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By that point in time the Japanese government had mobilized the entire population to participate in the defense of the home islands, using farm implements if necessary. Houses had been converted into arms factories. Furthermore, warnings were issued prior to the bombing for populations to evacuate major cities.

In addition, both cities were legitimate military targets as they housed both military factories and large army groups.

Your arguments are simplistic, childish, and predicated on assumptions that don’t stand up to factual analysis or middle-school logic.

By that point in time the Japanese government had mobilized the entire population to participate in the defense of the home islands, using farm implements if necessary.

Kind of like the United States at the time — right? Or Switzerland today. Or any other country where civilians give enough of a sh!t about themselves to defend their homes against a hostile invasion. Imagine that.

Sounds to me as if an invasion of Japan probably would have been a bad idea.

The other posts on this thread detailing the production schedule of additional atomic bombs suggests that the U.S. government likely had no intention of invading Japan at all.

Japan's vulnerability of having wooden construction throughout its urban areas was well-known. Even before the war started, there was an intent to take advantage of this.

Claire Chennault, heading the Flying Tigers before the United States (officially) entered the war, was pushing for long-range bombers for the purpose of bombing Japanese cities months before the United States even entered the war.

"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 TheJournalofHistoricalReview

Roosevelt approved this in July of 1941. (Look up "JB-355", which authorized the use of American bombers to be flown against Japan.)

(Everyone knows of the attack on Pearl Harbor on 12/07/1941; how many know of the Japanese attack on Clark Airfield in the Philippines on 12/08, where American B-17s were destroyed?) (Does anyone even wonder what American B-17s were doing in the Philippines in December of 1941 before the war began?)

James Doolittle and his "raiders" dropped incendiaries on Tokyo during their early 1942 raid.

The campaign against Japanese cities wasn't accidental or forced; there was a well-known weakness in Japan's defenses, and the US was simply going to exploit it