why would he feel bad?
would it have been somehow more humane to have dropped 1,000’s of fire bombs?
This is an interesting point.
To a B29 pilot who was a member of a group that had been superheating Japanese cities for months with incendiaries, dropping an atomic bomb may have been the next logical step. (The destruction was comparable but the fuel bill for the mission was drastically reduced.)
Tibbets would probably be shocked if he had known that there would be any controversy about the topic.
The earlier B-29 firebombings of Tokyo killed more than either of the A bombs.