DBWI: What if America nuked Japan?

What would've happened had, instead of a long and protracted land invasion, the US had simply used their nuclear bombs against Japanese cities to force them to surrender?
 
I say that the war would have ended a lot quicker and saved millions of American, Soviet, British, and Japanese lives.
 
OK, people who think nuclear weapons could have forced a surrender on the axis powers are really starting to piss me off.
How would city bombing force the Japanese to surrender? It's not as if we hadn't been completely demolishing their cities with firebombing anyways.
 
While DeathDemon has a very good point about firebombing, it would be interesting if the Japanese surrendered in time to prevent the split between the Democratic People's Republic of Japan in the north and the Republic of Japan in the south. We might even see the Emperor survive as a British-style constitutional monarch, though given the attitude of the populace of the Allies towards him that's probably ASB.

I wonder, if nuclear weapons had been used in 1945, do you think the Japanese War (assuming it still happens) would still go nuclear, or would the world have been horrified enough by an earlier use of nukes to prevent the US from nuking the North Japanese army when they invaded South Japan?
 
I wonder, if nuclear weapons had been used in 1945, do you think the Japanese War (assuming it still happens) would still go nuclear, or would the world have been horrified enough by an earlier use of nukes to prevent the US from nuking the North Japanese army when they invaded South Japan?

Good question. I think that the sheer numbers of men involved in the invasion necessitated the nuclear weapons, whether the Allies wanted to use them or not against the Soviets and the North Japanese. While the Americans themselves probably wouldn't have dropped the bombs, I don't think they were all that much above having an ally do the actual work. A modified Lancaster would've done the trick, and we know quite well there were plenty of British forces on the island that they could've found a squadron to carry the surprise north.
Who knows though? What's done is done, and not much you can really do to change it.
 
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