders asked for time to consider... and then launched a nighttime coup attempt to depose the Emperor and continue the war. A US combat air patrol happened to be flying above Tokyo looking for targets of opportunity when they spotted the convoy of coup attempters on their way to the palace by the headlights, and destroyed it... inadvertently preventing the coup. Japan surrendered in the next few days. Good thing, too, because we were out of Bombs. Shortly after the war we captured a Japanese sub with a hangar installed on the hull with a seaplane inside... equipped with a cobalt-based dirty bomb intended for L.A. that would have rendered it uninhabitable for decades if not centuries. The Japs had gotten this material from the Nazis by U-boat late in the war.

In short, nuking Japan likely was the best outcome for them and us. Extrapolating from Okinawa, minimum US casualties would have been around 1M, with 5X the losses for Japan. And how ugly would it have gotten if the Japs had managed to bomb L.A. with a dirty bomb, killing hundreds of thousands? No enemy persons should ever be valued more than our own people, civilians or military. Truman made the right decision.

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[rcathey]

Shortly after the war we captured a Japanese sub with a hangar installed on the hull with a seaplane inside... equipped with a cobalt-based dirty bomb intended for L.A. that would have rendered it uninhabitable for decades if not centuries.

That's intriguing! I would like to read more about that but a few different Google searches turned up fruitless.
Might you have a link to a source?