Well drilled and disciplined.

"I don't think a Nuke is ever justified unless the other country is going to nuke you.

[nope...preemptive strike is just trying to justify the unjustifiable]

If Nukes were justified then, then they could just as easily be justified now. 

America has gone down in history as the only country to use nukes. It may have saved American lives but it killed something like 250,000 civilians in Japan. 

It would be better to have a massive battle with army personnel dying. 

Snark, your best post in years...almost agree with everything...so you are capable of actual thought...who woulda....?

Yews, hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives after USA goaded Japan into attacking them so they could get into the war. Similar to how they have pushed Russia. Hopefully this time the yanks get it in the ass. It's really way late to what should have been done but better late than never. 

Send your troops in to die, when the means to end the war was at hand. Who would want to make that decision. The complicating factor was that the US had very few atomic weapons. And nobody was sure they would perform as predicted.

Still I think one test explosion should have been done in an unpopulated area….giving the Japanese an opportunity to surrender. The horror that followed dropping these weapons justified that.

It all comes back to a basic premise, war is not the act of sentient beings. It’s a primitive reflex instinct. And it should be condemned by all decent human beings.

 The only wars that seem justified to me in the last 50 years are Kuwait and Afghanistan….Kuwait to expel the invader and Afghanistan to respond to 9/11.But the US did it right in the case of Kuwait, stopping short of invading Iraq. The ‘nation building’ that motivated the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions was a pipe dream of old men.

Nothing more dangerous than an old man with unbridled power.

Well, hindsight is 20/20...they didn't have the luxury...and things were a bit different back then...and after Pearl Harbor the pesky Japanese had to be taught a lesson...and it seems to have worked...a great tragedy have taught the whole world a lesson, making a conflict with more modern nukes much less probable...but Japan payed an expensive price...

You’re right….dropping those bombs may have spared the world something worse. And the background was totally different….30000 killed in the Blitz, 25000 or more in Dresden, perhaps 60000 in Berlin. Civilians were on the front line and the cost of the Axis aggression was huge, so there was little empathy for them.

Humanity never underperforms when cruelty is the game.

One day man may evolve past wars, and they will look back and say a nuclear weapon was actually used...

If Aliens ever made it to earth, they might be amazed that man has used nuclear weapons.

This alone might be enough reason for them to skip the earth, assuming it is not bad aliens that would want the planet.
A primitive barbaric place that has learnt to use technology past their civility. 

I'm not sure what else the American's could of done differently accept maybe detonate a nuke off the bay of Tokyo to demonstrate its power to the Japanese to try to convince them to surrender but I don't think alone that would of worked.

Most historians agree that either a full scale invasion of Japan or a blockade to starve the Japanese into submission would have result in far more deaths both military and civilian than the nuclear attacks did.

To be more precise is important to do a bit of research and analysis into the justification of the dropping of Small Boy (10000 lb uranium gun-type bomb which had the equivalent power of 15 kilotons of 15000tons of TNT on Hiroshima in the first place. The city of Hiroshima had a population 300,000 civilians at the time. There was a military base there as well granted, but it’s size was 43000 soldiers in full capacity. It was the base for Japanese Second Army but it is highly unlikely that there were full at this time as the bulk were deployed elsewhere mainly in Manchuria and the islands just off. When the B.29 dropped the bomb at 30,000ft at 8.15 am the city was full of activity whilst some of the Japanese Second Army were doing calisthenics

Secondly, the dropping of the 2nd bomb , named Fat Man on Nagasaki was not justified at all because no military there. This tactic it was argued was to demoralize the Japanese and also I believe to create a deviation or red-herring to the fact that the Red Army was advancing with huge success Japanese soldiers, being obliterated and surrendering. President Truman was wary of that, as he did not trust Stalin and Russians, unlike his predecessor Roosevelt. He did not want the credit to go to them, as there were betrayal plans ahead and on the cards, initiated by Churchill, ie Operation Unthinkable. It is very doubtful that Roosevelt knew of this on his deathbed as historians have pointed out as he and Stalin respected and strangely got on well. It is suggested that the go ahead to implicate them with done by Roosevelt’s subordinates as they realized he was dying .

My take is that neither was justified when actual circumstances were purposely obscured.

Rather this …

Waiting for the Soviets. The planned US invasion of the Japanese homeland, Operation Downfall, was not scheduled to take place until early November 1945. So, in principle, there was no great rush to drop the bombs in early August. The Americans knew that the Soviet Union had, at their earlier encouragement, agreed to renounce their Neutrality Pact with the Japanese and declare war, invading first through Manchuria. Stalin indicated to Truman this would happen around August 15th, to which Truman noted in his diary, “Fini Japs when that comes about.” Aside from cutting Japan off from its last bastion of resources, the notion of possibly being divided into distinct Allied zones of influence, as had been Germany, would possibly be more of a direct existential threat than any damage the Americans would inflict. And, in fact, we do now know that the Soviet invasion may have weighed as heavily on the Japanese high command as did the atomic bombings, if not more so. So why didn’t Truman wait? The official reason given after the fact was that any delay whatsoever would be interpreted as wasting time, and American lives, once the atomic bomb was available. But it may also have been because Truman, and especially his Secretary of State, Byrnes, may have hoped that the war might have ended before the Soviets had entered. The Soviets had been promised several concessions, including the island of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands (giving them unimpeded access to the Pacific Ocean) for their entry in the war, but by late July 1945, the Americans were having second thoughts. As it was, once Stalin saw that Hiroshima did not provoke an immediate response from the Japanese, he had his marshals accelerate the invasion plans, invading Manchuria just after midnight, the morning of the Nagasaki bombing.

What should we make of these “alternatives”? Not, necessarily, that those in the past should have been clairvoyant. Or that their concerns were ours: like it or not, those involved in these choices certainly ranked Japanese civilian lives lower than those of American soldiers, as is typical in war. None of the “alternatives” come with any confidence, even today, much less for those at the time, and those making the choices were working with the requirements, uncertainties, and biases inherent to their historical and political positions.

But by pointing out the alternative that were on the table, one can see the areas of choice and discretion, the different directions that history might have gone — perhaps for better, perhaps for worse. We should see this history less as a static set of “inevitable” events, or of “easy” choices, but as a more subtle collection of options, motivations, and possible outcomes.