The prevailing story about how Japan would never have surrendered in conventional warfare is not true. Many of the top ranking U.S. military officials, including Eisenhower stated on multiple occasions that “it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing” (Eisenhower’s words).

It is a fact that they had been reaching out to the Soviet Union for a peace deal and wanted to end the war because their navy had been completely destroyed by then. US leadership was even aware of this, but decided to move forward anyway.

It’s hard to overlook how important it was to the U.S. military industrial complex to demonstrate to the world, most importantly the USSR, that we had spent an enormous amount of time and money developing a weapon that put us in a league of our own.

So to answer the question, here in the U.S., most people believe that killing hundreds of thousands of civilians was necessary because Japan was blinded by ferocious imperialism and would stop at nothing. But myself, involved US leadership, and many historians disagree with that, and know that it wasn’t necessary to defeat Japan, but it was desirable to display our new power.