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Originally Posted by Beemnseven
Wrong. The Japanese were willing to surrender as early as May, 1945 with the only stipulation being that they wanted to keep their Emporer. This didn't fit Truman's definition of "unconditional surrender". They dropped the bombs, and still wound up allowing Japan to keep its Emporer.
So in effect, Truman actually accepted the Japanese terms of surrender, but dropped the bombs anyway. You can read any number of sources from Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy, to Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, to U.S. Fleet and Naval Operations chairman Ernest J. King, to Eisenhower who all agreed that the Japanese had already been defeated, and it was completely unnecessary to use the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Make no mistake - the decision to use the bomb was political, and not based out of concern for the military.
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They may have said they wanted to surrender, but they were trying to break the Soviet & American alliance to bring the Russians onto their side. They were by no means finished.
They had no illusions about winning the war they just wanted to stop fighting it. They hoped to inflict so many casualties on the Americans that we would sign an armistice. They still had an airforce and a huge army. They hadn't run out of bullets either. Alot of their industry had been moved underground because we had firebombed them long before we used nuclear weapons. Had they known we only had two they might not have even surrendered then.
When I went to the peace museum in Hiroshima they stated the reasons that we dropped the bomb. It was to reduce our casualties and to end the war. The Japanese are very upfront about this and I don't understand why they would lie about an event that they experienced. The officers I spoke with in the Japanese Defense Forces came to the same conclusion.
You say that the dropping of the Atom bombs was just a political move but since when has war been non-political? War isn't just mindless bloodshed. It's economic, political, and psychological.
Droping an atom bomb on the Japanese was all of those. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were industrial cities. Hiroshima is a major port. Why spend millions on a weapons program and not see if it's viable, especially when you're in a major war and you're already broke? Why let the Japanese go home thinking they really hadn't been defeated like the Germans did in 1918? Why let the Japanese military / political leadership stay in power so they could plot and scheme like the Germans did?
Truman was an artillery officer during the First World War and understood the difference between a surrender and an armistice. In the end it was the Russians who finished them off not the A-bombs.