Alex WellersteinVerified account

Absence of evidence is not absence of effect, but it clearly wasn't a crucial part of it. The idea that the Japanese didn't believe that the US had more atomic bombs is mostly untrue. If Nagasaki hadn't happened, it seems likely that little would have changed regarding surrender.

This is why many people who have studied it have found Nagasaki not that justifiable. Ted Telford, the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, concluded that had had "never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki."

I think one can come up with "plausible justifications" for Hiroshima, even if they are debatable. Nagasaki is definitely a trickier moral issue, if your concern is with not slaughtering masses of civilians unnecessarily.

(If your argument is, "the Japanese [people] were evil and deserved it," then clearly the issue of plausible justification isn't an issue for you. I always get many replies to this effect.)

(I understand where they are coming from, especially from people who are from countries brutalized by the Japanese military. I don't think that justifies targeting children, as I've written on here before. But I understand it.)

Anyway, the most important consequence of Nagasaki, in my opinion, was that it greatly disturbed Truman. He had just gotten the casualty reports from Hiroshima and was already unnerved. He didn't know another bombing was going to happen so quickly. His attitude quickly soured.

Truman's reclamation of authority, and insisting that all further nuclear use orders be routed through the President (and not the military), changed the nature of US nuclear weapons going forward. He reinforced this many times in his later presidency.