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Originally Posted by cyde01
that's what they all say, more people would have died. regardless, it is an atrocity. hiroshima was a purely civilian target. 200,000 people died a horrible, painful death and a lot of them were women and children. nagasaki was the same with another 70,000.
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150,000 civilians died in the invasion of Okinawa out of a population of ~500,000. That's 30%, much of which was mass suicide and infanticide encouraged/caused by Japanese Army propaganda that the American barbarians were going to rape and murder all the women and children. The same percentage applied to the overall population of Japan would mean 22,000,000 civilians dead. Then there's the fact that Japanese civilians were being conscripted into "volunteer" militias to defend against invasion with 28,000,000 "combat capable" men and women. Of course, Japan couldn't produce that many guns, so most were armed with bamboo spears.
So yeah, more people would have died, a lot more.