Tokyo was bombed by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) ..
The strikes conducted by the USAAF on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, constitute the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history.[1] Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.
to be fair a link from september 2014 (almost twelve years ago) about things that occurred in 1945 (almost (relatively) a century ago), in the brains of people that were not even alive yet, and even if they were, unable to process the events through anything like a remotely similar scope or in a contextually contemporaneous way, or even relatively approaching the neurological pathways that someone from that time would have used, is...
Wow yes the USA and friends could have just surrendered. Brilliant insight. Very clever. I'm sure everyone being tortured to death by the various Japanese military units would super appreciate that.
I think you need to educate yourself a bit here. Japan's surrender was inevitable, largely due to Russia pressing them. The war was ending whether those bombs dropped or not.
The other awkward detail was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were picked from a conventional HE & incendiary bombing targeting list; had they not been destroyed with the first atomic weapons then they would have been destroyed to the same degree by a wave of heavy bombers overnight, just as Tokyo and 71 other cities were.
This is the point I keep trying to make, like, I don't want to downplay, you know, literally being nuked, but I also don't want to downplay the results of 1000+ heavy bombers dropping thousands and thousands of tons of "regular bombs" on a city during a single night.
That's a famous myth. Among other things, russia didn't have a navy, or a strategic bombing force, so they essentially posed no threat to the actual island of japan.
You are correct in the sense that Japan was going to surrender at some point, whether that was due to conventional bombings, starvation from naval blockades or an actual invasion by the USA, there's no scenario where they don't sign an unconditional surrender.
Most of those scenarios would have killed more people than the two nuclear weapons being dropped.
