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Debate over bombings[edit]

Main article: Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender, and the ethical, legal, and military controversies surrounding the United States' justification for them have been the subject of scholarly and popular debate. On one hand, it has been argued, that the bombings caused the Japanese surrender, thereby preventing casualties that an invasion of Japan would have involved. Stimson talked of saving one million casualties. The naval blockade might have starved the Japanese into submission without an invasion, but this would also have resulted in many more Japanese deaths. Although, if they had not dropped the bombs, most of those deaths would have been soldier casualties instead of thousands of civilian deaths mixed in. That point was a big topic in scholarly debates and is still lingering on today in 2018. It has also been pointed out that the conventional bombing of Japan caused just as much destruction as the atomic bombs, if not more so. Indeed, Operation Meetinghouse, known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid in Japan, was the single most devastating air raid of the war, with a higher death toll than either of the two atomic bombings. Together, the Bombs created in the Manhattan Project are top 10 on the list of deadliest acts of war in world history.

Japanese historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa argued that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan "played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender because it dashed any hope that Japan could terminate the war through Moscow's mediation". A view among critics of the bombings, that was popularized by American historian Gar Alperovitz in 1965, is the idea of atomic diplomacy: that the United States used nuclear weapons in order to intimidate the Soviet Union in the early stages of the Cold War. Although not accepted by mainstream historians, this became the position in Japanese school history textbooks.

A Gallup poll taken in August 1945 discovered that 85 percent of Americans supported the attacks, only 10 percent disagreed with them, and 5 percent had no opinion on the bombings at all.In 2015, a Pew Research Center survey discovered that 56 percent of Americans think that the attacks were justified. In Japan, only 14 percent agree the attacks were justified. Among Americans, the generation gap remains pronounced: 70 percent of respondents over the age of 65, but only 47 percent of those aged 18-29, agree that the bombings were justified.

Those who oppose the bombings, give other reasons for their view; among them: a belief, that atomic bombing is fundamentally immoral, that the bombings counted as war crimes, that they constituted state terrorism, and that they involved racism against and the dehumanization of the Japanese people. Those who are for the bombings may back up there claims with the wartime atrocities that the Japanese committed in China and the Pacific. Those atrocities include The Rape of Nanking (1937), also known as the Nanjing Massacre, The Bangka Island Massacre (1942): Slaughter of Australian Army Nurses, The Bataan Death March(1942),The Sandakan Death March (1945), Murder and cannibalism on the Kokoda Track (1942), Conscripting women for sexual slavery in Japanese Army brothels (1937-1945), Mutilation and murder of Dutch civilians in Borneo, and The Murder and cannibalism of captured American pilots. Many of those involved in this debate believe that those crimes were much worse than the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With these atrocities that have been committed prior to the bombing of those Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many scholars believe that Japan has no right to act as the victims.