History's eddies

 Eighty years ago today the United States ushered in the Atomic Age, a phrase that might sound celebratory but hardly is intended to be. Atomic-wise, after all, a lot of stuff has happened since we incinerated Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, and very little of it's been good.

It does, however, give the Blob an excuse to go Full History Nerd on y'all. Those with no stomach for such outbursts are hereby excused, per usual.

That first atomic bomb killed an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Japanese outright, with 90,000 to 166,000 dead from radiation poisoning by the end of 1945. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second A-bomb on Nagasaki, adding another estimated 39,000 to the immediate death toll and 70,000 by the end of the year.

This of course doesn't include the untold thousands who died from radiation-related cancers in the decades after. It does, however, fuel the continuing debate over whether the atomic bomb saved more lives than it ended by (at least allegedly) forcing Japan to sue for peace.

The Blob's position is the debate likely will go on until judgment trump. And I take that position because history's eddies are unfathomable even to the most elevated human minds, for the simple reason that what didn't happen, and what it would have changed, is forever unknowable. We can only forever guess, and we'd likely be wrong.

What didn't happen in this case, of course, is Harry Truman saying, "Hell, no, we're not gonna drop that thing." What didn't happen is the more fanatical elements of the Japanese regime successfully pulling off a coup and taking Japan into a final apocalypse that would have killed millions who wouldn't have otherwise died.

And who therefore didn't otherwise die.

Now, was this solely because of the 70,000 to 80,000 who died in Hiroshima on August 6, and the 39,000 who died three days later? Would the lives of  hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, and millions of Japanese, have ended in an invasion of the home islands had those 119,000 or so lives not ended on August 6 and August 9?

Impossible to know, again. Those historical eddies are filled with contorted oxbows and odd meanderings, and they are shaped by everything that happens or doesn't happen, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.

And so it could well be that obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ushering in a time when mankind at last was capable of completely destroying itself, was the coup de grace. Or maybe it was the Soviets' invasion of Manchuria -- which began on the very day Nagasaki was irradiated, and decimated the last fully intact Japanese army.

Or maybe it was both.

But would either alone have been enough to drive Japan to the table, especially for the hard-liners?

History's eddies, forever answering questions with more questions.