The U.S. took so long to become involved because the people of the U.S. were overwhelmingly pacifists.
The US at the time were certainly not as bad as the Nazis or Japanese Imperialists, but pacifists? Bullshit. The US has never been pacifist. It is the ONLY nation in the history of the world to have used an atomic bomb on a civilian population.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (demonstrating to the Japanese the power of a new weapon)
Didn't have to be done twice and didn't have to be one on a large civilian populated area. If they wanted to show what they could do, they could have simply done the same to a remote military base.
And again, the US was not at risk from Japan and would never have been involved whatsoever if the US didn't interfere in Asia. It wasn't about the US defending itself. It was about the US pushing its global influence.
We could discuss around and around about your belief that the Japanese interference in Asia was far superior to the US's interference in Asia but having spent a considerable amount of time in Nanjing, China I pretty sure whose interference they would prefer if they were forced to choose.
In fact, I spent a large part of my working life in the former Asian co-prosperity sphere of Japanese interference in Asia and found relatively little love and fond memories for the Japanese brand of interference in Asia. Especially in the Philippines who suffered considerably from the US Marines in the early part of the 20th century, they seemed to be quite happy that the US kicked out the Japanese in 1945 and gave them their independence a year later.
This above is very glib and heavy-handed, of course. But these are valid points considering your equally glib argument that the US fought the Japanese in order to expand our influence in Asia. The US considered an attack on Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, etc. to be the same as an attack on the US mainland.
Yes, we probably didn't have to drop the second bomb on the Japanese. It is even possible that we didn't have to bomb the Japanese at all. The Soviets had just invaded and routed the million man Japanese army in Manchuria inflicting more casualties on the Japanese than they suffered in the entire Pacific war against the US.
But this is all hindsight. The US had just invaded Okinawa, the first of the Japanese home islands to be invaded, and had seen how fanatical not only the Japanese army and navy had fought but the US saw the civilians join in the fight some times literally with pitchforks. Translating this experience to a full invasion of the rest of the home islands would not only result in more casualties than the US had already suffered in the Pacific war to that point but would also result in more Japanese civilian deaths than had occurred to that point in the war.
Of the nearly 200,000 men of the army, navy, and marines who invaded the island 25% were casualties with 12,500 deaths. Of the 130,000 Japanese army and marines defending the island, a horrific 110,000 were killed. The estimates of civilians killed ranged from 40,000 to 150,000 of the 450,000 pre-invasion population, largely made up of women, children, and men too old to be in the military. 21 of the more than 1300 ships in the invasion naval forces were sunk and an additional 66 damaged by the nearly 200 kamikazes Japan put up. The navy lost 5,000 killed, of the total 12,500 quoted above, and an additional 4,600 wounded.
Numbers from the first google search that came up, the history learning site, my google has a bias for the UK because I am currently on a VPN projecting me into the UK.
So it is not only possible but probable that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan saved civilian lives as well as American lives. I admit that I am a little biased on this point, my father and two uncles were training to be in the invasion of the Japanese home islands.
