What would happen if instead of nuking Hiroshima nad Nagasaki,

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>>127692091
who do you accept surrender from afterwards?

a bunch of peasants?

perhaps logistical issue with dropping a bomb from a slow af plane over the glorious nippon leader too, y'know, being at war and all?

>>127692091
The nukes were dropped to cripple industry, they weren't made specifically to kill civillains.

>>127692091
Fear is a great weapon

>>127692091
They thought that he was the voice of god and their duty was to die to serve him. Do you really think that killing him would do anything besides make them fight harder, or that the guy who immediately takes his place would just surrender when he comes to power?

>>127692182
>perhaps logistical issue with dropping a bomb from a slow af plane over the glorious nippon leader too, y'know, being at war and all?

Correct me if I am wrong, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were much farther away than Tokio (where, I presume, Hirohito was present). Unless Tokio was guarded as hell, it seems to be far better objective to bomb from logistical point of view.

>who do you accept surrender from afterwards?

Well, indeed, that is a good question.

>>127693494
I imagine Tokyo was much better defended, with like planes and stuff.

They wanted to test the nuke

>>127692680
You think Japs were so zealous that they would keep fighting even after obliterating their capital and emperor to ashes?

>>127693494
Both cities are south to Tokyo, I believe.

There's no reason to think their Emperor would be in Tokyo all the time, but the nature of his place meant his death would only embolden the enemy.

The nukes were an effective alternative to pacifying a nation of zealots and losing millions of lives in the process.

>>127693494
The original plan was to drop it on Tokyo but the weather was bad making the drop with an experimental weapon not worth it. Also Tokyo add been firebombed into ruin.

>>127693710
Yes.

After the surrender, there was an attempted coup to keep fighting. Every man, woman and child were motivated to fight.

>>127693710
Yeah...duh.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki
why
they were civilian cities and hadn't had any bombs dropped yet, so we could tell exactly what kind of damage the nuke could do.

also those cities had the highest population of Christians.

Why didnt they drop the first bomb directly of the coast as a warning and only if they didn't react then drop it on a town?

>>127692443
lie.

>>127692091
Why would (((they))) bomb the two catholic places of Japan?

>>127692091

His last standing order was to fight to the death. If he's dead he can't rescind that order.

>>127693996
Sorry, I meant christian cities, not catholic.

>>127694049
They needed two bombs to surrender, you think wasting the first one on a coast would be a better option??

>>127693710
Consider firebombing half of Tokyo in a night wasn't enough....
Let me think....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Choice_of_targets

>>127694049
I think they wanted to see the effects of the bomb on a city for research purposes.

They really didn't want to surrender. Tokyo being firebombed with massive loss of life didn't dissuade them, dropping a bomb into the ocean would result in no fucks given.

>>127694355
It's not like they knew about that before

>>127692091
counter-political is hard because you have to know where the target the whole time until the bomb hits. We didn't know where Hirohito was at the time, for all we knew he fucked off to a base in northern Honshu considering how badly we were fucking up Tokyo. Plus, leaving him alive was a good idea in long run considering how quickly the Japanese economy recovered. Without him around things may have gone very badly for the Japanese after the war.

>>127693494
Tokyo had already pretty much been destroyed by conventional bombing, so there wasn't much point dropping an atomic bomb on rubble.

>>127692091
Killing Emperor Showa would've done nothing, as he practically had no political power in the Diet of Japan.
The death of Tojo Hideki however, would've had an impact as he acted as the prime minister and war minister at the time of the war

>>127692091
The Hiroshima bomb killed 40,000 Japanese soldiers. And a shitload of civilians, but the military was the target. And Nagasaki was a possible beachhead for invasion so it made sense to clear it out.

>>127694989
Forgot to add that killing the Emperor would only make the nips go even more crazy and nationalistic, ending up in an entire country rising up against occupation. Constantly.

The americans feared this as well, hence why Emperor Showa was never executed.

>>127694049
They only had 2 bombs ready to go, but threatened the nips with 5

>Is there actual law forbidding attempt to kill enemy country leader during war?

During total war, there is no practical law. At best there's customs.

Functionally, the leader is the leader of the military, and is fair game.

>You think Japs were so zealous that they would keep fighting even after obliterating their capital and emperor to ashes?
Yes.

>>127694049
This was proposed, very early on and rejected. Preserving Japanese civillian lives was not a priority at all.

>>127693595
read a fucking book tokyo was firebombed to hell, in fact almost all japan was firebombed to hell

>>127694610
But they were unwilling to surrender after the first one, hence why the second one was used. If they were unwilling to surrender after one of their cities got obliterated, what would a nuke on a beach really do??

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His people had never seen him or heard him. The generals may have kepit from the public and fought on to the bitter end. This means more dead japs as well as more dead American solders.

>>127692091
Oh look Polish education oh yehhh.

The Emperor had NO POWER during WW2, they would have never had details in where the Shogun was. Ive never even heard of Americans having any spies in Nippon, as they rounded theres up after Pearl Harbour

>>127692091
you don't fuck with the emperor. Even the shoguns knew not to fuck with the emperor. Even when he's a powerless figurehead he is important to all of Japan. The imperial family has been around for thousands of years and descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu. Even if Japanese of the time didn't really believe the emperor was divine, if the US killed him Japan would not stop fighting until Japan was a smoking crater with no one left to fight

>>127693710
Japanese were djihadist tier during WW2.
Decapitating the ruling class of a population makes sense sometimes but not in this case because the enemy proved numerous time that he was fanatical, you would have just ended with a fragmentation of japanese forces making it necessary to land and suppress them one by one (which would have been Vietnam x1000).