[Fwd: The Bombs Of August - Howard Zinn]

[Grant Lee]

Zinn says " ... a planned U.S. invasion of Japan would have been necessary,
resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands.
Truman at one point used the figure "a half million lives," and Churchill "a
million lives," but these were figures pulled
out of the air to calm troubled consciences; even official projections for
the number of casualties in an invasion did not go beyond 46,000."

For once, Truman and Churchill were probably not exaggerating: that "46,000"
was the estimate of _Allied_ casualties in an invasion of the home islands.
According to the Okinawa Prefecture website, 200,000 people were killed in
the invasion of Okinawa Island alone.
http://www.pref.okinawa.jp/syakaihosho/I-e.html

The present population of Okinawa Island (~ 450 sq mi) is just over one
million. The US forces lost 10-15,000 killed --- this is not counting the
wounded on both sides.

I think the idea that the Japanese leadership was unanimously ready to
surrender is not borne out by the three day interval between the two bombs.

Another option, I guess, was a blockade and the effect of that on the
civilian population would have been terrible (e.g. Iraq between 1991 and
2001).