I was gonna put this in the tags, but it became an entire rant. SO
Do you know how many people would've died on both sides during an attempted invasion of the Japanese home islands?
Do you know how many Japanese civilians committed suicide en masse in fear of American occupation?
It was 1000 just for the Battle of Saipan¹. 1 0 0 0. Not 1000 civilians that died as unfortunate collateral damage. 1000 civilians that killed themselves because they were convinced by Japanese propaganda that they'd be raped and tortured and mutilated if the US captured them alive. Hundreds of civilians threw themselves off a cliff.
Nuclear bombs are awful and horrible and never should've been invented, much less dropped. But the US military's estimated casuality number from invading the home islands was millions. That's only for the US military. Add in the Japanese military and civilians, and you get millions more. ²,³
Conversely, the high end estimate for both bombs is less than a quarter million.⁴,⁵ That includes the deaths from the effects of radiation, including cancer, decades later.
The trolley problem is a running joke on this website. But this was the trolley problem, and it wasn't a joke.
(Also, the estimated number of dead from the Holocaust for just Jews is 6,000,000.⁶ So, um. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not on footing with it. Not at all. But the land invasion of Japan would've been.)
Astroth, Alexander (2019). Mass Suicides on Saipan and Tinian, 1944: An Examination of the Civilian Deaths in Historical Context.
Mosley, Leonard (1982). Marshall: Hero for Our Times.
Frank, Richard B. (1999). Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.
The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
United States Holocust Memorial Museum
