On July 26th and August 6th of 1945, two atom bombs----- Little boy and Fat man were thrown in the air above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two atom bombs became the only nuclear weapon applied to real battlefield. Thousands of Japanese citizens were killed at once and countless suffered from radius effect or further illnesses. Do we really need to throw those two atom bombs? Probably yes.
First, the US soldiers suffered a lot when they were going to conquer Iwo Jima and Okinawa. 4900 US Marine Soldiers were killed on the islands, 1900 missing and died of wounds, and 19,200 soldiers wounded from this battle.《Chen》 While Japanese solders price their death to the emperor as the most honorable thing they can do, US citizens, as well as the government, cannot tolerate such a big price. After using toxics, air strikes and flamethrowers, generals found that they cannot thing a way to beat those Japanese up without paying a huge cost. From an estimation of the US government, they cannot win the battle without sending 1,000,000 soldiers to death, which is a crazy number for all the US people.In this case, atom bombs became the most efficient way to end these battles.
Secondly, Japanese do “Kamikaze” a lot on Okinawa battlefield 《as well as other battlefields》： At one place, we sat together and hit the grenade on the ground, but it did not explode," she said last week of her flight with friends after Japanese soldiers told them to kill themselves rather than be taken captive. 《James Brooke》 It is never worth it to send soldiers to death with suicide bombers. On another hand, such dirty strategy must has made US soldier afraid of fighting those Kamikaze bombers. Which did harm to the courage of the US army.
Thirdly, even if the Japanese were almost defeated, they still had lots of armored vehicles as well as ships .Which means it would take more time for the US or USSR to defeat the Japanese thoroughly. While Japanese government treated the war as the most important thing of its country, the US never wants to be trapped in the swamp of war with Japan. Thus the 2 atom bombs are also signals, telling the Japanese that there’s no way for them to win this battle, the only choice is to surrender, or watch more citizens killed. In this case, the 2 atom bombs did a good job in shorten the procession of the war.
Last but not least, although Japan was an enemy of the US, the US never recognized USSR as an ally. As the Soviet red army beat up Japanese in northern China, the US has to consider whether the Russians would conquer some land from Japan or grab some resources like they did in China or not. Nobody want to see others stealing the prize of victory after a cruel and tiring war. And they did know that the USSR got almost the same military power like they do, owning thousands of IS series tanks and battle ships, they are even closer to Japan then the US military did. So the US government has to take the USSR into consider as a hiding threat, it’s also an alarm telling the USSR that “we’ve made this super broken big boss, don’t even try to engage with me”。 Which is a good choice from the perspective of present.
Although the atom bombs did well in shorten the time of the war, it also led to the following cold war, so even if it did well for the war, it started a new war. But it’s still a must-do work to throw those two bombs.