“You are also ignoring the conventional bombings all summer that had reduced so many Japanese cities to rubble. Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s destruction were a small part of the total.”
If you look at the position of the U.S. and Japan in 1945 there was literally only one option that would not have resulted in the death of millions of civilians and military.
The Japanese ethos during WWII did not consider any Japanese citizens as civilians. Women and children were ordered to fight to the death. Many Japanese women and children committed suicide rather than surrender.
The Japanese also did not consider any of the people they conquered to be civilians. Women were raped and massacred. Children were regularly killed.
In 1945 the U.S had four options regarding Japan.
The worst was to leave the military dictatorship in power and leave the area. This would have resulted in another costly war in a few years.
The second worst was a large scale invasion of Japan. This would have resulted in at the very least .5 million American casualties and most likely many more. It would have resulted in millions of Japanese casualties. It would have resulted in fighting for probable 3 years minimum over mountainous and easy to defend islands against an enemy determined to fight to the death. It would have resulted in a Japan so decimated that it could have never recovered. It would have resulted in generations of Japanese living in abject poverty and squalor in a destroyed and conquered country.
The third option was blockade and conventional bombing. This would have resulted in the destruction of all Japanese cities and the deaths through bombing, disease and starvation of millions of Japanese. The war would probably have been extended for at least two years and would have ended through the eventual invasion of a starving country in ruins.
The fourth was dropping the atomic bomb. It ended the war quickly and caused the fewest casualties. It allowed Japan to prosper in the period after WWII.
Your idea that someone could have waved a magic wand and there would be peace with no casualties is completely unrealistic. There would have been massive civilian casualties no matter what was done. The atomic bomb was the best decision.
The hate America propaganda that attacks America winning WWII is based on lies and ignorance.
That is not my idea at all.
Believe me, I know the options were all bad ones. Atrocious ones, especially for the men in the Pacific who were gearing up to invade while the Imperial Government was telling people to defend the home islands with pitchforks.
All I am saying is you cannot justify a wartime action by saying it produced a good effect.
If you're going to defend Hiroshima I'm ok with that. Just show how it met the conditions of a just action in war (Hiroshima had a military installation, civilian areas were not deliberately targeted for destruction, we did not understand the exact power of the bomb, etc.).
What I won't tolerate, though, is the people here defending it with a moral relativist argument: "war is war", "we needed to win" etc.