Replying to a message of Jeff Shultz to Geo.:

 JS> From: Jeff Shultz 

 JS> Except the decision to drop the nukes in '45 wasn't necessarily evil.
 JS> It was merely considered a necessary extension of the current "hit
 JS> 'em with everything we've got" warplan.

 JS> It worked too. If anything could be considered evil, it would have
 JS> been the going ahead with Operation Olympic instead of just sitting
 JS> back and letting the Navy starve them out.

That wasn't necessary.  In point of fact, the Japanese government had told
their ambassador in Moscow (Japan and Russia were not at war, and in fact
shipping between the U.S. west coast and Vladivostok went unmolested
throughout the war despite Japanese ownership of the Kurile islands) to
contact the allies in order to open negotiations to end the war.  This
occurred *before* the nukes were dropped.
Our people intercepted the diplomatic messages, but the traffic was not
decrypted and translated until about nine *months* after the fighting ended
(due to the huge backlog of intercepted traffic and the relatively low
priority accorded diplomatic traffic).  See David Kahn's "The
Codebreakers".

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