When the alternatives of nationalism are to fight to the very last man, and cause 8 times the number of casualties. ( Perhaps somewhat more...). Hirohito knew that the military was going to do that.
One thing that's rarely considered is that by any metric Japan had already lost the war.
And what's interesting - and definitive - about both Japan and Germany is that the regimes kept fighting when this was obvious.
There was plenty of insanity to go around, but it takes an extra special kind of insanity to ignore defeat when outmatched by a superior force, and when continuing to fight will cause massive casualties for your own population when failure is already guaranteed.
This isn't just irrational, it's compulsively self-harming.
At the same time it's recognised now that Germany and Japan both had very limited prospects of victory in WWII. There were voices in the military in both countries making this point before the fighting started. But the regimes chose irrational violence for irrational ends, with horrific self-destructive consequences.
What killed millions wasn't the weapons, it was the culture of mass delusion that made the weapons necessary.
It's the nature of authoritarianism to deny reality until pushed into collapse.
That's the only real enemy in war, and we're still fighting it today - unsuccessfully.
>At the same time it's recognised now that Germany and Japan both had very limited prospects of victory in WWII.
I'd beg to differ about this being widely recognized. For Japan perhaps, but even they could have considerably forestalled their eventual defeat if they'd done a few logical things better, or won the battle of Midway (which they should have won numerically and tactically, if they'd been a bit more careful with their encryption and estimation of U.S naval force disposition), or prioritized their targets at Pearl Harbour more carefully, or maybe better, not even bothered to attack it in the first place while performing the rest of their conquest of Asia.
As for Germany, it could have outright won the war. No debate at this point has settled that this isn't so. Indeed, at several key points Germany emphatically had both means and opportunity to secure its total hegemony at least over Europe and its surroundings in a way that would have resulted in a Nazi-version alternative to the dual superpower bipolar world that instead existed between the USSR and USA after 1945.
Fortunately this didn't happen, since as bad as the USSR was (especially under Stalin) I'd hate to imagine an alternative in which the other hegemonic nuclear power is one built on the even more murderously fanatical legacy of Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich and the rest.
> You are saying the responsibility for the instant incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians lies with the bombed, and not the bomber?
The Japanese leadership knew they could not win the war for about a year before the bombings. Yet they chose to continue the war regardless of the suffering it caused their own people.
Was the US supposed to give up?
Would it been okay if Germany was allowed to surrender on the following conditions:
* Hitler stayed in power
* the Nazis stayed in power
* all land conquered by Germany was kept by Germany
* any allegations of war crimes would be handled internally by the Germans themselves
Because those were the terms Japan was waiting for:
* Emporer stayed in power
* the government stayed in power
* all land conquered by Japan was kept by Japan
* any allegations of war crimes would be handled internally by the Japanese themselves
Would you have been okay with WW2 ending against either party on those terms?
When the bombed is credibly threatening to essentially suicide its entire citizenry despite no chance of victory, then yes, the rules of war must necessarily be relaxed to achieve the greater good. I would argue that the WW2 Imperial Japanese situation was unique in a way that nations had not yet had to deal with in the modern era (and haven’t had to deal with since).
