A VICTORY ONE CAN LIVE WITH? Sixty years ago, U.S. aviators delivered a second atomic bomb to Japan, and Soviet forces began invading Sakhalin Island (which to this day has Japanese style railroad equipment lettered for the Russian railroads.) That second bomb stimulates much more debate than the first. Jeff Jacoby makes the "necessary evil" argument.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hideous as they were, shortened the war that Japan had begun and saved an immensity of lives. Far from considering itself essentially defeated, the Japanese military was preparing for an Allied assault with a massive buildup in the south. It was only the shock of the atomic blasts that enabled Japanese leaders who wanted to stop the fighting to successfully press for a surrender.

''We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war," Kido Koichi, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, later recalled. Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief Cabinet secretary, called the bomb ''a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war." That is still the right way to see it. President Truman's decision to use the new weapons stopped a war that would otherwise have raged savagely on, and made possible the transformation of Japan from vicious aggressor to peaceful democracy. Six decades after August 1945, it is clear: The bomb made the world a better place.

Greg at Cliopatria offers the "unnecessary evil" argument.

To me, the United States committed a far greater crime in the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki than on Hiroshima. Whatever one’s opinion of the bombing of Hiroshima, there are at least various arguments that have been raised in support: the uncertainty that the bomb would work, the need to give Japan a shock, the need to avert an invasion that would be costly in lives, etc. Yet all of these arguments fall down in judging the Nagasaki bombing. Consider the situation: a bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima three days previously, to devastating effect. The United States had thereby proven that it had the capacity to make and deliver such weapons. (It is not clear how much their effects in the way of radiation were understood at the time by American military or political leaders). Furthermore, the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan on August 8th. There was no reason that the United States could not have waited to determine the Japanese reaction to these events, or to threaten further action, before dropping another bomb.

David at Liberty and Power extends.

I have a question: why couldn’t Truman have ended the war and saved even more lives by pursuing the third alternative of a conditional rather than an unconditional surrender?

Lots of hypotheses here; I lack the expertise to sort them all out. Mr Jacoby's column alludes to the conflict between the war faction and the peace faction within the Japanese government. Some of the former contended that Hiroshima was a "trick," or if genuine, a one-off. (I recall reading someone's observation that an offshore demonstration rather than busting up a city would have had no effect on the true believers in the trick hypothesis.) The Cliopatria post brings up a second hypothesis, in which the entry of the Soviet Union into the war on the Allied side ended the Soviet role as a neutral broker; apparently some members of the Japanese government had been working with the Soviet Union to communicate peace offers short of unconditional surrender to the Allies. The Leyte Gulf campaign itself hinted at a third possibility to obtain surrender without further bombing. U.S. planners were divided between closing the Japanese sea lanes by occupying Formosa (at that time Japanese; their railroads are also in the Japanese style) and establishing bases on China's east coast, or liberating the Philippines. Either action has the effect of isolating Japan from its Southern Resource Area; in the words of Robert E. Lee, it then becomes a siege, and it is only a matter of time. (These comments at Cliopatria consider further options.) But would world opinion be more, or less, critical, of a surrender obtained by starving, rather than bombing, a population into helplessness?