For me, that the Cold War began with the US wanting to stop Stalin's plans of imposing communism on the world. Did anybody else's curriculum portray Trotsky in a positive light? lmao it's funny to imagine the weirdos who write those textbooks were trots.
The Japanese were already in a hopeless situation strategically and would’ve likely surrendered at around the same time. A ground invasion of Japan probably wouldn’t have happened.
Also it seems that Japanese high command didn’t give that much importance to civilian deaths resulting from the nukes and may not have been as relevant to their surrender as they’re made out to be.
Overall it’s the certainty with which we are told that “we had to nuke them or else a million soldiers would’ve died” which was just post-war apologia and not a contemporaneous justification.
I'd heard the Japanese were in pretty awful strategic state, but i guess the common belief is that the military elite were so radicalised that they were willing to continue being imperialists to the very end, regardless how doomed their cause was. Would that be considered true?