My second thought though is admittedly an easy piece of arm-chair quarterbacking, with the benefit of three-quarters of a century's hindsight. Yes, day by day thousands of Allied and Japanese troops were still dying. . . but we only waited three days -- between Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
This -- even though we knew that the governmental decision system then prevailing in Japan was immensely slow, as to "big decisions".
And we well knew these cities were primarily (inexorably) civilian targets, by the very nature of a city-leveling single blast, each. [By day two of the "Become Death" era, we had seen Little Boy's mayhem.]
So -- I am struck by that: why not wait a month? probably 200,000 Japanese lives in Nagasaki would not have ended, in horror. Yes, perhaps an additional few hundred each of Allied and Japanese soldiers would die. . . but Truman could have largely dis-engaged, while the Emperor weighed his fate.
All that said, I am grateful for the reputation repair (for Oppenheimer, even though he was a famously-complicated human -- he had no interest in any form of treason). And I'm grateful for the unflinching look at small men, given too much power improvidently (Downey's character). It is -- to me -- clearly a warning: the small man at center right cannot be trusted with those keys. Ever again. Out.
नमस्ते
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