re: For people who don't like the fact we nuked Japan

I grew up 45 minutes from Hanford, Washington. It was where they built the bomb. My high school played them in sports. Their high school was the Richland Bombers.(Still is last I checked) The kids that went there felt their parents that worked there during WWII saved the world. They were right, they did. Their basketball uniforms had mushroom cloud on the front. Their letterman jackets had a mushroom cloud on the back with the words "Proud of the Cloud" above it. The bombs at H and N ended the war. You can argue about how many lives would have been lost in an invasion (on both sides) all you want, but the fact is those bombs saved American lives, and that is the salient point. They started the war, we ended it. You start a war do not expect any compassion until your unconditional surrender. That being said, I was born in Japan, lived in Japan, and have Japanese friends. WWII was a tragic event in our relationship, but fortunately we worked hard to heal those wounds. Don't try to rewrite history.

If you are President Truman meeting mother’s that lost sons in the invasion of Japan how do you explain to them that we had these bombs that could have ended the war and saved their sons lives but chose not to use them?

You can’t and call yourself President. You would have betrayed a trust.

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It's sickening that all these anti-nukes are speaking from their ivory towers, isolated from the realities of the world as it existed in 1945.

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This is a tactic from the left. They want to judge historical events and people based on what the world looks like in 2021. This is how they're attempting to dehumanize the Founding Fathers.

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The traditional Christian moral teaching that runs from St. Augustine through St. Thomas and on into the modern period explicitly condemns doing evil (e.g., killing innocent non-combatants) because some kind of utilitarian calculus says the net result is good.

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St. Augustine and St. Thomas lived in a time where civilians weren't part of the battle space. By the 19th century, wars began to be won in the factories of cities just as much as on the battlefields of Europe and North America. The civilian populace *became* part of the war effort. In an industrialized world, where the weapons of war are being fed by the fires of industry, do civilians not become enemy combatants since they are making the tools that then go on to kill soldiers on the battlefields?

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Perhaps some civilians. The nuclear bombs, and other bombing of cities, also killed 5 year olds, 2 year olds and babies in the womb. It's morally indefensible unless you hold the position that no act is morally right or wrong in itself, but is only made right or wrong by the net consequences from the act.

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The reason we dropped nukes was not to save lives it was to beat Russia to the punch

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You are somewhat correct, but it was as much to show the Russians what we had in our arsenal as was to end the War in the Pacific before the Russian put boots on the ground on the Japanese mainland.
H & N were military targets but were never bombed conventionally though they were easy targets by 1945.
They were left in pristine condition for a reason, and that is fact.
Regardless of the methods utilized to end the war in the Pacific, be it nukes, incendiaries, blockades, or US/USSR invasion, the loss of lives to the Japanese population would have been five-fold if the former of the four wasn't utilized, and it preserved the lives of tens of thousands of US soldiers.

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You forgot the "in my opinion" part of that sentence. The historical details could lead one to that assumption, but the full story says otherwise. The Russians simply did not have the resources after the heavy losses of manpower and equipment fighting Germany to go up against the entire nation of Japan on their home turf, and they knew it.

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You are correct. The video on the planned invasion covered this. The Russians committed almost nothing to invading Japan. They were staggering at the time through heavy losses against Germany. Their primary focus was on grabbing European ground, not Japan.

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Perhaps some civilians. The nuclear bombs, and other bombing of cities, also killed 5 year olds, 2 year olds and babies in the womb. It's morally indefensible unless you hold the position that no act is morally right or wrong in itself, but is only made right or wrong by the net consequences from the act.

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Alright, fine. Instead of dropping the bombs, how would you have tried to end the war? Firebombing the unholy hell out of Tokyo didn't make them surrender.

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there are 120,000 purple heart medals in storage.
They were all minted in 1945. Every purple heart medal awarded in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or any other military event from 1945 till today is from the storage of 500,000 made in 1945.
That's how many casualties we estimated for our invasion of Japan.

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I'm all for the bomb, but those purple hearts were probably manufactured as a reward to one of FDR's campaign contributors.