20. The Horrific Cost of Invading Japan
Japan’s wartime leaders’ dishonorable notions of honor meant that the price of an Allied invasion of their country would have been horrific. Allied planners estimated the cost of an invasion at upwards of one million Allied casualties, and tens of millions of Japanese, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.
Compared to that, the 200,000 casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings were an acceptable price. Morally speaking, there was nothing exceptional about the innocent victims of the atomic bombings, that would have justified sparing them at the cost of the many more other innocent lives that would have been lost elsewhere had the war continued.