this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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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.
What made the Japanese surrender was the Soviet Union declaring war. They held out hope until the very end that the soviets would mediate a peace, even after the nukes.
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.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but they did that AS WELL.
Operation Meetinghouse was the US firebombing of Tokyo on 9th-10th of March 1945 which destroyed a 16 square mile area, killing over 100,000 civilians and making millions homeless
There's also the B-29 raids america launched from the Marianas that lasted from 17 November 1944 until 15 August 1945
Civilian homes are not tactical targets.