this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
316 points (97.0% liked)

World News

58452 readers
1317 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world

Ask Historians !askhistorians@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] setsubyou@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

It doesn’t really matter if you only add up casualties and extrapolate what a prolonged conventional war would have caused. Conventional raids killed hundreds of thousands of people too and most of it happened in the last 5-6 months of the war. Single raids like the Tokyo firebombing caused close to or maybe above 100k casualties in one night. It’s not difficult to arrive at estimates in the millions for another year of conventional bombing.

Where the argument fails is that there is no way Japan wouldn’t have surrendered anyway with much of its industry destroyed, half of its urban areas destroyed, the blockades, the USSR entering the war, etc. The atomic bombs sped it up by a few weeks at most.