They dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan to make the Soviet Union's invasion of Hokkaido unnecessary and as a performative act to horrify the world in to subjugation.
The whole 'saved more lives than it cost' is a bad argument unless the plan was to slaughter a hundred thousand civilians on landing. Note the Nazi invasion of France cost 60,000 lives in civilian resistance...this was at the beginning of the war.
Japan would have surrendered on the first day of invasion.
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All of the major Allies, including the USSR and China, agreed in the Potsdam Declaration that they would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from Japan. Keeping the Emperor was a condition and therefore unacceptable from the get-go.
This isn't just pointless legalism either. The prevailing theory at the time (and still pretty common theory now) is that the end of WWI via a conditional surrender enabled the Nazis to twist what was pretty much a complete defeat into the "Stab in the back" myth.
The WWII Allies agreed on only accepting unconditional surrender from the Axis so that there could be no argument down the line that the Nazis or Imperial Japan could have won the war if they had held on juuuuust a little longer and hadn't been betrayed by [insert scapegoat here].
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Well yeah, that's why unconditional surrender as a war goal was promoted and accepted since 1943 by noted lib...
Checks notes
...Joseph Stalin.
That's the whole point. There were no terms to the surrender, it was unconditional.
Besides, it's a complete misrepresentation to claim that the Japanese only wanted to keep their Emperor. As late as June 1945 the Japanese leadership wrote memoranda to each other and the Emperor stating that they wanted to keep fighting until a "decisive battle" could induce the Allies to settle on more favorable terms. They also wanted to keep some of their colonies, oversee their own demilitarization (lol), and prosecute their own war criminals (LMAO).
The Emperor did direct some of his diplomats to put out peace feelers to some small neutral countries, who basically told Japan to take the deal or leave it. The Japanese also reached out to the USSR, which also told them to surrender unconditionally or fuck off.
If the Japanese military was truly willing to surrender, it would have done so when all peace feelers under the current conditions were exhausted.
The idea that Japan was ready to surrender but for the preservation of the monarchy is completely a-historical.
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Well I've seen the light.
Agreeing with Stalin makes me a lib, whereas agreeing with American military leaders makes you a leftist.
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Stalin adopted unconditional surrender as the goal of the war from the Casablanca conference in 1943 and restated it as a specific war goal against Japan in the Potsdam Declaration in July 1945. Unless you're laboring under the assumption that Japan surrendered in 1947, Stalin's position on unconditional surrender is pretty fucking clear.
Oh cool, just let the right wing Imperialists have a conditional surrender so they can twist it into a myth of national betryal. That'll never come back to fuck up the world, except for that time it did.
Fascists get the bullet. Not concessions. McAurthur fucked up after the fact by letting the Japanese keep the monarchy. That does not change the fact that negotiating with Fascists is absolutely lib shit.
Except dropping the bombs saved lives. Chinese lives, Korean lives, Vietnamese lives, and countless others. But hey, I guess my people should have just sucked it up for a few more months of being murdered by the fascists while waiting for America to muster up an invasion fleet.
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