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Why the second bomb?



Short post today.
Visits from supposedly anti-war Secretary John Kerry, and President Barack Obama to the Hiroshima memorial brought up a question I've entertained in my mind on different occasions over the years--one that others had posed for me: it's easy to understand that an overwhelming show of extreme superiority was necessary to prevent Emperor Hirohito from forcing his citizens to fight to the last even in a losing war, but why Nagasaki?  Why the second bomb?  Why did the US have to kill dozens of thousands of civilians AGAIN?
Beyond the explanation that cultural ideals of honor under which the society was operating at the time dictated that a warrior not submit even after the first devastatingly superior blow, I'm at a loss to understand why the Emperor didn't capitulate immediately.  Maybe it's even simpler than that: he was a tyrant dictator and was quite comfortable asking his citizens to commit suicide for him.  After all that is where we get the term kamikaze from.
Whatever the Emperor's thought process was, what's important to remember is the full context of the American decision.  The most concise and well argued summary I've ever come across comes from the Hoover Institute's Victor Davis Hansen.  It's well worth the read.  The long and the short of it is this: the victims didn't deserve to die, and didn't deserve to die the way they did, and those lives lost deserve to be remembered--and let's also celebrate the possibly hundreds of millions they saved, as they were needlessly sacrificed to the stubborn evil of a brutal dictator in denial of both his ignominy and his impotency.  America made a tough call, but ultimately the right one.  Lest we forget...

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