You make the historically false assumption that the intentional destruction of whole cities, together with their population, was opposed by pacifist hippies and favored by experienced military men. This isn't true.
Take, for example, Admiral William Leahy, White House chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war. Leahy wrote in his 1950 memoirs that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."
Leahy also said, "in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
“Leahy wrote in his 1950 memoirs that ‘the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.’”
And yet, after the SECOND use of a nuclear weapon, there were elements within the Japanese government that actively sought the overthrow of the emperor rather than surrender. Perhaps Leahy was wrong.
On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CIA informed the White House that the Soviet Union was a strong, thriving economic success that had a GDP perhaps twice the size of the US.
Not everybody “in the know” actually knows anything.
“...You write with confident, dismissive contempt about people you know absolutely nothing about...Admiral William Leahy...wrote in his 1950 memoirs that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war..’ “ [Mrs Don-o, post 16]
After decades of enforced association, I know more about ADM Leahy and the US Navy than the forum can possibly imagine. All of you would be asleep, or contemplating suicide, if I chose to type it in response.
Can’t anyone here stop arguing from Authority?
ADM Leahy is a terrible choice at any rate. He wrote what he wrote only to satisfy the most venal of bureaucratic-political motives, seeking to preserve his pet armed service (which had done well by him, though he was not of any conceivable moral stripe to deserve it), from budget and national-status encroachment being threatened by the upstarts in the US Air Force, who actually knew what to do with them danged new-fangled aeroplanes, and (worse) had had the cheek to use some to win WW2 before Leahy & colleagues could arrange the grand spectacle to suit whims.