> There was a political message in bombing Japan that communicated to Russia (and supported China). There was utility for the US.

Agreed, outside the US this is a common understanding. If you've visited the Hiroshima museum in Japan, you'll note that's also the stated position of the museum: the purpose of the bombings was not so much to defeat Japan, but to show Russia what the US was technically capable of and willing to pull off (I can't remember the exact words, but this is the gist of the museum's position). I'm not saying the museum is impartial on this topic, of course -- that's just an example, and there are many outside Japan too.

However, I've noticed that in online discussions with people from the US, they often don't acknowledge this. Perhaps because as a strategy it was long-term and cold-blooded. So they focus on how Japan was a genocidal empire, how the average citizen blindly followed the Emperor and would fight to the death, how the atomic bombs helped prevent more bloodshed, etc.

The common view in the US is distorted because as the cold war developed people were shown a lot of propaganda lionizing the US's victory and distracting from things like the firebombing. When you talk to more serious people in the US there's awareness of the point you're making, you just won't find it in Hollywood's movie version of things anytime soon.

A similar issue is how Band of Brothers, an otherwise excellent show, re-enforced the idea that D Day happened to stop the holocaust. Those who've read a bit more history however know it was to stop the soviets from marching all the way to Portugal, and that the US and allies declined to take even simple measures like bombing the railway lines to the death camps to fight the holocaust. In particular the treatment of holocaust survivors like a game of hot potato afterwards makes clear what the priorities actually were.

Yes, I have to disagree with that quote. Erico Fermi and Leo Szilard explicitly tried many times to prevent the bomb from being used. They were key scientists who were responsible for the bomb (Fermi discovered beta decay i think), and they knew what it mean once it was dropped.