The only reason Japan was struck by nuclear weapons was because they were going to surrender to the USSR which would invite them to the negotiating table and could very well have created a socialist Japan. Instead with the bombs the US was able to stave off a Red Army invasion that was set to happen days away and kept them away from the negotiations, ensuring a US-aligned puppet unoppposed.

Answering the genocide of a decrepit fascist empire with a nuclear Holocaust against civilians accomplishes absolutely nothing and is a demented, depraved, and reactionary revenge fantasy.

Nuclear bombardment would have had absolutely zero ideological effect, whether ten more were dropped, or a hundred.

Also I don’t know what your sources are, but the cities were absolutely starving, with a maximum ration count of 1,000 a day for priority workers, and 800 calories for everyone else. Those were also hopeful estimates, and the estimated caloric intake of a Japanese civilian was 300-500 calories a day, no sodium intake, little to no protein, and no vitamin B sources. Yes, the cities were industrialized and wealthy, but all that wealth doesn’t buy you any food when all the transportation infrastructure, both maritime and land-based is in utter ruin after incessant air bombardment. The cities were relatively unscathed as the military value of both was limited, but the rail lines, roads, depots, and port facilities were essentially gone. The destruction was so thorough that air attacks and submarines began targeting tiny sampams since there was quite literally nothing else to bomb.

None of that distracts from the fact that salivating for the deaths of civilians is disgusting. Too can play at that game with the personal anecdote too, because you know what? My entire family tree was killed in the Holocaust. Every other family thread is gone. I am the only member of my generation as the few survivors didn’t have kids beyond my grandmother, who had one. You know what else? Dropping nukes on Berlin, Hamburg, Essen, Cologne, Dresden, Kiel, Munich, and every other German city wouldn’t have brought them back even if sometimes I believe that that’s what the Germans deserved. Instead, I’m happy that the Soviet’s managed to reform a portion of the Germans into one of the best examples of a socialist state the world has seen to date, where even the descendants in the now annexed Eastern Germany still keep the flames of revolution alive.

Do some self-reflection comrade. Answering genocide with mindless slaughter is fools errand, unproductive, and a reactionary tendency.

I can grasp the anger even if I can’t claim to understand it on the level of having ties to those who were victims of Japanese aggression. What I don’t understand is the attempt to rationalize that bombing more civilians would accomplish defense of a homeland or deradicalize Japan.

The best I can gather is it’s the control the US got over them after the end of the war—like it violently did to so many parts of the world in post-WWII—that ensured the failure of any attempts to deradicalize.

Mind you, I’m not saying that fighting back in a war is invalid. Far from it. But nuking two civilian cities (no matter what you want to say about the kind of people living in them) is a war crime. Let’s remember that this was not something carried out by liberation forces of the victims of Japan. It was something carried out by a stronger colonial/imperial force who has easily been far more brutal than Japan in its history. We’re not talking about a people struggling for liberation and trying to judge their actions after the fact when they’re under existential threat. We’re talking about a head of empire who had essentially already won and still did it anyway. The same empire that in today’s world has destroyed hospitals in Iran.

Why carry water for the kind of brutality an empire like that does? Because it’s convenient for revenge?