For what? Soviet Naval capacity? Well there's Project Hula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hula where the US had to provide naval vessels to the Soviets. Not to mention that even after that there was no guarantee that the Soviets would have been able to protect a naval invasion.
For the Japanese not wanting to surrender, they were refusing to surrender after the second nuke and threatened to overthrow the Emperor if he tried to surrender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
It's not about punishment, it's about the reality of it. The US maybe should have allowed for an invasion of Northern Japan, although that would likely have been horriffic and brutal street fighting and anti-insurgency warfare, also starving out the south would have led to mass starvation and death of the civilian population as the military wouldn't have surrendered.
Because at the time there were no other nukes. I don't support nuking anywhere now, but at the time, in that exact circumstance, I believe it was the best option.
Less suffering that allowing the occupation of Manchuria to continue
Less suffering than an invasion of Japan
Less suffering than blockading and starving them out
A brutal and horrible thing, but ultimately necessary.
Japanese leadership was on the verge of surrendering to the soviets
No they weren't. Maybe in Manchuria but certainly not mainland Japan, the Soviets didn't have the naval capability to launch an invasion of mainland Japan.
I'm not arguing that the Japanese weren't fucked, but if mainland Japan had been blockaded, what do you think would have happened? Would they have gone "Well guess we lost lads, lets pack it up" or would they do what they were already doing and impose even harsher rationing on their civilians to feed their military to the bitter end? Given than one nuke wasn't enough to convince them to surrender, and Japanese veterans were found throughout the Pacific still continuing the fight as late as the 1970s, it's not hard to see what the answer is.
I'm not saying the US are good, or that the nukes were a good thing. I'm saying that the lives lost from the nukes, in my understanding, pale in comparison to the probable loss of life if the nukes hadn't been used.
Yeah, allowing the continued rape of Manchuria and then starving the civilian population of Japan, and then probably a land invasion with brutal urban warfare and anti-guerilla operations (because America always handles guerilla insurrections really well) would have been a much better option.
The American "war crime" stopped the far worse actual Japanese war crimes, if you're against the nukes then you're in favour of the Japanese rape of Manchuria.
If it spikes again I'll sell and do the same. I might be banned from main but I still like what this site is.