Why? That atrocities were common during the war doesn't make nuking civilian targets acceptable.

(1) Because it's part of a general hatchet job against nuclear energy

(2) It erases history. Really crazy stuff went down during the Korean war and people don't know about it. If the Japanese had spent 1% of the effort making amends for their crimes against China and other Asian countries that's gone into hand wringing over Hiroshima things would be very different in Asia today. It's nearly forgotten that the U.S. was slow to demobilize after WWII because it thought war against the Soviet Union was likely, and it was just as much a goal to intimidate the Soviets as it was to intimidate the Japanese.

How is dropping a nuke any less acceptable than a firebombing run? It's the same number of dead civilians in both cases, yet nuclear weapons are the ones that get all the pushback.

Neither are acceptable, I was not trying to argue that one was morally superior just that the presence of one dies not justify the second.

Those weren't civilian targets. Both cities contained military facilities and factories.

Yes, I'm aware of the doublespeak used to justify bombing major civilian population centers. I still would object to being bombed merely for living in a city, so object to bombing others for the same reason.

Please tell me how the US should have reacted to how they would have won the war while considering your moral principles.

Please explain this when you make comments like that.

And please also explain how many additional US soldiers (not to mention soldiers and civilians in China and other Asian nations) would you think acceptable to fight the war according to your moral principles.

If for example the Nazi put a single German child into the guard house of the synthetic fuel production facility, would you not destroy it?

Its easy to be critical, but please actually explain what your moral principles would have been and how you would have applied them. And can you make a credible case that these principles would have lead to less overall suffering.

I am gently curious what your logic is and what alternative strategy you would advocate.

>Please tell me how the US should have reacted to how they would have won the war while considering your moral principles.

They could bomb military targets, not civilian populations. Yes, Tokyo contained some military facilities, that doesn't justify firebombing the entire city.

The entire doctrine of "bomb the civilians into war weariness" has not been found to be successful, and even in 1944 there were already examples showing that. It more often causes the bombed to rally together against a common enemy, like London in the Blitz or what still effects North Korea today.

Your example of one child in a synthetic fuel facility is ridiculous. I understand that some civilian workers of factories will unfortunately be victims, and that bombs will miss their targets. That's not comparable to wide scale firebombing or nuking the population.

Production was distributed threw the cities in Japan, that's a simple fact. And they did target military target when they had good target.

After attacks on city on we can literally see production output going down.

There is an argument that in Germany some of the attacks on cities were counter-productive and a more intense focus on certain industrial areas would have been more beneficial. But those were also better guarded.

Even so, economic historian Adam Tooze book shows pretty well that air attacks did have large economic attacks.

>And they did target military target when they had good target.

If you don't have a good military target, then don't bomb them.

Yes killing however many thousands of people will drive down production. It doesn't end the war and it only makes the post war stage more difficult.

Production is of military value even if its not a purely military target.

> Yes killing however many thousands of people will drive down production. It doesn't end the war and it only makes the post war stage more difficult.

If your enemies have more weapons to kill you then more of your people will die. This is a simple reality modern war.

Suicide bombers and suicide submarines were being mass produced and a single one of them could literally kill 1000s of sailors when they hit a ship.

Reducing the number of such weapons existing by a large fraction is of clear military value.

Had an invasion taken place finally (as it would have to without nukes) then the destruction of that production would have been even more essential.

>If your enemies have more weapons to kill you then more of your people will die. This is a simple reality modern war.

I don't agree with the concept of killing a hundred civilians to save one soldier. While I can justify the civilian cost of destroying a factory building submarines, firebombing is a different story.

And while lowering production may drop them from having ten kamikaze pilots to eight, ending the war drops it from ten to near zero.

Finally it's ridiculous to claim the only two options were to nuke civilian population centers or invade. Peace talks are one obvious third option that is always completely ignored.

> They could bomb military targets, not civilian populations. Yes, Tokyo contained some military facilities, that doesn't justify firebombing the entire city.

I guess history disagrees with you.

I'd say it agrees with me, we firebombed Tokyo and the war didn't end.