No no no, stop taking me so literally! XD Ok, here's the thing I'm saying...let me try to make it a bit more clear. I can't advocate surrender to a nation like that just because the decision of the atomic bombings comes up. If it were to come up to the point of "We either nuke them or we surrender to them," I would say "nuke them." Why? Because of the crimes they had committed. Ultimately the nuking, if you compare it to the crimes they had committed over the previous eight years, was like a bathtub-full of water being poured into a pond [not saying a drop in the ocean; that'd be criminally insulting]. Given what they had done, and their capacity for doing more of it, they had to be stopped. If that meant committing an atrocity minor in scale to what they had done, so be it.
Basically...pragmatism, lesser of two evils kind of thing. Ultimately that's where my retrospective support of the atomic bombings comes from, is the evidence that I've dug up that doesn't point to Japan doing much surrendering under "mere" duress of invasion and what they seemed willing to do to prevent such an invasion.
That make it a little clearer, I hope?
Basically...pragmatism, lesser of two evils kind of thing. Ultimately that's where my retrospective support of the atomic bombings comes from, is the evidence that I've dug up that doesn't point to Japan doing much surrendering under "mere" duress of invasion and what they seemed willing to do to prevent such an invasion.
That make it a little clearer, I hope?
