As I said in a previous post, this is an annual discussion held by people who don't know the background of the bombings...
Look up "Operation Meetinghouse" to see what LeMay's pilots and aircrews had already done to Tokyo, and you'll understand why it couldn't have been a target for an atomic bomb.
Here's a hint...
We didn’t target a population center. We targeted the military targets, giving advanced notice so that the Japanese people would leave. That is a FACT.
This is a map of Tokyo that was used by the Army Air Force during WWII.
No, it's not marking military targets, which would be necessary for your argument to be correct. And no, it's not marking hospitals, which would be required if the intended raid was to be in line with the Geneva Convention. It's marking areas by their inflammability, which goes to my argument that the raids against Japan were designed to simply burn cities to the ground, and that the raids against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were simply the next logical step in such a campaign.
If military targets were really the intended aiming points, what could be the point of determining the best means of burning houses to the ground? (Why build a village to perfect a means of burning homes to the ground, if you didn't actually intend to burn homes to the ground?)
It was all part of the plan (and there's nothing "hypothetical" about it; the words of the men at the time give it away).
"A small number of long-range bombers carrying incendiary bombs could quickly reduce Japan's paper-and-matchwood cities to heaps of smoking ashes." (Claire Chennault)codoh.com
“If war with the Japanese does come, we’ll fight mercilessly,” General George C. Marshall told news reporters in an off-the-record briefing on November 15, 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. “Flying Fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out.” www.smithsonianmag.com
Japan's vulnerability with regard to its inflammable cities and the will of the Americans to use that vulnerability against the Japanese with little or no regard for innocent life was well-known, even to the Japanese.
"This is even in the event that war should break out and Tokyo should be in flames by the action of the United States Air Forces. If huge fires break out in Tokyo and Tokyo is completely destroyed by fire three or four times, and if I must witness it while waiting for a strategically opportune time, I cannot remain still." - Admiral Yamamoto, 11/12/1940. "At Dawn We Slept", Gordon Prange. catdir.loc.gov
(Not to worry. I have great confidence that after the last American serviceman who served in that war has gone to his grave, we'll be able to discuss the subject like adults.)