It's the trolley problem. Do you let the war go on and kill 1M more people or drop the bomb and kill 100K? I actually wonder if that was the origin of the thought experiment. I think most people in this crowd would say of course you switch tracks, but at that scale it takes on a different gravity.

There are quite a few countries currently who possess nukes. What do you say if they apply the same logic should they have military conflict?

There's an interesting piece from 2020, republished a few days ago, in the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, titled "Counting the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki" [1]. The bottom line is that the number of people killed is unlikely ever to be known.

[1] https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshi...

You assume that those two bombings had an effect or sped up the surrender. They provingly did not. The decision was made to show a) force to USSR and the rest of the world b) explain the funds spent on creating nuclear weapons.

They had been firebombing and eradicating whole Japanese cities for days/weeks. (Another topic to discuss -- that the pressure was applied to the civilian non-fighting population, regardless of the method.)

The late Japanese surrender is a failure of diplomacy -- the two sides could not communicate and neither side could swallow the whole "emperor question."

When the Russians started moving and declared war to Japan, both sides gave up something: "unconditional" surrender and emperor got to stay and not implicated in anything related to the war.

See the whole background behind the following trials, where a lot of people either did not get prosecuted or chose to die instead of implicating the emperor in any way.