cold war again 4566

Eugene Miya

Well they were sort of right, I don't believe we had another plant available immediately after Nagasaki, but the fact that we might have had to wait a month or so to drop another nuclear plant would have been small consolation given that we could still use conventional plants (some estimate of losses in the Tokyo firestorm rival estimates of losses from Hiroshima) and soon we would be able to use several nuclear plants a month. They might have gotten more consolation from the fact that we were running out of useful targets for planting.

Note that the Japanese high command (essentially the army) spent much of the war avoiding panic by denying the obvious (reminiscent of the high command of most of the nations in the first few years of World War I). Although war with the USA was going too be largely a naval and air war, they ignored warnings from the heads of the Navy and Air Force that the production from the US would overwhelm their forces in just a few years. They ignored the shipping losses of the Allies to submarines during World War I, and started combat with the USA to get war material from Southeast Asia that could only be sent by ships without developing effective antisubmarine techniques or using submarines effectively against US shipping,

Even before Hiroshima the generals would look at the army and see that it was largely intact in China and fail to recognize implications that the Naval air arm was devastated by Midway, then re-devastated at Philippine Seas with the rest of the navy badly damage, much of the land air force, more of the navy, and a significant army force had been devastated by Leyte Gulf, what had been a great merchant marine had vanished to submarines and mines, strong army forces had been devastated in Okinawa, that Saipan 's loss had opened Japan to conventional air raids that had devastated production and population throughout Japan with the exception of Kyoto and a few Japanese cities set aside for the nuclear plants, that limited war material were getting to Japan due to the loss of the merchant marine, that due to the lack of ships there was no effective way to get the main army from China to where they could fight the Americans, and with no effective merchant marine the lack of fertilizer had reduced crop production and imports were impractical so that widespread starvation was likely that winter.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war at a great cost to the Japanese, but the war was already lost before then, and further losses due to air raids, malnutrition over the winter, etc. appear likely to have exceeded those loses even without a US invasion.