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Essay On Hiroshima And Nagasaki

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The third reason why dropping the atomic bombs wasn’t necessary to end the war is because dropping the bomb, contrary to popular belief, was not the only low-casualty option for ending the war. As more and more people have examined the situation surrounding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more and more evidence has appeared challenging the orthodox belief that dropping the bombs was the option that would save the most lives. This belief was first challenged through the discovery of other options presented at the end of the war in the Pacific that were subsequently suppressed by the U.S. government. The article "How We Bungled the Japanese Surrender," written by Ellis Zacharias five years after the end of the war, details one of these strategies. In the article, Zacharias, who was the Deputy Chief of Naval Intelligence at …show more content…

Nathan Donohue explains in his article, “Understanding the Decision to Drop the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” that a high-ranking American official stationed in Japan, General Robert Eichelberger, wrote on July 24 of that year, “a great many people, probably 50%, feel that Japan is about to fold up.” This low morale, according to Donohue, was probably because “The war had already taken a great toll not just on the Japanese military but also on its entire domestic infrastructure,” after the firebombing of major industrial cities such as Tokyo. Eichelberger’s damning account goes directly against what so many Americans have been told about the Japanese people during World War II: that every man and woman and Japan were brainwashed into fighting to the death for the country should a land invasion had occurred, justifying the use of the atomic bombs to prevent hundreds of thousands of American

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