GregP
Major
I'm not counting on anything.
I was speculating about the options and pretty much decided I'd have dropped the bomb, too, at the time since I probably would not have realized the real consequences any more than the people who made the decision at the time did. No one should have to endure the attention of a nuclear weapon in hindsight ... but we didn't have hindsight when the Enola Gay took off and probably only had an idea of the size of the kill zone when the second bomb was dropped. We had aerial photos of Hiroshima but no ground intelligence inside Japan itself, and still had not heard from the Japanese.
However, the JB-2 could very easily have been aimed via radio control from aircraft and would have been much more accurate for it.
Unless the information available to the President at the time is accurately laid out, we'll probably never know, but the correct decisions were probably limited to invasion, drop the new bombs, drop conventional weapons until the Japanese surrender at additional cost in men and material to the USA, or use a combination of JB-2's, bombs, and Naval artillery. I really don't see any other options that would have acceptable to the USA after Pearl Harbor. There is no way we would have driven them back to Japan and then simply let the matter drop.
No, it was going to be fought to a conclusion using some option and they were trying to find a way to minimize Allied losses until the surrender happened. Casulaties in the event of invasion were predicted to be VERY heavy. I'm sure that moved the decision toward trying options other than invasion first. So it was going to be bombing by either conventional or nuclear weapons or trying the JB-2 option combined with bombing. What else was there to try at the time?
I was speculating about the options and pretty much decided I'd have dropped the bomb, too, at the time since I probably would not have realized the real consequences any more than the people who made the decision at the time did. No one should have to endure the attention of a nuclear weapon in hindsight ... but we didn't have hindsight when the Enola Gay took off and probably only had an idea of the size of the kill zone when the second bomb was dropped. We had aerial photos of Hiroshima but no ground intelligence inside Japan itself, and still had not heard from the Japanese.
However, the JB-2 could very easily have been aimed via radio control from aircraft and would have been much more accurate for it.
Unless the information available to the President at the time is accurately laid out, we'll probably never know, but the correct decisions were probably limited to invasion, drop the new bombs, drop conventional weapons until the Japanese surrender at additional cost in men and material to the USA, or use a combination of JB-2's, bombs, and Naval artillery. I really don't see any other options that would have acceptable to the USA after Pearl Harbor. There is no way we would have driven them back to Japan and then simply let the matter drop.
No, it was going to be fought to a conclusion using some option and they were trying to find a way to minimize Allied losses until the surrender happened. Casulaties in the event of invasion were predicted to be VERY heavy. I'm sure that moved the decision toward trying options other than invasion first. So it was going to be bombing by either conventional or nuclear weapons or trying the JB-2 option combined with bombing. What else was there to try at the time?