Introduction

On August 6–9, 1945 two bombs were dropped on two cities of Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Six days after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan surrendered to the Allies and signed the Instrument of Surrender on the second of September, officially ending World War II in 1945.  Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a necessary catastrophe to end further destruction, therefore was a justified action.  The invasion of Japan would have cost more lives for the Allies and the Japanese.  To the Japanese, the Emperor was considered a god on earth.  He praised civilians for cooperating with the Japanese army by committing suicide if they were ever captured by the United States.  The citizens, like the army refused to surrender and even turned suicide into a strategy.  The Japanese used young men to fly a plane filled with explosives and would make a deliberate suicidal crash on their designated target; this action was known as kamikaze.  Some of the people who worked on building the bomb said they made it out of fear, that the bomb was an instrument of genocide, yet they decided to make it anyways because they realized that it would be the weapon that would end the war.