Hirohito posted:

TO OUR GOOD AND LOYAL SUBJECTS:

After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure.

We have ordered Our Government to communicate to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that Our Empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration.

To strive for the common prosperity and happiness of all nations as well as the security and well-being of Our subjects is the solemn obligation which has been handed down by Our Imperial Ancestors and which lies close to Our heart.

Indeed, We declared war on America and Britain out of Our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from Our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement.

But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State, and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

Such being the case, how are We to save the millions of Our subjects, or to atone Ourselves before the hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors? This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.

We cannot but express the deepest sense of regret to Our Allied nations of East Asia, who have consistently cooperated with the Empire towards the emancipation of East Asia.

The thought of those officers and men as well as others who have fallen in the fields of battle, those who died at their posts of duty, or those who met with untimely death and all their bereaved families, pains Our heart night and day.

The welfare of the wounded and the war-sufferers, and of those who have lost their homes and livelihood, are the objects of Our profound solicitude.

The hardships and sufferings to which Our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great. We are keenly aware of the inmost feelings of all of you, Our subjects. However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable.

Having been able to safeguard and maintain the Kokutai, We are always with you, Our good and loyal subjects, relying upon your sincerity and integrity.

Beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion which may engender needless complications, or any fraternal contention and strife which may create confusion, lead you astray and cause you to lose the confidence of the world.

Let the entire nation continue as one family from generation to generation, ever firm in its faith in the imperishability of its sacred land, and mindful of its heavy burden of responsibility, and of the long road before it.

Unite your total strength, to be devoted to construction for the future. Cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility of spirit, and work with resolution – so that you may enhance the innate glory of the Imperial State and keep pace with the progress of the world

SnowblindFatal posted:

Hey, I've always been wondering how the media portrayed the story of atom bombs being dropped in Japan. I could imagine them being completely magical devil fireballs from hell as the power was something like the which people had never seen before. Then again, it could've also been a steady slope where first there were some stories about massive bomb trials and speculations of what such a bomb could do to a city. How surprised were the people? Was your average Joe at all informed about the breakthroughs in physics? Not a lot of people know about fission for example even these days.

Unkempt posted:

VikingSkull posted:

Also, just to get this out of the way, the base plan of just waiting Japan out was being undertaken simultaneously in conjunction with the firebombings, atomic bombings and plan for invasion.

It was called Operation Starvation, and it meant what it said. A naval blockade and wholesale mining of Japanese harbors. Japan had ~1 month of food stores left in August of 1945, and winter was fast approaching.

Had the US just simply stopped and waited, millions would have starved to death.

boner confessor posted:

people were suprised in that the detonation was announced out of nowhere but i'm sure there were some rumors etc. going around because atomic weapons aren't that complicated in theory. scientists had been discovering and screwing around with atoms in the couple decades prior to the war. generally this was cutting edge stuff your average person wouldn't know about but so many amazing technologies had been developed in the previous half century (electricity, flight, internal combustion, etc.) that a really huge bomb wasn't that much of a shock, and newspapers did their best to explain how it worked in the context of people's education, which generally didn't cover the physics of atoms and the like

A Buttery Pastry posted:

This discussion actually makes me wonder, what would be the equivalent today? On the technical/scientific front, perhaps fusion? It probably wouldn't have the same kind of impact on society, being an ostensibly peaceful technology, but it could potentially change society to a greater degree than nuclear weaponry did.

Fojar38 posted:

We already have fusion bombs and it's hard to imagine needing anything stronger without also being an interstellar empire.

Helsing posted:

I don't have a citation to back this up so take it with a grain of salt with but I heard during a radio interview with a nuclear physician that the United States didn't have a sufficient stockpile of materials on hand to continue manufacturing nuclear weapons, at least in the short term, so if Japan hadn't surrendered when it did then the United States wouldn't have necessarily been able to immediately continue dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities.

Fojar38 posted:

We already have fusion bombs and it's hard to imagine needing anything stronger without also being an interstellar empire.

blowfish posted:

Even on Earth, maximum MAD will only be possible with a one-shot planet killer in every superpower's hands (after test firings on Mars and Venus).

boner confessor posted:

i'm sure there were some rumors etc. going around because atomic weapons aren't that complicated in theory

VikingSkull posted:

The US and Russia can do this right now. If you surround a nuclear device with a few hundred tons of Cobalt, you make enough Cobalt-60 to irradiate the entire planet.

VikingSkull posted:

Also, just to get this out of the way, the base plan of just waiting Japan out was being undertaken simultaneously in conjunction with the firebombings, atomic bombings and plan for invasion.

It was called Operation Starvation, and it meant what it said. A naval blockade and wholesale mining of Japanese harbors. Japan had ~1 month of food stores left in August of 1945, and winter was fast approaching.

Had the US just simply stopped and waited, millions would have starved to death.

CAPT. Rainbowbeard posted:

Also, the Russians were also offering to "help" the U.S. invade Japan at this point. The thing is, when the Russians invade a country, they just sort of... stay forever. They were already parked in much of Europe with no sign of agreeing to leave, and Roosevelt and Truman were already looking ahead to the Cold War. Dropping The Bomb was as much Truman's show of force against the Russians as it was against the Japanese. It mostly worked.

If word had gotten out that a lot of the fighting I'm the Pacific could have been avoided, that would have been a political nightmare for the Democrats.

We should have nuked something that wasn't packed with civilians, but... there you go.

Fojar38 posted:

The Russians had no capacity to invade Japan without the US literally ferrying the Red Army across the Sea of Japan. Russia's role in the bombs dropping and in the Japanese decision to surrender gets exaggerated a lot in these parts.

Brainiac Five posted:

Ah, the USSR had no amphibious assault capability, meaning they did not seize the Kuriles. In fact, the weak, flabby, dickless USSR was meaningless compared to the turgid, manly USA.

Fojar38 posted:

I too believe that invading the Kurils is the same as invading Hokkaido

Brainiac Five posted:

So you were lying in your earlier post when you said that the USSR was incapable of amphibious invasions. I see.

Fojar38 posted:

I never said that they were incapable of amphibious invasions, I said that they were incapable of invading Japan, by which I meant the Japanese home islands, without US assistance. Stop being wilfully dense.

Brainiac Five posted:

"The Russians had no capacity to invade Japan without the US literally ferrying the Red Army across the Sea of Japan."

I'm sorry that you are incapable of saying "the USSR lacked the experience in amphibious invasions to invade Hokkaido" (debatable, but at least tenable) without instead saying "the USSR lacked the machinery to conduct amphibious invasions". I would suggest learning to say what you mean.

blowfish posted:

Nah, I don't mean slow radioactive death, I mean planet-shattering kabooms.

Fojar38 posted:

Not only did they lack experience, but they were woefully underequipped both logistically, in the ability to keep the seas clear, in the ability to soften Japanese coastal defenses, and in the number of feasible landing craft that they could muster to realistically have a shot at even establishing a beachhead in Hokkaido without US assistance.

This would have been the most colossal amphibious landing in history and the US, who were better prepared for it in every single way, were still predicting an insane number of casualties despite having the world's strongest navy, air force, complete domination of all the air and space surrounding Japan, AND experience in conducting what until this hypothetical invasion was the largest amphibious invasion in history (D-Day)

The USSR's Pacific Navy was a non-entity, their Kuril landings required the US Navy to gift them landing craft, they were incapable of landing armor, and the Japanese were barely defending them and were instead preparing to defend Kyushu/Honshu. The notion of an unassisted Soviet invasion of the Japanese home islands is a complete and utter fantasy and the Kuril operation established the Soviets of being so lacking in amphibious landing capabilities that Soviet officers pointed to them as evidence that invading Hokkaido would have been suicide.

Brainiac Five posted:

There's some major incoherencies here. They receiving US landing craft entirely separately from any planned invasion of Japan, since that was being planned secretly. Your points are at odds with one another, since you're saying the LACK of Japanese defenders is a reason why the invasion of Hokkaido would have failed, suggesting you're copy-pasting this from somewhere. The Kuril invasion, mind, was against equal numbers of Japanese troops, the USSR lacking local superiority at any point. I don't even want to address the idea that there was anything to clear from the seas in August or September 1945. Then, too, this posits a situation where Japanese resistance holds out indefinitely, which is hardly to be taken as given.

You're also straight-up ignoring the political nature of calculating casualty projections for OLYMPIC and CORONET. Unsurprising, since you are an unreconstructed oorah kid.

Fojar38 posted:

There are so many things wrong with this post that I'm having trouble parsing it.

1) The Americans were in fact giving the Soviets ships for the express purpose of being used in a theoretical invasion of Japan

2) No, I was pointing out that the resistance that the Soviets faced in the Kurils was relatively minor to what they would have faced on one of the Japanese home islands and they still had loads of trouble because amphibious invasions are hard as gently caress.

3) No, I'm not copy-pasting anything.

4) It wasn't Japanese ground resistance that gave the Soviets so much trouble in the Kurils, it was their lack of air and naval support and their lack of reconnaissance capacity making them sitting ducks for Japanese coastal defenses.

5) There were Japanese submarines prowling the Sea of Japan all the way up to the end of the war.

6) lol "US casualty projections were faked because politics"

AriadneThread posted:

it's not so much focused on the media/common person perspective but Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb and the follow up, Dark Sun are pretty great overviews of the atomic program and it's after effects.

Brainiac Five posted:

They gave them ships in anticipation of invasions of Sakhalin and the Kuriles, both claimed as Soviet territory. They did not give the the USSR ships to assist in establishing a divided occupation of Japan.

They had "loads of trouble" that still resulted in a victory, which is, like, a significant step up from early efforts like Dieppe and just plain ignores the lack of effective troops in Hokkaido.

I don't think you understand that with all these disadvantages they still managed to invade and occupy the Kuriles. Comparatively, the US threw five times the number of defenders at Omaha Beach. Traditionally, three times the number of defenders are considered necessary to push them out. The USSR's performance in the Kuriles is actually strong evidence that they would have been able to overcome their major disadvantages in an invasion of Hokkaido, because they did so historically.

drat, a single-digit number of submarines, which would have been further reduced by the time of an invasion, and which would have been primarily aimed at OLYMPIC and CORONET. I guess the IJA and IJN could have somehow gotten a bunch of midget submarines up to Hokkaido.

No, you grunting little subhuman, the casualty projections varied depending on which service was making the projection because they all had different opinions of what would be successful. Then some dipshit nationalist comes along and hollers about how literal millions of precious American lives would have died, saved by the atomic bombs.