Atomic bomb dropped on Tokyo

Yet another what if - what if US command decided to drop the bomb on Tokyo and not on Hiroshima.

Let's add that the bomb is dropped and Imperial family (together with the Emperor) dies in the explosion.
 
you need the government intact, so there is someone to negotiate with.
and if i recall correctly, they wanted reasonably intact city (tokio is not!) so they would have a better impression of the force of the bombs
 
Yeah, dropping a bomb on Tokyo doesn't work because it leaves no central government left to surrender to you.
 
Yet another what if - what if US command decided to drop the bomb on Tokyo and not on Hiroshima.

Let's add that the bomb is dropped and Imperial family (together with the Emperor) dies in the explosion.

America ends up having to invade, completely nullifying half the point of dropping the bomb in the first place, because there is now literally no one with the authority to surrender the whole country.

Also the entire point of choosing the target cities was that they were almost completely intact, allowing for the best possible judging of the effects of the bomb on a city.
 

CalBear

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Tokyo was already pretty much a burned out ruin. You could drop directly on the Imperial Palace, but that would likely have had the exact opposite effect that was desired, namely shocking/over-aweing the Japanese into surrender. Killing the Emperor would have made any surrender utterly impossible (the Emperor was the only one who could have swayed the Cabinet, and he was seriously invested in his own survival and that of his Family Line). If he was killed (not an automatic, even with the Bomb) there would have been no one left to influence the IJA lunatics who were perfectly willing to see the Japanese wiped out as a people before surrendering.
 
America ends up having to invade, completely nullifying half the point of dropping the bomb in the first place, because there is now literally no one with the authority to surrender the whole country.

Also the entire point of choosing the target cities was that they were almost completely intact, allowing for the best possible judging of the effects of the bomb on a city.

The citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fully aware that their cities had been relatively unscathed by the war, and there was even speculation that that they were being saved for something special, which as it turned out, they sort of were.
 
I'm not that well known with the Japanese situation during this time in the war, but a bomb on Tokyo would pretty much make the war go even further, since the emperor is dead and you still need someone to negotiate.

I don't think negotiating with a couple of regular people is the way to end a war.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
This would be the first illustration of literally

Yet another what if - what if US command decided to drop the bomb on Tokyo and not on Hiroshima.

Let's add that the bomb is dropped and Imperial family (together with the Emperor) dies in the explosion.

This would be the first illustration of literally making the rubble jump; Tokyo had essentially been destroyed by the previous "conventional" bombing campaigns with HE and incendiaries.

Which demonstrates, of course, the significance of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; as it was, by the time of the atomic bombings, there were only about four Japanese cities (the other two being Kyoto and Kokura, IIRC) that were even intact enough to warrant being listed as targets...

And yet the Japanese chose not to surrender, not after the Marianas operations destroyed the IJN as an offensive force and provided the US with the necessary air and submarine bases for the strategic bombardment campaign and sustained commerce-destroying campaigns in Japanese home waters; not after the IJN was destroyed as a defensive force in the Philippines; not after the IJA's largest field army in the Pacific was destroyed on Luzon; not after the IJA's second largest field army in the Pacific was destroyed on Okinawa ... and not even after all but four Japanese cities worth the name had been destroyed by aerial bombardment even before the atomic bombings.

It's almost as if they were not thinking rationally, or something.:rolleyes:

Best,
 
If the Emperor is killed, Japan will never surrender. Unless an atom bomb is dropped on most of the cities in the home islands, I don't see it happening.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
The thing is, by the end of the war, there

If the Emperor is killed, Japan will never surrender. Unless an atom bomb is dropped on most of the cities in the home islands, I don't see it happening.

The thing is, by the end of the war, there were only about four cities left "unscathed" in Japan, and Hirsohima and Nagasaki were two of them.

Best,
 
But in the end it was the Emperor who finally brought an end of the war. The Firebombing of Tokyo had pretty much eliminated it as a target.
 
Ahem, I had made a post where I said that a bombing of Tokyo would be impossible, because no one would be left to negotiate.

And then I said that negotiating with regular people would be idiotic. Or does it?!
 
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