5 million dead and 25 cities gassed.

[drussell41]

Over the years we have been exposed to the revisionist history of how mean and terrible the atomic bombing of Japan was to end the war.

Well there were how many killed in the dropping of the two nuclear devices ? Not as many people died as you might suspect by dropping the first bomb (78,000 initially although many others would die from radiation poisoning; I have seen numbers as high as 140,000) and as far as Nagasaki the initial death toll was around 40,000 due to the city being in mountainous terrain.. Yes more died from radiation poisoning but America lost more dead and wounded taking Okinawa (50,000

The Army made estimates that if these bombs had not been dropped, Japan might have ended up totally depopulated because they were going with a total war strategy, and the Allies could have lost millions of troops. It was estimated that the beach landings would have been faced with 2:1 odds, if not worse. They were training schookids to use spears, for crying out loud.

It's estimated that the war would not have ended until 1948, at the earliest. Russia would have invaded the home islands; we could have had all the problems with East Germany in Japan, let alone Japan dealing with their "Rapists R Us" MO (Germany). Russia might have taken all of Korea. Dropping those bombs was a horrible but necessary decision.