In August of 2009, 64 years after the fact, Quinnipiac University ran a survey to establish the perceived stance of the American public on the bombings of #Hiroshima and #Nagasaki. This poll found that about 61 percent of Americans supported the bombings while 22 percent were opposed to those actions.

The same polls were carried out 6 years later, in 2015, by a Pew Research Center. They discovered that the number of Americans who thought that the bombings were the right call had dropped to just 56 percent. If that poll was to be carried out again today, there is clear evidence to suggest that these numbers will have dipped even further.

All of this is to indicate just how subject to conjecture the actions of the U.S. military were when it came to ending the war with Japan.

In saying that, it’s vital to revisit the issue of whether or not the United States military, under the orders of #President Harry S. Truman, should have dropped the atomic bombs.

Sure, as the saying goes, hindsight is always 20/20. Because of this, it isn’t too hard to say that, now, there were any number of ways that the issue could’ve been addressed without resorting to such extreme lengths.

However, while the larger parts of this argument may remain subjective, the fact remains that, unless new evidence capable of significantly changing the established narrative comes to light, the U.S. took the most expedient course of action in resolving its conflict with Japan.

For the purpose of clarity, there were several paths open to the U.S. military at the time. A few of these include the fact that they could’ve simply continued with conventional warfare as they had done up until that point by bombing Japanese cities. They could also have flat-out invaded Japan or even just tested the atomic bomb on an uninhabited island to demonstrate its destructive power.

But, it’s only if we’re ready to make counterfactual statements ad libitum that we’ll be able to say that any of the measures just listed would have achieved the same results that the atomic bombs did in the same time frame that it did.

This statement seems harsh and in justification for the use of a weapon of mass destruction. However, that is far from the case. The simple, bitter, and immutable truth is that there can be no true justification for such brutality, just the same way that no war can ever be truly justified.

Yet, considering what the country had to face at that time, it really isn’t hard to see how such drastic actions would have been deemed merited.

Some people will say that the United States would’ve won that war without the help of “#Little Boy” and “#Fat Man”. However, the vast majority of people who utter such statements don’t take into cognizance what it would’ve cost the country to win with the use of a weapon of mass destruction.

Had Japan been defeated at the time the first atomic bomb landed on Hiroshima?

Yes, they most assuredly had been. Except for the most fanatic military personnel, the upper echelon, #Emperor Hirohito included, understood without a shadow of a doubt that the tides of war had turned against them.

That said, this knowledge made them even fiercer warriors if nothing else. They were battered but refused to be broken. At every single point where it mattered, they showed unabashedly that they would gladly choose death over capitulation.

If you’re not sure about this point, you only need to consider the fact that between April 1944 and August 1945 alone, nearly one million Japanese citizens were killed or injured in air raids alone. The ceaseless firebombing of Tokyo that the U.S. embarked on in March of 1945 alone claimed upwards of 80, 000 lives and this wasn’t enough to deter the minds of the citizens and military alike.

Conventional bombing was clearly not the way to go and it was as plain as day that pushing for a landing invasion would take a massive toll on American soldiers.

Displaying the terrifying might of the atomic bombs, while brutal, went a long way in not only quenching the fighting spirit of the opposition but ultimately saving a lot of lives, American and Japanese in the process.

The fact that they wouldn’t have to put their lives in harm’s way thanks to this action wasn’t lost on members of the U.S. military either. A 21-year-old soldier famously said, “When the bombs dropped and news began to circulate that [the invasion of Japan] would not, after all, take place, that we would not be obliged to run up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being mortared and shelled, for all the fake manliness of our facades we cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”

Ultimately, in retrospect, it’s very easy to say that a lot of things could’ve been done differently back then. Still, the facts speak for themselves. As to whether or not the U.S. should’ve used the world’s first weapon of mass destruction on Japan, the truth is that the nation had nowhere else to turn.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was both necessary and useful in bringing a speedy conclusion to what was, overall, an ugly period in mankind’s history.