Hiroshima, Nagasaki prevented worse?

I think, as someone on this site said, that you have to use these damn things to find out why you don't want to use these damn things. Without seeing videos of children with their eyes melted out or people vomiting out their guts, the temptation would be to think of nukes as just big bombs. If Japan had surrendered without the atomic bombings, there would likely have been a war five, ten or twenty years later, with not a couple ground zeros but a dozen or a hundred. Or a thousand.
Agree or disagree?
 
There wouldn't have been a war later on. If Japan agreed to unconditional surrender, the Americans would've still occupied it and reshaped its economy and government system.
 
I think it did. An excellent example of how it could have gotten horrendously WORSE would be The Red's timeline "Decisive Darkness"
 

Delta Force

Banned
I think, as someone on this site said, that you have to use these damn things to find out why you don't want to use these damn things. Without seeing videos of children with their eyes melted out or people vomiting out their guts, the temptation would be to think of nukes as just big bombs. If Japan had surrendered without the atomic bombings, there would likely have been a war five, ten or twenty years later, with not a couple ground zeros but a dozen or a hundred. Or a thousand.
Agree or disagree?

That statement doesn't quite reflect what happened. The photographs and videos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were confiscated by the occupation forces and were not seen by the public until the late 1970s and early 1980s. The radiation incidents of the 1950s and 1960s had a far greater effect such as (Castle Bravo and the Baby Tooth Survey had a far greater effect on shifting public opinion towards nuclear weapons, or at least above ground nuclear tests.
 
we invade them and kills tens of millions potentially or we blockade them and kill tens of millions potentially. There was not going to be any peace short of the terms eventually imposed.

no question Hiroshima and Nagasaki were awful In the last 18 months of World War 2 over 1 million people were dying a month. But there is staggering amounts of evidence that continued resistance by Japan would end with more deaths, far more, including most of the Allied civilians and POWs still under their control, not to mention the unknown but certainly very high numbers of civilians who would die in territory still held by Japan.

There are countless books on this. While a certain number of historians decry the use of the bombs, and some indeed of called it Racist, there is plenty of excellent scholarship and indeed a number of threads in this forum who firmly refute that argument.
 
So asking if without the horrors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki would there be less taboo on a bombs? If so yes, possibly used in whatever form the Korean war takes or another conflict which draws from the butterflies.
 
I think the likelihood of WWIII or at their use in Korea etc is much, much greater.

I do as well. Without the use against Japan, many of the horrors of nuclear weapons would have gone unnoticed until they actually were used. Moreover, even by 1948 the unthinkability of another global conflict had sunk in to some extent, which is one reason why the Berlin Crisis that year did not escalate into something much worse. It's easy to see that spiraling out of control with the US and Soviets thinking that nuclear weapons were simply big bombs. Korea is, of course, another instance where they might have been used. The fact that they were used on a civilian population at a time when their yields were relatively small may have saved us all from a use later when yields became far larger.
 
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