Current Events > How do you feel about the atomic bombings of Japan in WWII?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Please try to keep it civil, as this is a controversial topic even still today, and there are legitimate viewpoints for each side.

I personally think Hiroshima was the right choice. The Japanese were fully willing to give up everything just to beat us even if it was a semblance of a chance of them winning. The bomb basically sent a message telling them it really was futile to continue to fight and there was no reason to continue this anymore. Many civilian lives were lost, but the results of continued warfare would have been worse imo. I just don't think enough time was given for Japan to fully comprehend what happened and to decide to surrender before the 2nd bomb.
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The bombs were just as bad as anything that happened in that war. Nothing justifies blowing up an entire city of civillians, let alone two. Imagine seeing the utter destruction you cause to innocent people, then having the audacity to do it again :(
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Unwarranted. We should have accepted their surrender instead of trying to force them into an unconditional surrender.
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I do not think it should have happened. There's no justification for such an act of slaughter, in my opinion.
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Badass display of power.
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ChromaticAngel posted...

Unwarranted. We should have accepted their surrender instead of trying to force them into an unconditional surrender.

I was raised (like most) to believe there was no other way and all that.

I came to grasp how severe the act itself was but even though I read a lot of history I've largely stayed away from WWII myself. Did they really offer something reasonable that we rejected?
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It ended the war. "War is cruelty. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."
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Zeeak4444 posted...

ChromaticAngel posted...

Unwarranted. We should have accepted their surrender instead of trying to force them into an unconditional surrender.

I was raised (like most) to believe there was no other way and all that.

I came to grasp how severe the act itself was but even though I read a lot of history I've largely stayed away from WWII myself. Did they really offer something reasonable that we rejected?

Yes. Basically

They were beginning the process of offering negotiations
Bomb 1
They requested we negotiate through official channels and everything
Bomb 2
They formally surrendered in the hopes that it might spare them another nuclear bomb falling upon their civilians

The us committed the most horrendous acts of terrorism in history as a result
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ChromaticAngel posted...

We should have accepted their surrender instead of trying to force them into an unconditional surrender.

We gave them Potsdam and they made it clear they'd keep fighting
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War winning

gunplagirl posted...

Zeeak4444 posted...

ChromaticAngel posted...

Unwarranted. We should have accepted their surrender instead of trying to force them into an unconditional surrender.

I was raised (like most) to believe there was no other way and all that.

I came to grasp how severe the act itself was but even though I read a lot of history I've largely stayed away from WWII myself. Did they really offer something reasonable that we rejected?

Yes. Basically

They were beginning the process of offering negotiations
Bomb 1
They requested we negotiate through official channels and everything
Bomb 2
They formally surrendered in the hopes that it might spare them another nuclear bomb falling upon their civilians

The us committed the most horrendous acts of terrorism in history as a result

Fuuucckkkkk....

I knew it was bad. But this... I mean, cowardly as it is, I kinda feel like I knew this and didn't read about it out of shame.
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Look at all these quotes from top US military officials at the time claiming it was not a military necessity. The Japanese were on the verge of surrender anyways, but we wanted to show the Soviets what we were capable of. There never would have needed to be a land invasion of Japan.

In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
- Dwight D. Eisenhowever

Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials), Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet), Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr. (Commander of the US Third Fleet), and even the man in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands, then-Major General Curtis LeMay:

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.
- Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet

The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
- Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950

The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.
- Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945

The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it ...
- Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1964,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Militarily_unnecessary
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gunplagirl posted...

The us committed the most horrendous acts of terrorism in history as a result

I mean the holocaust was still worse
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solosnake posted...

Nothing justifies blowing up an entire city of civillians,

Not even saving a much larger number of civilians?
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stoltenberg11 posted...

gunplagirl posted...

The us committed the most horrendous acts of terrorism in history as a result

I mean the holocaust was still worse

thats extremely debatable imo
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Zeeak4444 posted...

I came to grasp how severe the act itself was but even though I read a lot of history I've largely stayed away from WWII myself. Did they really offer something reasonable that we rejected?

They offered to negotiate terms.

We basically said "We literally don't even care what your terms are. Unconditional or we keep fighting."

The response was "We're going to lose, but we think we can inflict significant damage on the way down. You should negotiate with us."

Then we nuked them twice.
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Damn man that's sickening. I really appreciate that info laid out though, more than I can express.
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Zeeak4444 posted...

Did they really offer something reasonable that we rejected?

They actually spent the last months of the war trying to convince the Soviets to mediate a peace deal that would be favorable to Japan.

Japan's leaders weren't really the type of people you could negotiate with.

stoltenberg11 posted...

gunplagirl posted...

The us committed the most horrendous acts of terrorism in history as a result

I mean the holocaust was still worse

That raises the question, is a genocide terrorism?
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DarkChozoGhost posted...

solosnake posted...

Nothing justifies blowing up an entire city of civillians,

Not even saving a much larger number of civilians?

They never would have been killed unless we decided to target them, soooo
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I feel better about the nukes than I do about firebombing Tokyo. At least nukes have the kind of shock value that ends a war. Firebombing should have appealed to the emperor's empathy for his people but he gave more of a shit about losing ceremonial artifacts in the attack than the civilians boiling in their homes.
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gunplagirl posted...

stoltenberg11 posted...

gunplagirl posted...

The us committed the most horrendous acts of terrorism in history as a result

I mean the holocaust was still worse

That raises the question, is a genocide terrorism?

I don't believe terrorism can be conducted by the state. Ergo, I don't believe the holocaust is terrorism. The genocide some colonials conducted in the Americas could be considered terrorism, however.
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gunplagirl posted...

DarkChozoGhost posted...

solosnake posted...

Nothing justifies blowing up an entire city of civillians,

Not even saving a much larger number of civilians?

They never would have been killed unless we decided to target them, soooo

A land invasion would have killed more Japanese citizens than the bomb did.
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DarkChozoGhost posted...

gunplagirl posted...

DarkChozoGhost posted...

solosnake posted...

Nothing justifies blowing up an entire city of civillians,

Not even saving a much larger number of civilians?

They never would have been killed unless we decided to target them, soooo

A land invasion would have killed more Japanese citizens than the bomb did.

Look at my post with all the quotes, the land invasion was known to be unnecessary for Japanese surrender at that point.
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ThePrinceFish posted...

I feel better about the nukes than I do about firebombing Tokyo. At least nukes have the kind of shock value that ends a war. Firebombing should have appealed to the emperor's empathy for his people but he gave more of a shit about losing ceremonial artifacts in the attack than the civilians boiling in their homes.

Man... this happened too... I really should look into that war more..

I still really don't want to though. Like the one subject I have no desire to study at all.
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Just like with London and Dresden, their cities would have just been carpet bombed into hell and ruins.

The a-bombs just made it faster and easier.
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PrettyBoyFloyd posted...

Just like with London and Dresden, their cities would have just been carpet bombed into hell and ruins.

London wasn't bombed anywhere nearly as badly as Dresden I don't think.
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Sativa_Rose posted...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Militarily_unnecessary

-"Japanese militarism was aggravated by the Great Depression, and had resulted in countless assassinations of reformers attempting to check military power, among them Takahashi Korekiyo, Saitō Makoto, and Inukai Tsuyoshi. This created an environment in which opposition to war was a much riskier endeavor.[58]

According to historian Richard B. Frank,

The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender.[59]"

-On 30 June 2007, Japan's defense minister Fumio Kyūma said the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the United States during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war. Kyūma said: "I now have come to accept in my mind that in order to end the war, it could not be helped (shikata ga nai) that an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and that countless numbers of people suffered great tragedy." Kyūma, who is from Nagasaki...

-Colonel Harry F. Cunningham, an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force, noted that in addition to civilians producing weapons of war in cities, the Japanese government created a large civilian militia organization in order to train millions of civilians to be armed and to resist the American invaders. In his official intelligence review on July 21, 1945, he declared that:

The entire population of Japan is a proper military target ... There are no civilians in Japan. We are making war and making it in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which war is and seeks to bring about an enduring peace. We intend to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in the shortest possible time.[45]
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Weren't the firebombing campaigns more destructive than the nukes?
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Its already proven to be a bad decision
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RE_expert44 posted...

Weren't the firebombing campaigns more destructive than the nukes?

No.

Like, maybe in raw people outright killed, but in terms of lasting damage done by radioactive fallout, birth defects, sterile land, and other issues that caused pain for decades to come, the nukes remain the most destructive weapon we've ever used.
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stoltenberg11 posted...

gunplagirl posted...

The us committed the most horrendous acts of terrorism in history as a result

I mean the holocaust was still worse

The Middle Passage too...

Bloodychess posted...

Sativa_Rose posted...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Militarily_unnecessary

-"Japanese militarism was aggravated by the Great Depression, and had resulted in countless assassinations of reformers attempting to check military power, among them Takahashi Korekiyo, Saitō Makoto, and Inukai Tsuyoshi. This created an environment in which opposition to war was a much riskier endeavor.[58]

According to historian Richard B. Frank,

The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender.[59]"

-On 30 June 2007, Japan's defense minister Fumio Kyūma said the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the United States during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war. Kyūma said: "I now have come to accept in my mind that in order to end the war, it could not be helped (shikata ga nai) that an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and that countless numbers of people suffered great tragedy." Kyūma, who is from Nagasaki...

-Colonel Harry F. Cunningham, an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force, noted that in addition to civilians producing weapons of war in cities, the Japanese government created a large civilian militia organization in order to train millions of civilians to be armed and to resist the American invaders. In his official intelligence review on July 21, 1945, he declared that:

The entire population of Japan is a proper military target ... There are no civilians in Japan. We are making war and making it in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which war is and seeks to bring about an enduring peace. We intend to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in the shortest possible time.[45]

I think the evidence is more compelling on the anti-nuke side, and June 1945 didn't have the same picture as late July or early August for sure. Also if it was really that crazy, why did Japan not just keep fighting after the nukes? They still had millions of people still alive.
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The Emperor of Japan during WW2 was seen as a god by the Japanese public. A strong display of power, like the atomic bombings, shook that belief that most Japanese citizens had.
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Sativa_Rose posted...

why did Japan not just keep fighting after the nukes? They still had millions of people still alive.

Japan thought we had more than 2.

Had they known that was literally all we had at the time, they probably would have kept fighting.
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I don't think you can justify death of civilians on that astronomical scale, plus the radiation legacy and decades of increased cancer rates etc

Sativa_Rose posted...

I think the evidence is more compelling on the anti-nuke side, and June 1945 didn't have the same picture as late July or early August for sure. Also if it was really that crazy, why did Japan not just keep fighting after the nukes? They still had millions of people still alive.

Because by that point the emperor had finally been convinced to surrender, and also because the Soviets had declared war and were invading Manchuria.
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MorbidFaithless posted...

I do not think it should have happened. There's no justification for such an act of slaughter, in my opinion.

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ArchiePeck posted...

I don't think you can justify death of civilians on that astronomical scale, plus the radiation legacy and decades of increased cancer rates etc

On top of that:
Not that correlation means causation or anything but it's not good that between that and Fukushima the japanese, who are already at an extinction level birthrate if I'm not mistake, are worried about future reproduction.
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ArchiePeck posted...

I don't think you can justify death of civilians on that astronomical scale, plus the radiation legacy and decades of increased cancer rates etc

They didn't have long term data on the effects back then. President had a "end the war quick button" at his side and he pressed it.

It is interesting to hear the military quotes about the bomb, but I'm kinda fuzzy on the "they were preparing to surrender already" part because different sources tell me different things regarding that
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ChromaticAngel posted...

gunplagirl posted...

stoltenberg11 posted...

gunplagirl posted...

The us committed the most horrendous acts of terrorism in history as a result

I mean the holocaust was still worse

That raises the question, is a genocide terrorism?

I don't believe terrorism can be conducted by the state. Ergo, I don't believe the holocaust is terrorism. The genocide some colonials conducted in the Americas could be considered terrorism, however.

Nothing in the definition of terrorism excludes the state from being able to conduct it. I agree that the nukes were acts of terror, but I also think the Holocaust was. At the least, whatever the extent of their intentions was, the Nazis had to understand that the Holocaust would incite terror into millions of people.
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Sativa_Rose posted...

Bloodychess posted...

Sativa_Rose posted...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Militarily_unnecessary

-"Japanese militarism was aggravated by the Great Depression, and had resulted in countless assassinations of reformers attempting to check military power, among them Takahashi Korekiyo, Saitō Makoto, and Inukai Tsuyoshi. This created an environment in which opposition to war was a much riskier endeavor.[58]

According to historian Richard B. Frank,

The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender.[59]"

-On 30 June 2007, Japan's defense minister Fumio Kyūma said the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the United States during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war. Kyūma said: "I now have come to accept in my mind that in order to end the war, it could not be helped (shikata ga nai) that an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and that countless numbers of people suffered great tragedy." Kyūma, who is from Nagasaki...

-Colonel Harry F. Cunningham, an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force, noted that in addition to civilians producing weapons of war in cities, the Japanese government created a large civilian militia organization in order to train millions of civilians to be armed and to resist the American invaders. In his official intelligence review on July 21, 1945, he declared that:

The entire population of Japan is a proper military target ... There are no civilians in Japan. We are making war and making it in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which war is and seeks to bring about an enduring peace. We intend to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in the shortest possible time.[45]

I think the evidence is more compelling on the anti-nuke side, and June 1945 didn't have the same picture as late July or early August for sure. Also if it was really that crazy, why did Japan not just keep fighting after the nukes? They still had millions of people still alive.

Their god king emperor finally had seen enough and spoke out in favor of ending the war. Literally can't imagine what japan would look like today if America had to invade the mainland. Millions dead
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Sativa_Rose posted...

Look at my post with all the quotes, the land invasion was known to be unnecessary for Japanese surrender at that point.

But not unconditional surrender. There would have been many compromises that were not acceptable.
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Here are the critical points to remember:

1) Western policy and military planners by this point were all paranoid about a repeat of Versailles, where the enemy was all but defeated but they didn't finish the job and left instead a festering wound that lead to an even more brutal war a generation later. By 1945, nobody in their right mind could've assumed that Japan would become a staunch ally, strictly pacifist, and a major technological and economic power mere decades later. Unconditional surrender and occupation/reconstruction were musts for both Germany and Japan for that reason.

2) Japanese militarism was still alive and well. Japan still held large chunks of China, pockets of Southeast Asia, and their home islands itself, and for all intents and purposes every single action that the American and other Allied forces had with Japan featured heavy losses on their sides and almost total losses on the Japanese side. At Okinawa, the Japanese indoctrinated or forced civilians to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Americans, and the Allies had every expectation for that to be the case for any invasion of the Japanese home islands. If you left that in place, that's just pushing off the problem for another war down the line a la point #1. And if you had to fight that head on some more, that leads to point #3.

3) If nukes weren't used, what to do instead? Traditional and firebombing campaigns were still well underway and had killed far more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so in any continuation of the war the extensions of those campaigns would've invariably lead to significantly more casualties. A strict blockade to starve the home islands would've left Japanese armies on the Chinese mainland still fighting and committing atrocities left and right, not to mention would've starved tens if not hundreds of thousands if not more Japanese civilians to death. And an actual invasion would've been brutal to both sides. It's only been recently that we started making new Purple Hearts for our wounded veterans due to the shear number that were made in the lead up to the planned invasion of Japan. In other words, all of the wounded of Korea, Vietnam, and much of the War on Terror have been awarded Purple Hearts created with the intent to be awarded to soldiers wounded in Japan in the 1940s, and that's with an aborted production line that stopped when it became apparent that an invasion wasn't happening.

4) There were some peace feelers in place, but by this point the Allies were still not sure if the Japanese were entirely prepared to surrender or not by the terms acceptable to them via point #1. Plus, even after this, Japanese junior officers attempted a coup to prevent the surrender even after Nagasaki, and hundreds of soldiers committed suicide once the surrender was officially announced. Japan was beaten in 1945, but they weren't dead, and the Allies knew that.

5) The Soviets had the largest army in the world by far in Eastern Europe and they were invading Manchuria with a humongous army as well. Had the war continued, there's no doubt that they would've been in an even more powerful position to posit their geopolitical influence on East Asia during the Cold War, likely with a united puppeted North Korea, a subservient China, and even possibly a divided Japan. None of these would've been good in the decades that followed.

So, with all of that in mind, while the use of atomic bombs was horrible, they were likely the least horrible of several even more horrendous choices.

tl;dnr - they were worried about Japan coming back for a WWIII if they didn't pursue unconditional surrender, other options likely would've lead to substantially more casualties, the Allies still weren't sure how prepared that Japan was for a meaningful surrender/peace, and there were larger geopolitical concerns to prevent the Soviets from absorbing all of East Asia and part of Japan into their sphere of infulence.
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K181 posted...

tl;dnr - they were worried about Japan coming back for a WWIII if they didn't pursue unconditional surrender

I'm sure that is part of the reason, but the real reason we demanded an unconditional surrender is because we wanted to stick a base there to point missiles at the USSR and needed to do it as fast as possible before the USSR got there.
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ChromaticAngel posted...

Unwarranted. We should have accepted their surrender instead of trying to force them into an unconditional surrender.

What?

They didn't surrender at any point until the second bomb.
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K181 posted...

Here are the critical points to remember:

1) Western policy and military planners by this point were all paranoid about a repeat of Versailles, where the enemy was all but defeated but they didn't finish the job and left instead a festering wound that lead to an even more brutal war a generation later. By 1945, nobody in their right mind could've assumed that Japan would become a staunch ally, strictly pacifist, and a major technological and economic power mere decades later. Unconditional surrender and occupation/reconstruction were musts for both Germany and Japan for that reason.

2) Japanese militarism was still alive and well. Japan still held large chunks of China, pockets of Southeast Asia, and their home islands itself, and for all intents and purposes every single action that the American and other Allied forces had with Japan featured heavy losses on their sides and almost total losses on the Japanese side. At Okinawa, the Japanese indoctrinated or forced civilians to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Americans, and the Allies had every expectation for that to be the case for any invasion of the Japanese home islands. If you left that in place, that's just pushing off the problem for another war down the line a la point #1. And if you had to fight that head on some more, that leads to point #3.

3) If nukes weren't used, what to do instead? Traditional and firebombing campaigns were still well underway and had killed far more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so in any continuation of the war the extensions of those campaigns would've invariably lead to significantly more casualties. A strict blockade to starve the home islands would've left Japanese armies on the Chinese mainland still fighting and committing atrocities left and right, not to mention would've starved tens if not hundreds of thousands if not more Japanese civilians to death. And an actual invasion would've been brutal to both sides. It's only been recently that we started making new Purple Hearts for our wounded veterans due to the shear number that were made in the lead up to the planned invasion of Japan. In other words, all of the wounded of Korea, Vietnam, and much of the War on Terror have been awarded Purple Hearts created with the intent to be awarded to soldiers wounded in Japan in the 1940s, and that's with an aborted production line that stopped when it became apparent that an invasion wasn't happening.

4) There were some peace feelers in place, but by this point the Allies were still not sure if the Japanese were entirely prepared to surrender or not by the terms acceptable to them via point #1. Plus, even after this, Japanese junior officers attempted a coup to prevent the surrender even after Nagasaki, and hundreds of soldiers committed suicide once the surrender was officially announced. Japan was beaten in 1945, but they weren't dead, and the Allies knew that.

5) The Soviets had the largest army in the world by far in Eastern Europe and they were invading Manchuria with a humongous army as well. Had the war continued, there's no doubt that they would've been in an even more powerful position to posit their geopolitical influence on East Asia during the Cold War, likely with a united puppeted North Korea, a subservient China, and even possibly a divided Japan. None of these would've been good in the decades that followed.

So, with all of that in mind, while the use of atomic bombs was horrible, they were likely the least horrible of several even more horrendous choices.

These are some good points. I think it's good for people to read the arguments on both sides as there is a lot of nuance to it. People should at least be aware that it wasn't a completely one sided discussion. When I was in HS, it was basically taught that it had to be done to save lives, very propaganda like.
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It was overkill but at the time a needed act. We wouldn't know the full horror of the nuke if they were never used like that.
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This should be required reading whenever discussing the atomic bombs.

http://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb525-The-Atomic-Bomb-and-the-End-of-World-War-II/documents/075.pdf

http://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb525-The-Atomic-Bomb-and-the-End-of-World-War-II/documents/089.pdf

TL;DR: Even after the Hiroshima bombings, the high council had refused terms of surrender given by the Allies, and specifically refused occupation, forced disarmament, and foreign prosecution of their war criminals, in addition to maintenance of the role of the Emperor. This was driven by men who were guilty of war crimes, who essentially were trying to save their own skins.

The Emperor overruled them and declared Japan should surrender, but the wired response by Japan was that they still insisted on keeping the Emperor.

After Nagasaki, the emperor made a second overruling of his council in which he declared that even if it costs him his role and his life, Japan should surrender.

General Anami supported an attempted coup after this to attempt to stop the surrender.
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Not the call I would have made but I suppose a politician doesn't have the luxury of deontological ethics.

Officially, the a bombs save millions of lives yadda yadda, and who knows maybe it's true.
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