During the summer of 1945, American leaders were desperately scrambling to find a way to end the second World War. Allied forces ultimately had Japan defeated, but due to pride and traditions in Japan they refused to accept their fate. With Japan’s refusal to surrender and casualties piling up by the thousands, The United States had no other option but to explore a more drastic measure using atomic bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man. Atomic warfare was certainly new, unexplored, dangerous, and experimental to say the least, but Japan left America no other choice. Despite the amount of research done on atomic weapons, no one could have accurately predicted the effect that the atomic bombs would have on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after being dropped.
Moreover, the Japanese were prepared to lose every soldier they had because of their firm belief in, “’Ketsu-go,’ decisive battle,” (4.2:04) which had already cost them hundreds of thousands of military and civilian lives. In an attempt to avoid any more bloodshed than necessary, The United States chose to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two of Japan’s most
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Our nation was well equipped and prepared to approach Japan using our Naval forces, land battle, and air tactics against their mainland. These plans were all great methods, however they would have been costly in lives, money, and an excessive waste of time. For example, it was estimated that one of their tactics to take down the Kyushu beach would have cost, “50,000 American casualties and several times that number of Japanese casualties,” (2.8) Not only was this an expected complication, but given the hypothetical situation that Japanese would take measures of rouge war, it would have been much more costly in the end. Karl T. Compton, who worked as a scientist during the war, recalls General MacArthur saying it would cost millions of lives in that scenario and over a decade to obtain