[SeekAndFind]

He said he "didn't have any doubt" about the wisdom of the decision—unlike those he pictured as "eggheads" or "Monday morning quarterbacks." He called it the "most terrible decision that any man in the history of the world had to make" but "I'd do it again" and "I would not hesitate." On one occasion, asked how long it took him to decide to use the new device, he simply snapped his fingers.

When the scientific director of the bomb project at Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer, revealed during a private meeting with the president shortly after the war that he feared he had "blood on my hands," Truman (by varying accounts) either offered to pass him a handkerchief or simply told him to quit worrying, the decision was his. After he left, in any event, Truman complained to a top adviser that the "Father of the Atomic Bomb" was a "crybaby scientist."

In an interview he cited the Japanese soldiers as vicious fighters and "I thought that wiping out complete cities with the bomb would be better." And in 1959, long out of office, he declared (not for the last time) that "I never lost any sleep over my decision," perhaps the line most associated with Truman and the bomb. But Truman went further: He didn't want anyone else to lose any sleep over it, either. In private, he instructed the pilot of the plane that dropped the first bomb, Paul Tibbets, "Don't you ever lose any sleep over the fact that you planned and carried out that mission. It was my decision. You had no choice."

[TexasFreeper2009]

If the Nazi’s or Japan had developed it first, they sure as hell would of used it against us!

[packagingguy]

His decision probably saved more lives than it took, especially with the Soviets bearing down on northern Japanese territory.

[albie]

Truman was a good man. “Don’t you ever lose any sleep over the fact that you planned and carried out that mission. It was my decision. You had no choice.”

[Chainmail]

The really sketchy part of the use of the nuclear weapons was the careful targeting of cities that had no prior bombing attacks: it smells of using those cities as a testing ground complete with unwarned civilians rather than a target.

If I had been in charge of that targeting, I would have targeted the Japanese 16th Army Headquarters in Kyushu. Wiping them out would have conclusively demonstrated the power of the bomb, decapitated the leadership of the forces defending Kyushu, and if we had to invade there, dramatically reduced the Japanese resistance.

But the Air Force aimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at civilians and at our POWS in those cities (not to mention wiping out most of the Japanese Christian population in Nagasaki).

[left that other site]

Met General Tibbets in 2000 and we had a nice talk about it.

He didn’t regret it eithe.

[wafflehouse]

the "Father of the Atomic Bomb" was a "crybaby scientist."

LOL