Actually what is striking is that when confronted with this issue, most people feel superior enough to it to bluntly state what is the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do in this situation, forgetting that wrong and right are actually only relative to the people in question, and there are millions people in question.
That's sort of like setting a standard, and expecting people to fit in this standard, and neglecting those that don't. Who knows that the Hiroshima bomb didn't actually kill the next ten scientists and Nobel Prize winners who would have revolutionized the world, and made it a totally better place to live in? Who knows the real reason why the bombs were dropped anyways? Isn't it bias, that compells you to think that people who did it would have done it for the same reasons you would have done it?
And what was the war about anyways? Isn't it just the result of people putting too much power into a handful of individuals, stupidly believing that their choices are cleverer then their own, forgetting that they are just human, and just biased as them?
Isn't that why democracy is supposedly better?
But everyone prefers to believe that their opinion is the righest one about anything. This is just TOM bias though.
On August 6th, in 1945, the world saw the first use of atomic weapons against human targets. On this day 63 years ago, humanity lost its nuclear virginity. Until the end of time we will be a species that has used fission bombs in anger.
Time has passed, and we still haven't blown up our world, despite a close call or two. Which makes it difficult to criticize the decision - would things still have turned out all right, if anyone had chosen differently, anywhere along the way?
Maybe we needed to see the ruins, of the city and the people.
Maybe we didn't.
There's an ongoing debate - and no, it is not a settled issue - over whether the Japanese would have surrendered without the Bomb. But I would not have dropped the Bomb even to save the lives of American soldiers, because I would have wanted to preserve that world where atomic weapons had never been used - to not cross that line. I don't know about history to this point; but the world would be safer now, I think, today, if no one had ever used atomic weapons in war, and the idea was not considered suitable for polite discussion.
I'm not saying it was wrong. I don't know for certain that it was wrong. I wouldn't have thought that humanity could make it this far without using atomic weapons again. All I can say is that if it had been me, I wouldn't have done it.