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Originally Posted by Vorkosigan
All true, as the ministers of agriculture, transportation, and munitions informed the government at the meeting on Aug 10. But still Anami, the War Minister, refused to surrender and urged a fight to the bitter end. The official policy, adopted in a meeting on June 6, was the Honorable Death of 100 Million -- the military was so wedded to its rule that it was willing to kill every human in Japan rather than surrender.
Vorkosigan
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And if this official policy were in fact realistic, the dropping of the two bombs would have had absolutely no effect whatsoever.
The Honorable Death policy was held by a very small handful of men in the military heirarchy, and their objections were evidently overturned following the deaths of 200 000 - far from the 100 000 000 you mention above. The fact that a surrender followed the bombings within two weeks indicates that this
death-before-surrender story was, in fact, effectively moonshine. If it were otherwise, no surrender would or could have come about as a result of the bombings.
Your synopsis of the official reasons for the use of the bombs is excellent, but you still don't address the practically certain option of a naval blockade of Japan effecting its surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were undefended targets, and the civilian population
was being targeted by the bombings, despite the presence of garrisons and facilities with a potential military utility (at a certain level, any infrastructure has a potential military utility).
I still do not see how the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives can be justified. Certainly not by considering the chimeric casualties to the united nations military forces by an unnecessary invasion, which was the argument that sold the use of A-bombs to the US and other publics.
The Japanese forces were in defeat everywhere except Japan itself, where only the army remained intact (the navy and air forces having been destroyed) and its isolation on island Japan rendered it wholly ineffective for anything other than the defence of the islands against a seaborne invasion force. This invasion was not a necessity. Neither was the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.