Kantor said:
Ideally, you kill nobody. But if you have a choice between killing 300,000 and killing over a million, you choose the lower number. Whether they are civilians or soldiers isn't really relevant. |
That's assuming that there was that choice in the first place, of course.
Perhaps the decision-makers (subconsciously) didn't care about the Japanese overtures for peace (which were significant) because they had already in their minds decided that the Japanese weren't serious - probably because (subconsciously) they wanted to use the bomb - after all, they had just invested a lot of money in it and had several 'good' reasons to use them. The orthodox/revisionist/post-revisionist debate over this is quite interesting, but it is clearly more complex than just saying they did it to save lives.
Yes.
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