Everyone debates about whether the atom bombings were right or wrong, but I have a spin on it:

Would it have been worth invading Japan and losing millioons of people, if doing so meant nuclear weapons would never have been invented?

Curtis LeMay's "Operation Starvation" could have starved millions of Japanese civilians to death in the upcoming winter. I wonder if the Japanese military government could have held on to power amid that?

I'm always forgetting the image.

>>17867336 (OP)
>if doing so meant nuclear weapons would never have been invented?

Well it was touch and go there for awhile during the Cold War. We came close to waging nuclear war too many times during those decades. If we do end up wiping ourselves out, then that will prove the answer to your question is "Yes!!!"

Since kamikaze planes have double the range of planes flying from aircraft carriers, one plan to soften the Japanese defenses up was to hit them with mass produced V-1 rockets.

>>17867336 (OP)
Most people don’t know about Operation Downfall or understand the effect it would have had for both the Allies and Japan. They just hear about the U.S. destroying two cities and are told it’s bad with zero context of what was going on, what had been done, and what would have happened.

no

>>17867336 (OP)
>Would it have been worth invading Japan and losing millioons of people, if doing so meant nuclear weapons would never have been invented?
Even if the Manhatten project had never existed OP the bomb would still have been invented, it's something that obviously and necessarily follows from the work Cockcroft, Walton, et al were doing in the 20's. The difficult part was actually turning the theory into a bomb. If it hadn't been developed during WW2 it would have been developed during the Cold War (which would have been much less likely to remain cold in a war without nuclear deterrence), potentially by the Soviets. In that world, without the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's likely that the voices in NATO and the Warsaw Pact who were calling for nukes to be used even with those attitudes would have gotten the go-ahead, and the nuclear taboo would never have been established.
>tl;dr - even without considering Downfall, or Starvation, it's probably better for the world that the bomb was invented when and by who it was.

>>17867336 (OP)
Who cares? It would be Russia to invade it.