Dear Japan: Pearl Harbor has been annihilated by you. Paybacks are a b****.
Actually, dropping the bomb was the humanitarian choice. Had the Marines been called on to invade Japan, the leaders of Japan would have whipped their citizens into a frenzy as they had done on Okinawa.
Their were 200,000 civilians and military dead on Okinaw and the US military was not frightened by the prospect of a repeat on the main island. The US Marines would have done their job and decimated Japan. Only instead of the correct definition of decimate (1 in 10). It would have been 9.95 out of 10 dead.
Dropping the bomb allowed members of the Japanese leadership to convince the war party to back down. And, that almost failed to another coup.
There are a lot of Japanese alive today because we had the courage to do the right thing.