I think very few people on the anti-bomb side would seriously argue there wasn't a split in the Imperial government and a lot of preparation going into defending against a potential US invasion attempt. At the same time however there were the beginning of diplomatic efforts to explore a negotiated peace from minority factions in the Japanese government partially backed by the Emperor, these (to me) undermine the "it was the only option" argument supporting the bombings morally. I found this article that talks a bit about the feelers (even though it gets side tracked about a supposed early-1945 prototypical peace "offer" that closely matched the eventual status post war, though that's an interesting read and an important bit of info about how to treat and examine reports of things like that). [0]

The main thrust of the anti-moral-bombing argument is essentially that the MAGIC intercepts we know happened for sure of their early diplomatic feelers indicate that the Emperor and some minority factions were beginning to develop the terms for a possible surrender and that combined with the main reasons for the US bombing not being directly oriented towards defeating Japan but were already looking to their next adversary, the USSR, weakens the argument that the bombing was ultimately more moral way of ending the war. We know for sure from Truman et al's own writings at the time show that their only concern wasn't the least bloody end of the war with Japan and they wanted to demonstrate the bomb to the USSR, I think that's pretty undisputed history even by the pro-moral-bombing side of the argument.

I tend to agree that it's unlikely Japan would have been able to stand up to a US blockade when we were already able to safely park battleships off their coast before the bombs were dropped and ultimately the Supreme War Council would have been overruled by the Emperor the same way they were after the atomic bombs were dropped. How quickly would the pro-negotiation side have gained power with a blockade of the home islands? That would have been a pretty safe operation for the US at the time.

The biggest question marks in the whole thing are largely impossible to answer how many more defeats would the militarist side have to suffer before accepting a surrender that looks like the eventual post war status. The insistence on unconditional surrender is also a thing that's difficult to weigh morally. If the US insists on a condition it knows is unacceptable how much does that shift the moral blame for Japan not accepting the ultimatum of an "unacceptable" condition or bomb?

Sorry if it's a bit jumbled, I'm bouncing between work and this and I'm not a great essayist to begin with.

Too long; You rambled too much there in the middle: the main argument of the antibomb remains that it's unlikely that a full or even partial invasion of the home islands would have been ultimately required and the atomic bombing of civilians is so morally bad that it requires an iron clad "there was no other option to end the war" (or the only alternatives were far bloodier; eg a full home island invasion) which the Japanese feelers about negotiating a peace undermines.

I think ultimately if we could part the curtains of time for both sides and show the post war outcome to both sides Japan would have accepted a surrender that lead to that future.

[0] https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/05/06/did-the-japanese-...

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opo 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>...We know for sure from Truman et al's own writings at the time show that their only concern wasn't the least bloody end of the war with Japan and they wanted to demonstrate the bomb to the USSR, I think that's pretty undisputed history even by the pro-moral-bombing side of the argument.

There is very little evidence of this. Truman's own writings at time (or later) never mention this idea.

This idea that Truman decided to drop the bomb to impress the Soviets was popularized later. It even has an analysis in the Reddit BadHistory subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1z07v8/deconstr...

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fn-mote 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thank you for the post.

> Too long; You rambled too much there in the middle […]

Is this Claude’s suggestions for editing your post??

	▲	rtkwe 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nah, that whole thing is pure human. I originally had simple "tl;dr" but this felt more true and acknowledging of my poor self editing/thought organizing plus a little self deprecating. [0] Somethings that smell of llm speak are common in their output because the llms are mirroring human writing patterns after all. The only LLM sourced thing in there is I found the nuclear secrecy blog post in a citation link but I then read it myself to try to avoid cherry picking a portion of an article that ultimately shut down my own argument. [0] eta: Also I thought some people might take tl;dr offensively so softened it with the self deprication.