It makes his ancestors opinion, which he mentioned, more valid.

No but it's very high status amongst affluent dinner party types in the west to communicate in these entropyless parochialisms.

Well you know what, none of my ancestors fought in WWII... So, visiting the Yasukuni Jinja in Tokyo, I was quite shocked by the interpretation of history on the walls there, that was stating that Japan had been strangled of any resources access by the West, and had to attack Pearl Harbour as a desperate measure of self defense. Taking pictures was forbidden but I took one anyways, and some older Japanese man accosted me, asked for my nationality, I answerer truthfully being from a smaller southern european nation, and he laughed in my face clearly thinking that country name meant hilarious inferiority. This was in 2006, not so long ago. A Large black bus was loudly spewing out extreme-right propaganda outside. Left that country, thought about their birth rate...

Believe it or not, there are people who think that a world without nuclear warheads and the MAD equilibrium [1] would be safer. This is despite the documented history of several millennia of such world existing, and being plagued with constant wars fought with conventional weapons.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

It's not over atomic energy. It's that it's no coincidence that all 5 members of the UN security council have nuclear weapons. The threat of their use gets things done, and that fades the more countries have nuclear weapons. So, insofar as there is a sinister motive to Hiroshima drumbeating, it's specifically to preserve the viability of the nuclear threat. Consider how different the current war in Ukraine would look if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons. How different would the situation in Gaza look if any of Israel's immediate neighbors also had nuclear weapons?

I'd also argue that the correct emotional response to the destruction rendered by a single airplane (vs. the 325 used for the Tokyo Firebombing) is abject horror, and that should cause any person to seriously question their use.

I'm not here to dispute that nuclear power is good or that the alternative to bombing Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki was worse than the bombings. It's that while Truman et al may have understood the extrema situation the Allies were in, that's no guarantee that future users of atomic weapons would be so deliberate.

> I wonder if it's just an attempt to keep a cloud ...

Yes, but only peripherally. Atomic energy and atomic weapons are closely associated with a certain wealthy white western superpower. And within that superpower's political and ruling classes, there have been centuries of ideological struggles for what might be called "moral supremacy". Given how strongly the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombing push many people's "Moral Issue" buttons - those naturally become a point of contention, with plenty of folks weighing in on them whenever it seems opportune to do so.

"Nukes made Japan surrender" is a lie americans keep repeating to make themselves feel good about what is probably one of the most horrible mass civilian casualty event of the last century. Every single serious researcher, both at the time and today agree that Japan would have surrendered. Every single event, document, information points this way.

Justifying nukes with "we could have done something worse" is... an incredibly american thing to say, yes.

> in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia.

Assuming you mean USSR, who declared war on Japan on August 8th 1945, we need to believe someone used a time machine to travel to the future before they authorized the first atomic strike on August 6th?

May be, but hard to prove either way without an A/B timeline test.

"Military historian Gian Gentile disputed this counterfactual, stating that testimony from Japanese leaders in USSBS interrogations supported the likelihood of Japan continuing the war beyond November and December 1945. Gentile stated that survey authors chose not to publish such evidence, as it challenged their conclusions."

The command at the time had fresh memories of the suicidal resistance from Wake Island to Okinowa. You can imagine the large impression all of the bodies made on them. It must have been hard to convince them that the rest of the Japanese were different, and to bet so much on it.

You are mixing up two ideas.

The survey stated that Japan was going to lose the war with or without nuclear weapons as strategically Japan was overmatched, which was obviously true.

However, this survey was looking at Japan’s overall defeat, not the timing of surrender or the number of casualties avoided by dropping the bomb. At the time, US military planners were working with invasion timetables that projected tens of thousands to hundred thousands of US casualties if the US invaded Japan.

The survey doesn’t deny that many more American or Japanese soldiers might have died in the weeks or months before surrender if the war had not ended immediately after the atomic bomb was droppped.

Your link says this:

>...Military historian Gian Gentile disputed this counterfactual, stating that testimony from Japanese leaders in USSBS interrogations supported the likelihood of Japan continuing the war beyond November and December 1945. Gentile stated that survey authors chose not to publish such evidence, as it challenged their conclusions.

The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.

>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.

>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/okinawa-costs...

Japan had every intention of defending the main islands just as strong, or stronger, starting with operation Ketsu-Go. One of the slogans in Japan in 1945 was "The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly."

https://irp.fas.org/eprint/arens/chap4.htm

As user 542354234235 pointed out in an earlier message:

>...Every option (invasion, mass starvation via blockade, atomic bombing) was a horrific nightmare of death for the Japanese.

Unfortunately, I think that was situation the Allies found themselves in.

>...and in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia

This idea keeps getting repeated by revisionists, but is not credible. While the Soviets considered invading Hokkaido after Japan surrendered, very few people think they would have succeeded. The USA had given the Soviet Union some ships that could be used, but they would not have been nearly enough.

The role of the atomic bombings in compelling Japanese surrender is still hotly debated, and will remain so until the end of time because, quite frankly, we don't have the historical record that will conclusively decide the debate.

Strategic bombing, outside of maybe the two atomic bombings, has never compelled an enemy's surrender despite several attempts to do so. And the fact that the bomber corps's own survey, trying to argue for the value of its work, suggested that it alone was capable of bringing Japan to surrender without any other forces given enough time should be regarded with a healthy degree of skepticism.

> The Philippines were taken from the Spanish

Spain got $20 million and trading access for the Philippines.