quote:
More than 200,000 dead and thousands more wounded. Vast majority are civilians. We wouldn’t do this today.
I’m a proud American, but I don’t think dropping the bombs was morally justified.

Are you serious?

The threat of nuclear war has loomed over our heads since the Russians got the bomb in 1949. If the chips were down, we most certainly would do that today.

War itself is an immoral act. And it's easy to say almost 80 years later that we weren't justified bombing civilians. However, you or I weren't alive back then. Think of what the average American was going through. The country had been at war for almost four years. Over 400,000 American servicemen had been killed and more than 70 million had been killed worldwide since Germany invaded Poland back in 1939. Numbers like that are absolutely incomprehensible to the human mind. We see those figures and just think statistics but for those living in 1945 they were more than just statistic, they were real because they were living through it.

What do you do when you are faced with such staggering figures in real time after so many years of war? You do your best to end the war as quick and as painless as possible. The United States in July 1945 had three separate options.

1. Invade the home islands
2. Blockade the home islands
3. Drop the bomb on the home islands

Each option would mean dead civilians. An invasion of the home islands would have been the worst case scenario for Japan's civilian population as they were being mobilized to fight invading Allied servicemen. Blockading the home islands meant potential starvation for tens of thousands of Japanese civilians who were already suffering from malnutrition. That leaves the third and final option, drop the bomb and hope the psychological damage is such that the Japanese agree to surrender.

We chose option three. We can argue the morality of laying waste to an entire city filled with civilians, but in that debate we must remember that the civilian populations for ALL major warring parties had been mobilized to build weapons of war in factories in every major city in the world. These civilians were creating the weapons that would eventually kill military personnel on the battlefield. If you were an American mother of boys of fighting age in 1945, would you have had any sympathy for the Japanese citizenry when you know they were creating weapons in their factories to kill their sons? I think not.