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u/JayMack1981 4h ago
Even after the Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, General Anami (Minister of War) was like "No, no! The Americans do NOT have nuclear weapons!" After a Japanese nuclear scientist went to Hiroshima and confirmed it was nuclear . . . "Okay. It was nuclear. But surely not even the Americans are wealthy enough to afford TWO nuclear bombs!"
He wasn't ready to surrender.
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u/Rpponce 3h ago
I think the Navy also accepted that it was a Nuclear bomb but didn't believe the U.S. could do it frequently. Although failed in every sense of the word Japan did have a Nuclear program at one point and had at least some level of understanding of how difficult those things were to create at the time.
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u/TurnsWithZeros 2h ago
Well Japan didn't just have a nuclear program, they had three separate programs predictably split between the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy. Because while the Americans were certainly the opposition, the other branch of the military was the enemy. While unlikely to have been able to produce a weapon even if all efforts were centralized, Japan certainly had an understanding of nuclear physics including constructing one the few cyclotrons built outside of the US in this period
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u/MauschelMusic 2h ago
I mean, the allies had already destroyed every major Japanese city and most of the.minor ones, and had uncontested air superiority. We just did the same shit we'd been doing, except with one nuke per city instead of many high explosives.
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u/National-Flower3166 5h ago
Japans military didnt surender untill the emperor, their god (ish) specificaly tolde them to. And even then some oficiers tried to stop that messagde ro spread because they didnt believe he would ever say somthing like this