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Notes -
I would argue that the IRBO only really emerged during the cold war.
Contrary to common belief, nukes are not the "I win" button. Japan's war had gone very badly and they were facing an invasion, getting nuked was simply the last straw. "The killed 100k Russians when they nuked Leningrad, better make peace before they kill another 100k of my poor countrymen" would not have persuaded Stalin out of all people.
If the US could have defeated the USSR by prolonging WW2 for a year or so, I think they would have done so, not for the right of self-determination of anyone but because any fool could see that the USSR would become their rival superpower. But they had just spent a lot of lives and productivity on winning a big war. Telling the Americans "change of plans, you already freed France from the Nazis, no you get to free Poland from the Soviets" would not have been popular, especially if you consider that plenty of intellectuals were leaning communist.
The Atlantic Charter, signed 1941, called for:
(It called for several things that didn't happen, actually, but if we're looking for the emergence of the principle, I think this counts.)
Now, the USSR didn't sign it (not that version, anyway), but America did (before actually entering the war, even). Most of the involved parties decided they didn't really mean it within the next few years (it didn't go over terribly well in Britain's colonies, for one), but that kind of makes my point that such promises were hard to take seriously. The UN Charter, 1945, expressed the same sentiment, but of course was careful to grandfather in the allies' recent conquests, and in fact would compel the signatories to condemn e.g. Finland trying to take back the territory the USSR stole in the unprovoked Winter War.
This is true, especially for fission bombs, especially given the very tight production bottlenecks they had at the time. It would still have been a huge advantage -- less so for bombing cities than for discouraging any concentration of force, I would think. MacArthur was general then, too. It'd have certainly been expensive in blood and treasure, but it's hard to imagine it's a fight the US actually loses, provided they had the will to see it through. It certainly didn't get any cheaper for the next 40 years.
(The USSR did ultimately dissolve without a fight, but not before doing an enormous amount of damage around the world. Their efforts to undermine Western dominance were quite successful in tying anti-imperialism to socialism in the public imaginations of much of Africa and South America, arguably immiserating those nations to this day and for who knows how long to come. You could fairly blame that on the Western Imperialism too, but the British and French colonial empires would have dissolved regardless; there's no USSR making Britain pay Mauritius a fortune to rent islands Mauritius never actually occupied today.)
My point is not that it would have been easy or even smart (though I not-very-confidently believe it would have been), just that it casts a lot of doubt as to just how committed the US (or anyone else) really was to the principle.
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