Hence there are even historians who think that the Hiroshima bombing was necessary, but Nagasaki was not. The "after the fact" justification of the two bombs, as an aside, has nothing to do with why Nagasaki happened when it did.
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I'll note, as an aside, that the US invasion of Kyushu was not to start until November 1945. Some accounts make it sound it was going to happen the next day or something, that it was barely avoided. This is wrong; there were 2 more months there.
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Personally, I think the balance of evidence points against Nagasaki playing a big role, but the "mix" of Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion is tough to disentangle. There's evidence that the Soviet invasion mattered a lot. But that's not the same as saying Hiroshima didn't.
![[KTRM] 𓐑](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1154852982434873344/WmBI4dqh_normal.jpg)
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What I do think a balanced account of the timeline indicates, though, is how inadequate the simplistic "two bombs and surrender" version of the story is. It's much more complex than that, much less straightforward, and doesn't lean into easy propaganda one way or the other.
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Bottom line: if your vision of historical events tends to render your historical conclusions as being very simple (and coincidentally they overlap with your present-day political views), you're probably leaving a lot of important stuff out. Real history is complicated and messy.
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Further reading: for timeline issues, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy is great, and even if you don't totally go along with his overall argument, it's worth the read for a balanced look at the US, Japanese, and Soviet perspectives at the end of the war.
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On the Japanese pre-planning about the invasion by the USSR, the work of Yukiko Koshiro has been eye-opening for me. On the timing of the bombs and etc., see esp.
@GordinMichael 's "Five Days in August."Show this thread
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Was wanting comparison data between the two designs part of the decision and importance of Nagasaki?
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Really bad setup for doing comparisons: different geographies, uncertain detonation points, extremely limited ability to observe and measure. Plus Fat Man was the same design as the Gadget used at Trinity so they already had data about it.
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