• davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlOP
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    1 day ago

    🙄, but I’ll only address:

    the US justification for using nukes in Japan was that forcing a surrender via attack against civilian targets prevented a years-long slog and invasion.

    That was the US’s public-facing narrative, not its actual justifications. Japan was already ready to surrender at that point, but the US was worried that Japan might surrender to the USSR instead, and the US wanted an unconditional surrender, not one with conditions. It also wanted to scare the living shit out of the USSR, to discourage it from further spreading its influence. And it wanted to test the bomb on a city that had been left intentionally undamaged during the war, namely Hiroshima, for its own nuclear weapons research & development.