Alex WellersteinVerified account

I think the best evidence for the truth of the "two bombs and surrender" story is a) that Hirohito went out of his way to mention the atomic bombs in his surrender speech, and b) that the people who argue otherwise invariably have to lie about what happened, to make their case.https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/1027581987874394112 …

When you tell the truth about what the U.S. knew and what the Japanese did, you can't find any evidence that the war would have ended for months more. Even a surrender before the invasion would have meant hundreds of thousands of Allied civilian deaths, and continued fighting.

And the invasion was expected to kill hundreds of thousands of Allied troops, and a million or so Japanese military and civilians.

Finally, the idea that the bomb wasn't necessary, and the U.S. knew it, was part of Stalin's Cold War propaganda. 'The Japanese were going to surrender soon, the U.S. knew it, the dropped the bombs in an attempt to frighten us.' All lies.

Briefly: a) Historians (and most people) know that speeches by heads of state rarely give full indication of internal thinking and motivation; it's why we look at the meetings, etc., that went into the crafting of said speeches.

b) I don't think I said anything about when the war would have ended. I did note that the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded, in 1945, that it would have ended without the atomic bombs, or invasion. I just bring that up to suggest that it's not some kind of revisionist idea.