It was willing to accept a conditional surrender, which was not an offer on the table. The options were unconditional surrender or invasion and pacification. The projected cost in lives of that operation was in the millions. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined didn’t even kill 1/10th of those projections.
Their only condition was that they wanted to keep the Emperor. It was ridiculous of the Allies to demand a wholly conditional surrender. All those people got blown up just to win the argument about that one point. They could have ran a conventional air bombing campaign against tactical targets, but they decided to drop nukes on a “tactical” target in the middle of a huge city! And then they did it again! That’s not tactical, that’s strategic. If you’re going to use nukes, at least use them on a military base far away from cities.
The Japanese government was already willing to surrender.
It was willing to accept a conditional surrender, which was not an offer on the table. The options were unconditional surrender or invasion and pacification. The projected cost in lives of that operation was in the millions. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined didn’t even kill 1/10th of those projections.
Their only condition was that they wanted to keep the Emperor. It was ridiculous of the Allies to demand a wholly conditional surrender. All those people got blown up just to win the argument about that one point. They could have ran a conventional air bombing campaign against tactical targets, but they decided to drop nukes on a “tactical” target in the middle of a huge city! And then they did it again! That’s not tactical, that’s strategic. If you’re going to use nukes, at least use them on a military base far away from cities.