No atom bomb

If the atom bomb could never and would never be invented, how would this have affected the end of the pacific war and more importantly, the cold war?

For starters, there wouldn't have been a cold war.

It woulda been WW2b: Allies vs. Commies, within a week of the end of WWII.

The war would have lasted years longer and millions of Japanese would have died in the bomb and blockade strategy the US would have adopted. The Navy would never have supported an invasion, as Admirals King and Nimitz made clear. How many American and Allied casulties are unknowable.

> how would this have affected the end of the pacific war

Not that much, desu. Japan was on its last legs, and what was keeping them from surrendering was internal uselessness as much as anything else. If nothing else, starvation would bring them down.

>the cold war?

While I"m sure you'll hear the line that nukes kept the peace, that's probably not really true. Modern industrialized states are fully capable of enormous devastation without resorting to atomic weapons, by good old fashioned ground troops and occupation.

What kept the peace was deterrence: The West had rather significant advantages in population and industrial levels, but weren't willing to commit to the amount of blood and treasure it would take to subdue the Soviets. Without nuclear weapons, this will be less, but it will still be enormously huge, and not likely that Washington and friends will want to go there.

The most immediate impact is that the NATO strategy of allowing nuclear deterrence of its own to counter conventional Soviet buildups wouldn't exist: and you'd see a much heavier level of militarization in Europe and in America deploying to Europe. Probably would have had peacetime drafts at least until the 70s all around, and millions of troops sitting around in Germany waiting to see if the balloon goes up.

It's already been revealed that Japan surrendered due to Russia joining the war and not the nukes. Firebombing was already as devastating as dropping a nuke.

Japs would have surrendered soon regardless. Maybe not as soon but soon nevertheless. They knew the war was over at this point and once the Soviets invaded, they where looking for a deal.

The cold war would defiantly kicked off hot. With no big destructive deterrent, there would be no real reason not to. This Russians had nothing to lose at this point and both sides where highly mobilised.

>This Russians had nothing to lose at this point

What? They had half the world to lose...

Operation downfall would have been put into effect in that case, a joint invasion of Japan from the North and South by the US and USSR would've overwhelmed Japan, who at the very best case scenario could keep resisting until 1947.

The post-war map would look pretty similar, save for the Soviets most likely receiving all of Korea and Hokkaido as well as be in a better position to directly prop up Mao's China.

When it came down to it, Downfall would have achieved the same result the cost of 2-2.5 million more deaths.

by the time 1945 came around, the world was just absolutely sick and tired of war and killing, there's no realistic scenario where a sensible world leader would initiate another global war immediately after the deaths of 60 million people in a continent that's by all means completely destroyed.

Except Japan had already attempted to surrender twice, before the last bomb fell. They'd already lost nearly all their ground forces to Russia in China, and woulda been fighting with civilians and women - which was their final plan, if they could not get the US to finally accept a surrender.

...and I doubt it woulda been looked upon as another war, so much as a continuation of World War 2. The end of war status involved a whole lotta negotiation with Russia, in which they didn't even get what they wanted in the end - had nukes not been a factor in negotiations, they never would had agreed to the terms that ended that world war.

>Except Japan had already attempted to surrender twice, before the last bomb fell
No, they didn't. They wanted a conditional peace. They weren't surrendering. There's a huge distinction.

>Except Japan had already attempted to surrender twice

This is something that trips people up.

In the Japanese system of government, a surrender had to be unanimously agreed to by all members of the cabinet, which constitutionally had to include a representative from the army.

The Army didn't want surrender

The peace faction in Japan, which included the emperor and a lot of the diplomatic corps, spent a lot of time floating peace proposals that their government had no way of accepting.

The war-ending effect of the nukes wasn't the sheer devastation they wrought. It was the sheer devastation wrought /from just two bombs/. The Japanese understood fire. They understood hundreds of bombs raining from the sky to reduce their cities to ash. The nukes represented a new force never seen and barely comprehensible. The Japanese army was counting on the idea of the allies fighting conventionally, on some level. But suddenly ending all of Japan seemed so trivially easy for the Americans that further resistance was obviously pointless.

tl;dr The atom bombs were shock and awe, plain and simple. But they did their job.

The atom bomb made total war illogical. The power of an entire mobilzed and ideologically possesed nation in the single solitary splice of an atom.

>The war-ending effect of the nukes wasn't the sheer devastation they wrought. It was the sheer devastation wrought /from just two bombs/. The Japanese understood fire. They understood hundreds of bombs raining from the sky to reduce their cities to ash. The nukes represented a new force never seen and barely comprehensible.

Wrong. All wrong.

Japan had their own nuclear program. They were well aware of the possibility of a 'nuclear bomb'. You're regurgitating a postwar narrative that portrays the bomb as this 'horrific new superweapon nobody could account for' which Japan readily accepted because it paints them as victims and not the brutal aggressors they had been throughout the conflict.

>It's already been revealed that Japan surrendered due to Russia joining the war and not the nukes
That theory is accepted by two camps: Marxist historians and vatniks. Judging by where we are I'm guessing you're the former.

I wonder what the historical framework would be had one of the two atom bombs been dropped on Germany as originally intended. I think it'd be seen differently and without the same justification for dropping on Japan.

The perception of Dresden is certainly different than Tokyo, and Dresden was just a regular RAF incendiary mission, the same scale and munitions that had been dropped on Berlin numerous times and Dresden only once. That a conflagration occurred was mere happenstance.

>Japan had their own nuclear program

Yeah, so did Nazi Germany. Both concluded that an atomic weapon was feasible in theory, but in practice required an absurd amount of money, time, and resources to get off the ground.

>The formation of the Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics, chaired by Nishina, that met ten times between July 1942 and March 1943.
>It concluded in a report that while an atomic bomb was, in principle, feasible, "it would probably be difficult even for the United States to realize the application of atomic power during the war".

The sheer shock of realizing the US had done the absurd sent more of a message than our firebombing. We had spent more than $2 billion 1940's dollars on two bombs, each able to destroy most of their targets. We promised more on the way, and seemed capable of doing it too.

Dahl, Per F. (1999). Heavy water and the wartime race for nuclear energy. CRC Press. pp. 279–285. ISBN 0-7503-0633-5.

>pacific war

Invading Japan would be costly, and the Soviets are rapidly gaining ground, so I suppose the Allies would scratch the unconditional surrender, and negotiate.

>cold war

Europe is fucked, but America might be safe.

The only thing I'd like to add was the possibility of more chemical weapons to fill the deterrence gap. Chemical weapons were deployed in the Cold War as area denial weapons, mostly targeted at air fields.

However, in their role as a counter-value strategic weapon we might have seen the same race for accurate delivery systems for chemical or biological agents as we did for nuclear weapons.

After all, through the cold war the Warsaw Pact maintained a much larger material and manpower advantage over NATO that could only be matched either via much larger forward staging and a Europe First And Only strategy, or with finding an asymmetric advantage in other areas.

While NATO did eventually reach an asymmetric advantage via better C3 and advanced technologies, no nuclear weapons would have not changed the calculus of numbers.

In short, we gobbled up German rocket scientists. We would also do the same for Japanese bio weapons engineers.

Everyone, get a load of this retard.

The atom bomb is the greatest invention ever. Great powers can't fight eachother anymore without killing everybody.

Every night before bed you should thank oppenheimer for keeping you safe

>Great powers can't fight eachother anymore without killing everybody
Fallout from modern nuclear devices is so negligible you could airburst every nuke on the planet simultaneously and raise the background radiation by that of a days sunlight.

That's just Western and Central Europe along with Eastern Front that was halted in May, the Soviets pushed their East and declared war on Japan and rushed a land grab that continued months after VP day. Stalin was happy to continue fighting in any theater, even making peace arrangements difficult in Europe, if it meant he could gain more land and a larger sphere of influence.

> We had spent more than $2 billion 1940's dollars on two bombs, each able to destroy most of their targets.

Which didn't change the relevant calculus in the minds of the members of the Japanese high council. The destruction of cities was not a pressing concern for Japanese leaders. American bombing campaigns were already running out of targets and resorted to bombing "cities" of less than 50,000 people. Whether these targets were incinerated by fire or annihilated by nukes made no difference. What DID make a difference was there was little to hope from holding out for a conditional surrender when all their territorial holdings were in the process of being overrun by the soviets. The entry of the soviets also meant that their hopes of playing one side against the other to secure a favorable peace were dashed.

>people are still pushing the vatnik revisionist bullshit
How does it feel to not be taken seriously by even the Japs?

Modern nuclear devices are also so powerful that they don't need fallout to kill everybody.

The bomb ending the war is a convenient narrative that was spun after the war was over.

Japanese leaders even declined to meet after they got news of the first bombing because they thought it wasn't important enough. However when they got news of the Soviet declaration of war they met IMMEDIATELY.