We didn’t need to drop the bomb — and even our WW II military icons knew it

[Igel]

75. There were several.

They were confidential.

They lacked details because they were months away from their tentative dates of implementation.

My wife has plans to visit her family this summer. She's going to visit in very late July and early August, and fly.

My wife has no plans to visit her family this summer. The precise dates aren't determined, she has no tickets. If you ask our son, he'd have to say there are no plans because he'll object to flying, and at this point it's need to know.


Note that the first bomb did not produce anything. The closest any of the hopes for a negotiated settlement was a tentative ouverture to Russia to be go-between. That went nowhere that we know of.

The rest of the quotes are opinion and hope, a repugnance at a heinous weapon used. But while they may have been squeamish about fighting that killed women and children, Dresden and Tokyo did precisely that. Repugnance at war =/= war was unnecessary.

This repugnance, sadly, was not shared. Otherwise the war would not have happened. We like to say that we had basically surrounded Japan with blockades and embargoes, so that their attack on us was justified. However, our actions were rooted in knowledge of prior atrocities done by Japan in Korea and China, unrelated to us and due entirely to Japanese nationalism. We seek root causes, but another version of American exceptionalism is that America is exceptionally bad, has an exceptional moral obligation, and is exceptionally guilty, so when we dig down to find a root cause that digging stops when it hits US.