Hiroshima

The destruction caused by the Hiroshima bomb was not enormously greater than that caused by the rare firestorms set off by conventional bombing, as in Tokyo in March 1945, or in Hamburg and Dresden earlier. But those events were semi-flukes caused by unusual weather conditions and other random variables. Thus, the ability of the U.S. to destroy a city was not unprecedented, so it's not surprising that the Japanese did not immediately surrender, but waited until after the Nagasaki bomb. The ability of the U.S. to destroy two cities in four days, however, meant that the human race had entered a new epoch, one not necessarily to the advantage of the Japanese war effort, as Hirohito put it in his surrender message to his people.

Also note that in between the two bombs came the massive Red Army assault on the Japanese army in mainland Asia.

No nation has ever suffered three such hammer blows in four days. Still, even after that, fanatical militarists fought gun battles within Tokyo trying to keep the Emperor from announcing the end of the war.

By the way, what if the Los Alamos boys had finished the A-bomb just one month earlier and we had compelled Japan to give up before Stalin had shifted his army from Germany to northeast Asia? Would Korea be a unified capitalist democracy today?

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My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer