Its still calculated human death on a grand scale. How were kids in Hiroshima guilty and deserving of death? (and I agree that 9/11 was not an act of war, but the Bush Administration might not since it apparently regard it as the satart of the war on terror.)
I have read a lot about this. It is a hard call. I fully understand why FDR's and Truman's administration did it based upon the defective intelligence it had at the time. It was quite a different thing from General Curtis LeMay's systematic and brutal razing of Tokyo, which was based upon the cruel premise that Japan's industrial capability was indivisible from civilian homes.
Use of A-bombs followed from
1. a brutal Pacific war, and the bleak prospects of a long term blockade of Japan and the even bleaker prospects of an invasion;
2. Imperial Army control of the Japanese government and the Emperor, and Imperial Army entrenched poicy of no surrender or capitulation;
3. intelligence of Communist activity in Japan (a groundswell of anti-imperialism, since the Emperor was perceived as the cause of the war).
A major benefit from the unconditional surrender was the complete recasting of Japan into a benign democracy, but that wasn't something that could have been anticipated.
My view on it is that the US should have first bombed Mt Fuji and utterly destroyed it. By obliterating the symbolic Fuji-san instead of two minor cities, it would have served as a shot across the bows. If the Japanese government had not surrendered then (remembering that it refused to surrender following the bombing of Hiroshima), then and only then given the exigent circumstances should a city have been destroyed.
But these things were nightmarishly expensive to manufacture and there wasn't a massive arsenal of them like there is now, and Truman had the additional message to end to Stalin to back off from an invasion of Hokkaido (Japan could easily have been divided like Germany). At least it wasnt used on Tokyo and Osaka, two massive cities with large civilian populations, and instead was used on relatively small cities.... little consolation to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Incidentally, Kyoto was the first target but was obscured by low clouds. Kyoto has remained untouched during the war because an influential government official who had been there argued successfully that the place was irreplaceable. The idea was to bomb it to see the effect an A-bomb would have upon an intact city (all other cities in Japan had been badly scarred). Kyoto is a beautiful ciy where I have spent a lot of time, which has some of the world's oldest wooden structures. I'm personally very grateful for the low cloud.
