You need to look at the Japanese plans for civilian resistance to an invasion -- civilians using spears and such if that's all they had -- and consider who a "noncombatant" would be.
This guy, atkin, is a revisionist moron. I happily would volunteer him to be in the front of the Japan invasion uf I had a time machine. I think he’s drinking too much free wine at the altar.
Yes, the civilian/noncombatant excuse for moral superiority by those not involved in hell dictating those who were in hell. I wish these revisionist would actually tell us who exactly was innocent, pure, and righteous. Nagasaki was known as a vital trading post in Japan and the center of Roman Catholicism and Buddhism as well. Too bad the weather (Who controls that?) played a factor with the second target.
What exactly is a noncombatant anyway? A person working in a factory making bombs, bullets, armor and other instruments of war, say in a Mitsubishi Aircraft plant and maybe the Ohashi Arms factory? A child learning to shoot a gun with an accompanied bayonet? Who?
Self-defense, just like a pregnant woman with severe endometrial cancer who undergoes a hysterectomy due to the fact that both would not survive.
Nothing wrong with using superior firepower against the enemy, the Israelites made good use in their war with the Canaanites. Heck, they had to kill the little ones, the females, and the elderly by hand, not from an airplane.