"Being forced to kill women and children, not from 30,000 feet up, but at hand-to-hand distance, would have been damaging to the souls of American servicemen." We don't know for a fact that this was the only alternative. Three points:
- First, Stalin told Roosevelt that the Japanese had asked him twice to broker a negotiated peace. There can be a lot of speculation of what this could or couldn't have, would or wouldn't have, accomplished. That's one set of unknowns.
- Second, some of the Manhattan Project scientists wanted the nuclear device to be used to destroy the sacred Mt. Fuji, or to an unpopulated island in a demonstration run, convinced that the overwhelming scope of the destruction (especially Mt, Fuji, which was a mainstay of their fanatical Shintoism) would have broken their will to fight. Another set of unknowns.
- Third, yet another group advocated using (conventional, but still stupendous) blockbuster bombs to kill the Emperor, believed by the Shintoists to be a god and the direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. We knew where he was and how to do it. Yet even in the firebombings of Tokyo, as much care as possible had been taken to avoid bombing the Emperor's palace, even though Japanese air defence had been pulled back from the cities, and was being reserved for the defense of Kyushu. Why did we prefer to leave untouched an emperor who was just as guilty as Tojo and the militarists, and yet annihilate a hundred thousand of his battered civilian subjects whose power and culpability were far less? Yet another set of unknowns.
I would even point out that fighting women and children who are attacking you with IED's (which is something we face increasingly in Jihad World)
is morally justified; but blowing civilians up in their homes, groceries, shoe-shops, schools and churches (including Nagasaki Cathedral, which was the focal point of the second atomic bombing) is not.
It is not realistic, nor historically plausible, to imagine that killing people indiscriminately from 30,000 feet did not do much damage to the souls of American soldiers. I am convinced it damaged the souls of millions and millions of people, both in the USA and around the world, by establishing consequentialism as an almost unopposable "principle" of action. It provided the world with a stunning practical demonstration that innocent life is not at all considered involate, even by allegedly "Christian" nations; and that one may always kill the innocent, by wholesale lots, if one has a good enough reason.
The spiritual fruits of this can be found in the moral cynicism and nihilism which gave us 50,000,000 abortions--- an ongoing massacre comparable to least 400 self-inflicted Hiroshimas; we may also be tutored in spiritual consequences by nuclear-armed mujahideen, who will probably wreak their quid pro quo in our own lifetime, or that of our children.
They will be glad to make a flambeau of nations which have spread moral relativism, abortion and sexual perversion as major cultural exports around the world; but we won't like it quite so well.