Atomic bombs were not the main issue.
The New York Review of Books Thu, Apr 9, 2026
“The prospect of widespread firebombing obsessed military planners. In 1944 US Air Force officers even consulted Canadian and British insurance adjusters who had worked in Tokyo at the time of the earthquake, including one who had assisted with the redesign of the city. Incendiary bombs, they calculated, “would destroy 70 per cent of the houses in the six major cities and would result in the estimated death of 560,000 persons.” Apocalyptic destruction of city after city, they believed, would break the will of the Japanese to continue the war.”