re: On this day 75 years ago....the city of Nagasaki was wiped off the face of the earth....

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That’s a mighty big range.

Crazy that has to happen and that the Japanese, despite confirmation that Hiroshima was indeed wiped out, still vowed to continue their war with a clearly superior enemy.

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Their intelligence at the time told them that we had 2 or 3 bombs, at the most, so they were willing to lose those cities and keep fighting on. This was TECHNICALLY correct. We did only have 2 or 3 bombs AT THE TIME, but we were online with plutonium production and were making it at the rate of a new core every 2 to 3 weeks. There were already bombing plans in place to deliver 8 weapons through the end of October 1945. With the realization that the bomb wasn't just a one and done sort of thing and was in actual ongoing production, Hirohito came to the conclusion that the Americans would never invade and would just put a blockade on and annihilate a city every couple of weeks until Japan surrendered or there were no Japanese cities left; he forced his government to capitulate and surrender in spite of howls from his military leaders.

By somewhere about the spring/early summer of 1945, there already were precious few Japanese cities left that were spared Curtis LeMay's firebombing campaign. By that point in the war, industry had moved into the suburbs and much of the Japanese war production had moved from being concentrated in large factories to being spread among small operations in homes and small businesses throughout the cities. LeMay realized that Japan was mostly built of paper and wood, so his response to the Japanese spreading their production throughout their cities was simply to methodically, systematically, and ruthlessly set their cities on fire, one by one, to stifle their war production. In Tokyo, it only took LeMay a day to kill 100,000 people and leave a million homeless. He couldn't destroy a city as fast as an atomic weapon, but he was still fast and he was unrelenting. Once his pathfinders were over the city, they'd come from different directions and firebomb a giant "X" on the city and that was it. The remaining hundreds of bombers didn't have to worry about finding the target and the city was doomed.

LeMay's superiors had to put him in his place and gave him a list of cities that were not to be firebombed. These cities enjoyed not facing LeMay's wrath. Unfortunately for them, the reason LeMay was forced to leave them alone was because he was rapidly running out of cities that he hadn't already firebombed. LeMay was REALLY good at organizing bombing campaigns. So good that by the time early August 1945 arrived, he'd have firebombed every major Japanese city if left to his own plans. However, the War Department wanted pristine cities to drop the first atomic bombs on so they could see just what it would do to an untouched city and so the entire world could witness the devastation. Further, nobody could claim that the might of the atomic bomb was a lie because some of the destruction was already there when the bomb was dropped. The War Department needed a thriving city one day and smoldering wreckage the next. So, they told LeMay to leave a short list of cities alone specifically so they would be hit by, and only by, an atomic bomb.

If you ever wonder why so many cities in Japan seem ultra-modern, thank Curtis LeMay. He burnt the old ones to the ground. LeMay himself said that had we failed to win the war, he believed he'd be executed for war crimes because of his strategies. War is hell.