Most historian's agree? Sort of like 4 out of 5 dentists recommend?
That honestly doesn't make a lot of sense to me. They demonstrated it with the first test. The Russians could see how powerful the bombing was from the pictures of the original test.
If "using our new toy to kill people to show the Russians" was a policy, wouldn't the H-bomb have been used on people then later ICBMs?
That said, I don't think a conventional bombing of nagasaki and hiroshima would have forced a Japanese surrender.
The bomb wasn't just a big ass powerful bomb that could kill a lot of people. It was also a huge psychological weapon.
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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
the bombs were dropped just to see if they worked, and most historians agree that they were dropped to show the russians that they existed, functioned, and could be used against them. the japanese were already defeated after the fire bombing of Tokyo, which killed as many civilians as did both atomic bombs...
the bombs were like military toys, the US could have destroyed Japan through conventional bombing (oh wait, they already did, in fact they had intentionally saved four cities as targets for the a-bomb, or they would have already destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki earlier with regular bombs) but they just had to use their new toy...
so of course they wouldn't have used it on the germans, it didn't exist when the germans were still fighting. if the japanse had already surrended by the time, then they would have waited and used it in Korea.... they just needed some people to kill with their new bomb and the japanese happened to be the people that the US were killing at the time...
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