> It references many books, with a number of different viewpoints and arguments.
It references Walker and Alperovitz. I'll be sure to add Alperovitz to my reading list.
> You've read a single book with a single viewpoint.
I said I have read Walker. I have not said I've read only Walker.
> There's a breadth of informed opinion on the matter; the article you haven't read outlines a number of them.
By "number of" do you mean "two": Walker and the "consensus" / "traditional" view, and Alperovitz and the (so-called) "revisionist" view. (Kuznick is mentioned in passing at the very end.)
Walker is well aware of the ambiguity of the situation; from an interview:
> One argument has been made by the scholar Richard Frank, and I find it wonderfully convincing. Richard makes the argument – going back to the atomic bomb versus the Soviet invasion – he says that the bomb was essential to convince Hirohito to surrender. But that it was the Soviet invasion that convinced the generals of all those armies in China and other parts of East Asia to surrender. Because there was genuine concern, both among American officials and Japanese officials, that the emperor’s order to surrender would not be obeyed by generals in East Asia, who had huge armies and who could’ve fought on for a very long time at enormous cost to everybody. Richard makes the argument that once the Soviets came in, then the generals out in the field, who were outraged by the idea of surrendering, knew they couldn’t defeat the Soviets. So they went along with it. It’s a very interesting argument that I think makes a very sensible separation of what the impact of the bomb was and the impact of the Soviet invasion.
> Walker: […] Those are the positions. And as I, and a lot of others, argue – I’m certainly not alone – they’re both seriously flawed. The traditional view because Truman did not face a stark choice between the bomb and an invasion. The invasion was not going to begin until on or around November 1, and a lot of could’ve happened between August and November of 1945. Also the view that if an invasion had been necessary, it would’ve cost hundreds of thousands of lives: there’s simply no contemporaneous evidence that supports that argument. It was made after the war as a means to justify the use of the bomb against a really small number of critics, who in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, were saying that perhaps the bomb wasn’t necessary. It’s also beyond question that the invasion was not inevitable. I mean, the idea that Truman had to use the bomb because if he didn’t the only other option was an invasion is simply wrong. So, the traditional view in its pure form, that Truman used the bomb to avoid an invasion, simply doesn’t hold up.
> Kelly: In the view of the revisionists.
> Walker: No, in the view of those of us who are somewhere in between. What I argue is that Truman used the bomb for the reasons he said he did, to end the war as quickly as possible. No one in a position of authority or knowledge, and certainly not his chief and military advisors, told him in the summer of 1945 that if you don’t use the bomb, an invasion is inevitable and it’s going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Estimates for lives lost that were projected by military experts in the summer of 1945 were far less than that, and the numbers are far from hard evidence. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that he was ever told that hundreds of thousands of lives would be the cost of an invasion of Japan. That was something that came about later.
> My argument is that Truman didn’t have to be told that an invasion would cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He knew it was going to cost a lot of lives, tens of thousands, if an invasion was necessary. He also knew that even without an invasion, the war was still going on. Okinawa had been defeated in late June of 1945, so we had one month when there weren’t any major battlefronts between the end of the Battle of Okinawa and the end of the war, which is July 1945.
> In that month, about 775 American soldiers and Marines were killed in combat. About another 2,300 or 2,400 died from other causes, disease, wounds, accidents, whatever. So, you had 3,000 soldiers and Marines who were killed in the month of July of 1945 without any major battlefronts.
> You also had sailors being killed. The sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis occurred July 28 [misspoke: July 30], 1945, just a horrific event, in which a Japanese submarine attacked and sank the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Of the 1100 [misspoke: 1200] crewmembers, 880 died, either from the explosion of the ship or were stranded in water for a very long time and either died from exposure or from sharks. Just a horrific story.
> As long as the war was going on, that was going to happen, and that’s what Truman and his advisors were concerned about. No one had to tell them that the alternative to using the bomb was saving far fewer lives. That number of 3,200 or 3,300 who died in July, that’s just soldiers and Marines, so you have sailors on top of that. That was plenty of reason to use the bomb if it had a chance to end the war as quickly as possible.
It references many books, with a number of different viewpoints and arguments.
You've read a single book with a single viewpoint.
> what makes you think they'd surrender with zero bombs dropped?
There's a breadth of informed opinion on the matter; the article you haven't read outlines a number of them.
> And I'm aware of the author of the article, Wellerstein
Cool. But not read much of his work covering the breadth of opinion on the use of the atomic bomb.
> He's also the creator of the Nukemap website
I know, he based that on contributions from various geophysicists and physicists who have spoken to him IRL.