Quote Originally Posted by ermitonto
Perhaps you're right. I am a bit of a pedant, though. I do a lot of proofreading and I'm a linguistics student so grammar and spelling errors are one of my pet peeves.

But back to the topic at hand, I wonder why instead it could not have been arranged to drop a bomb over some thinly populated Japanese-controlled island somewhere. They could measure the blast radius, we could say "just think about what this could do to your cities", I'm sure they could have put two and two together and would at least have had a chance at considering surrender to our nuclear weapons without the excessive loss of life that unfortunately occurred.
You had a whole race of people that believed that it was honorable to die for the Emperor. They had to essentially break they're back.