Was the dropping of the Hiroshima+Nagasaki atomic bombs inevitable?

Over a pint my brother and I pondered whether once they were invented, it was inevitable that the Atomic bombs would be dropped.

As of OTL July 1945, yes.

Particularly.

-If FDR had lived longer, would the bombs still have been dropped ?
Yes.
-How much of the bombs being dropped was down to Truman?
Not much. Any U.S. President in that position would have made the same decision. Not using a weapon that had cost $2 billion to make and could save hundreds of thousands of American lives? Unthinkable.

However, there are other ways the Bomb might not have been used then and there.

For instance, if Stauffenberg's bomb killed Hitler, and the war in Europe ended in 1944, then

1) Allied effort switched to Asia defeats Japan sooner, before the Bomb is ready.

1)a) Soviet forces overrun Manchuria, Korea, and Sakhalin, and threaten Hokkaido. The Japanese hardliners' fantasy was that the U.S. would invade the Home Islands, encounter fanatical resistance including mass banzai attacks by millions of civilians, and would be so traumatized by the casualties that it would agree to a conditional peace. But I don't think even they believed that would work with Stalin.

2) With the Nazi menace dead, and no threat of a Nazi bomb, and with six-eight months work still to do, many Manhattan District scientists refuse to finish the job. A lot of them never wanted to build the Bomb in the first place.
 
The answer to the question is an unequivocal "yes".

Any President who launched a bloody operation like Olympic and was subsequently found to have withheld a new weapon that could have conceivably shortened the war would have been impeached and removed from office. This apploes even to FDR, had he lived.
 
M. Adolphe Thiers said:
said invasion would have been a bloodbath
That is unsubstantiated nonsense. The actual casualties would have been in line with Iwo Jima: severe & shocking, but not exorbitant.
ModernKiwi said:
OK, a little ASB but if Japan surrenders in 1944 after the loss of Saipan then they're not going to get nuked.
Not ASB at all, if you change the right conditions: pull the Sub Force back to Hawaii after the war starts (no basing in Oz), put tankers at #1 priority (for sinking by Sub Force) immediately, increase priority on IJN DDs immediately, & put all available boats off Japan (instead of all over the damn Pacific:rolleyes:). It helps to fix the Mk 6 failures sooner, too.:mad::rolleyes:
 
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never understood the the aversion to a single (or two) nukes in the context of the war. The world's 'civilized' nations had just spent 5 years blowing each other into smithereens. Now, all of a sudden, it's immoral to do so more efficiently? I don't think so. Just because it takes more effort to destroy a target doesn't make it any more moral. The bugaboo with nukes is that when everyone has them, you have a real mess on your hands if someone decides to use them (the whole MAD scenario). In a way, it's good. IF folks had believed in MAD at the beginning of WW1, it never would have occurred, because MAD ended up happening. There, though, you have a shot of winning. In a nuclear war, it's guaranteed that no one wins. Hence the reprehensibility. In the case of Japan and the nuclear bombs, there is no MAD. You have a choice of destroying the country conventionally and adding in partial destruction of your own forces, or you can destroy the enemy with nukes, and save your own forces. It's really no different than taking out a machine gun nest with an artillery shell vs expending lots of lives taking it out with a lot of soldiers with rifles. Which one do you choose? We were destroying them conventionally. Taking them out conventionally would have entailed destroying the entire country. People always talk about how many American lives would have been saved. How many Japanese lives would have been saved? Oh, wait, we dropped the bombs on civilians. How many civilians lose there lives in war? At the time, a lot. We didn't have precision smart bombs, so we took out a target by taking out an area and there was a lot of collateral damage. That it was conventional,and that it took more effort, doesn't alter the fact.

Was it inevitable? As long as there was a war going on, yes. And there is no shame in using them.
 
We do not know that there was no way of getting a deal to end the war. There were elements who wanted to fight no matter what. It is clear that there was little interest in gettign a conditional surrender

Of course at the time nobody KNEW that the nukes would end the war. It is also true that Stalin's declaration of war was a factor in the surrender
 
That is unsubstantiated nonsense. The actual casualties would have been in line with Iwo Jima: severe & shocking, but not exorbitant.

The entire thing is unsubstantiated, since it didn't happen. Since they projected fatalities to be at 400,000 for the occupation of Japan, which doubles the amount of U.S. servicemen killed in the war, I would call that a bloodbath.
 
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of course not. the full scale invasion of japan was not only possible, but achievable. the bombs were officially dropped to avoid a larger number of casualties, but in my opinion they were also (if not mostly) a "don't fuck with us" towards the USSR

The 'Atomic Diplomacy' argument is one that is entirely contradictory with reality, according to its logic Truman was desperate to make sure the Soviets stayed out of the Pacific whilst at the same time welcoming their intervention.

Their use wasn't inevitable, but incredibly likely if you have circumstances similar to those of July-August 1945.
 

burmafrd

Banned
Of course it was inevitable.

It was believed that the shock might force the Japanese to be realistic about the peace process.

Much better then invasion for both sides.
 
One thing to keep in mind, people: the Army placed an order with the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot for Purple Hearts in June '45. The order was said to be for over half a million. EVERY Purple Heart awarded since 1945 has come from that order. And there are still thousands in storage. There's enough that units in Afghanistan (and previously, Iraq) had a stock on hand for immediate award to soldiers who were wounded as a result of enemy action.
 
Matt Wiser said:
One thing to keep in mind, people: the Army placed an order with the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot for Purple Hearts in June '45. The order was said to be for over half a million.
That allows for wounded in all services for the duration of the operation, including multiple awards. It's not as inflated as it's made out.
 
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