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.
Myself: I can't help but wonder about anthropic effects here. It might be the case that nuclear-armed species annihilate themselves with high probability (say 50% per decade), but of course, all surviving observers live on planets where it hasn't happened through sheer chance.
Just to expand on this (someone please stop me if this sort of speculative post is irritating):
Imagine there are a hundred Earths (maybe because of MWI, or because the universe is infinite, or whatever). Lets say there's a 90% chance of nuclear war before 2008, and such a war would reduce the 2008 population by 90%. In that case, you still end up with 53% of observers in 2008 living on an Earth where nuclear war didn't occur.
This implies that we might be overconfident, and assign too low a probability to nuclear war, just because we've survived as long as we have.
But: The argument seems to implicitly assume that I am a random observer in 2008. I'm not sure this is legitimate. Anthropic reasoning is irritatingly tricky.