James Oberg wrote:

Find a single Japanese who claims they were about to surrender -- until the
sacrifice at Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave the Emperor's government BARELY
enough clout to overcome the War Party and stop the war.

Indeed! Even after the dropping of the two bombs and the Emperor's finally deciding to surrender, the military wanted to fight on. The night before the surrender, military leaders attempted a coup and occupied the Imperial Palace in an effort to depose the Emperor, prevent the broadcast of his surrender message, and keep the war going on to the death of every Japanese if necessary. The only reason the coup failed is that the only man who knew where the recordings of the Emperor's surrender message were hidden was knocked unconscious during a scuffle at the beginning of the coup attempt. So much time was wasted trying to locate and destroy the recordings that the rebels failed to adequately secure their position and forces loyal to the Emperor were able to retake the Imperial Palace, recover the recordings and broadcast the surrender message.

The atomic bombs prompted the Emperor (who up till that point had been loathe to interfere) to finally see reality and act in the best interest of his people by ordering the surrender even in the face of bitter opposition from the military. If not for those two atomic bombs, millions of Japanese and hundreds of thousands of Americans may have perished in the battle for the Japanese mainland which was in the advanced planning stages at the time the bombs became available. I would conservatively estimate that those two bombs saved 10 times the number of lives they took, most of them Japanese.

--
The Evil Michael Davis(tm)
http://mdavis19.tripod.com
http://skepticult.org Member #264-70198-536
Member #33 1/3 of The "I Have Been Killfiled By Tommy" Club

"There's a sucker born every minute" - David Hannum (often erroneously attributed to P. T. Barnum)

As for innocent victims, whose soldiers cordoned off the cities when people
and their families, warned by US dropped leaflets to get out before the
cities were destroyed, were stopped and herded back INTO the cities? Using
one's own civilians as hostages, hoping that the enemy will be more
concerned for their welfare than you are yourself, is a tactic of tyrants
and monsters, and we've seen it from Japan to Vietnam to Palestine to Iraq,
and we'll see it again.