Why did the U.S. bomb Japan and not Germany if the Nazi regime was responsible for so many atrocities?
We don’t drop nukes because nations commit atrocities (although you should ask the Chinese about atrocities the Japanese committed before and during WWII), we drop nukes because it’s a strategy aimed at quickly and decisively ending a war that has no end in sight. The U.S. would have eventually conquered Japan, but many thousands of U.S. troops, not to mention hundreds of thousdans of Japanese troops and civilians, would have died in the bloody affair. The U.S. had the means to end the war without invading and used it. This wasn’t necessary in Germany, which had surrendered three months prior. You can debate whether this was a just and fair and ethical and sound military decision. You can also raise the question of whether the ethnic divide between the Japanese and most Americans made the decision to use nukes easier for Truman.
