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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by StillGrande I'm not convinced this is true. The US was in no danger of losing WW2 when it nuked 2 cities. It was to bring the war to a quick end and reduce US casualties. [/quote] This is a common misconception. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed to prevent the annihilation of the entire population of Japan. The cliffs and hills at the entrance to Tokyo Bay were honey combed with fortifications and the entire population had been brainwashed to fight to the last person. Remember that in Japan the Emperor was God and the Japanese would follow him without question. Some dramatic and shocking event had to happen to convince the Emperor and the populace that there was no hope of winning or even fighting to a draw. The US had already encountered this mind-set when capturing islands in the Pacific so the intelligence they received from the Japanese homeland was not surprising. Remember the Kamikaze Zeros? Also, the last Japanese soldier on Guam finally surrendered in 1972. There was a similar incident in the Phillipines in 1974. When the final plans were being made the first phase, the invasion of Kyushu, the southern-most island of Japan, was estimated to cost 63,000 US casualties. After we took over the country and saw what defensive measures were in place that estimate was raised to between 500,000 to 1,000,000 US casualties. Japan's army strength at this time was ~ 5 million, and most of them would have been casualties of a conventional invasion. At some time prior to the dropping of the first atom bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer said "this is a weapon with no military significance. It will make a big bang - a very big bang - but it is not a weapon which is useful in war." The US infrastructure, not the least of which were the railroads, was simply undefeatable. The only questions were, how many US lives were we willing to lose and how many Japanese were we willing to kill.
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