It doesn’t really matter if you only add up casualties and extrapolate what a prolonged conventional war would have caused. Conventional raids killed hundreds of thousands of people too and most of it happened in the last 5-6 months of the war. Single raids like the Tokyo firebombing caused close to or maybe above 100k casualties in one night. It’s not difficult to arrive at estimates in the millions for another year of conventional bombing.
Where the argument fails is that there is no way Japan wouldn’t have surrendered anyway with much of its industry destroyed, half of its urban areas destroyed, the blockades, the USSR entering the war, etc. The atomic bombs sped it up by a few weeks at most.
It doesn’t really matter if you only add up casualties and extrapolate what a prolonged conventional war would have caused. Conventional raids killed hundreds of thousands of people too and most of it happened in the last 5-6 months of the war. Single raids like the Tokyo firebombing caused close to or maybe above 100k casualties in one night. It’s not difficult to arrive at estimates in the millions for another year of conventional bombing.
Where the argument fails is that there is no way Japan wouldn’t have surrendered anyway with much of its industry destroyed, half of its urban areas destroyed, the blockades, the USSR entering the war, etc. The atomic bombs sped it up by a few weeks at most.