And if they had surrendered after the first, there wouldn’t have been a second. Can’t imagine how many Allied lives would have been lost if we had to invade Honshu.

I have read the casualty estimates ranged from low hundreds of thousands to four million, which tells me the only thing the Allies were sure of was heavy casualties. Estimates of civilian casualties ranged as high as half of all Japanese. “War is Hell” wasn’t always a punchline.

In the mid 1950s Eleanor Roosevelt visited Japan. She wrote a letter to Truman saying that after seeing the coastal defenses Japan had built, she was sure he made the right decision. They had discussed The Bomb in June of '45.