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adam_strandberg comments on A brief history of ethically concerned scientists - Less Wrong
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Even a few years of delay can make a big difference if you are in the middle of a major war. If Galston hadn't published his results and they weren't found until a decade or two later, the US probably wouldn't have used Agent Orange in Vietnam. Similarly with chlorine gas in WWI, atomic bombs in WWII, etc. Granted, delaying the invention doesn't necessarily make the overall outcome better. If the atomic bomb wasn't invented until the 1950s and we didn't have the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then the US or USSR would probably have been more likely to use them against each other.
For that matter, if we didn't use the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then we would have gone ahead with the land invasion, resulting in far more fatalities.
When wars are fought until a decisive victory, a huge technological edge may serve to decrease the death toll, as the side at a disadvantage will be more easily persuaded to give up.
This is commonly taught in US schools, but you should be aware that the claim has some serious flaws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Militarily_unnecessary
Gwern already linked to the same page previously. I've updated on the information, however, in my time at school I also did a research project on the atom bombing, and the sources I read for the project (which are not online, at least as far as I know,) cited Japanese military officials who were of the opinion that their country would have continued to resist, even to the point of a land invasion, and that the bombings were instrumental in changing that.
There are certainly good reasons to suspect that Japan might have surrendered soon under the same terms even without the dropping of the bombs, but it's also not as if there is a dearth of evidence suggesting that the bombings were a significant factor.
You know this interpretation is massively debated and criticized due to the Russian declaration of war and internal Japanese deliberations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Militarily_unnecessary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Surrender_of_Japan_and_subsequent_occupation
It's true that Japan was already willing to surrender, and perhaps this should have been a sufficient goal for the U.S. forces, but there was still a great degree of resistance to the prospect of unconditional surrender. For better or for worse, the U.S. was unsatisfied with the terms of surrender the Japanese were willing to accept prior to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, and were planning to pursue further measures until they achieved unconditional surrender.
Even if America did not resort to land invasion, months more of firebombing would most likely have resulted in a greater number of fatalities than the use of the atom bombs.
The terms are irrelevant, because the US did not get an unconditional surrender in your all-embracing sense. It got a capitulation with the understanding that the Emperor was not threatened (which was indeed subsequently the case), which makes sense once you understand that the 'unconditional surrender' in the Potsdam Declaration was only about the military forces:
The question is why the Japanese government abandoned its previous insistence on a general admission of defeat with 4 conditions and settled for just 1 condition which was acceptable to the US since it was not a military condition. And the reason for the dropping seems to have in large part been the sudden shock of negotiations with Russia failing and it dropping neutrality and starting its invasion. Even despite its almost immediate surrender to the US, Japan still lost Sakhalin.
(I'd note that we might expect claims about the necessity of the bombings to be overblown for at least 2 reasons: first and most obviously, it is important so as to justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in those bombings and other ongoing campaigns despite US government awareness of Japan's ongoing surrender overtures and that Russia would switch its attention to the Japanese front soon with what were probably at the time predictable consequences, and secondly, it is a useful claim in minimizing credit for the Russian contribution to WWII, a phenomenon already acknowledged about most US treatments of the European theater's eastern front.)
That may indeed be the case.
Huh. I had never thought about that from that angle.