My tendency to burrow and hide should not be held against me. It’s not only due to nature; some of it is because of my environment. For I am a resident of “The Secret City”.
And a co-worker just sent me an Atlantic pictorial essay on Oak Ridge. It’s pretty cool. Though not as cool as this painting:
World's Only Rational Man 
The comments are interesting to read as well. Like that Karine chick/fellow. The same old fairy tale of boohoo, nuclear bombs so evil, evil Americans.
So excuse my rant…
Just think how many innocent Chinese, Koreans and other Asians were butchered by fascist Japan. Unit 731 easily killed more people than both nukes. Just think how many innocent Japanese suffered at the hands of the fascists in Japan. Thousands of people disappeared in the prisons of the “thought police” never to be seen again. Hirohito himself even signed the order to murder Chinese POWs, which was the thing they based the order that triggered the Rape of Nanking on.
It was war. Truman used a weapon that worked because it was war. It was total war. In 1943 Goebbels screamed at the Germans “do you want total war?!” and they all stood up and screamed “yes!” In Japan the similar things happened. Children as young as in elementary school were drilled into believing that the other countries were out to strangle Japan to death. That started long before the war. With the death of the Taisho emperor the fragile bloom of democracy died with him. With Hirohito fascism and militarism came. And even after the surrender some teachers continued to spread this nonsense.
The nuclear bomb and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria ended the war. And thanks to this the woman I love doesn’t have to produce sons for the “divine emperor” and doesn’t have to labor in a munitions factory producing ammo for the war in China. My friends can live their lives in freedom and can do what they want. Thanks to it the guys among them aren’t stationed in a foreign country oppressing and murdering the citizens there in the name of some emperor. They haven’t been pulled out of university and turned into a “student soldier” because of it. They haven’t been ordered to fly a plane into an American carrier because of it. Japan today is free because of it. My niece won’t be given a hand grenade to kill herself and her friends with it because of these bombs.
Btw, more people died in the fire bombing campaign than in both nukes. The effects of the radiation itself have been massively overplayed, usually with a political agenda in mind (there is evidence that the entire anti-nuclear and anti-war movement in the west had some massive Soviet donors.) The vast majority of the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were caused by the initial blasts, the heat, the fires resulting from it and the shock wave. The eyewitness reports and medical data is very clear there, leaving no room for radiation scare and nuclearphobia.
And let’s not forget that every single hibakusha I know isn’t blaming the Americans. They blame the emperor and the fascists who surrounded and played him like a fiddle. It was Hirohito’s war, his name was on every order and every order was given in his name, even former soldiers blame him (one very outspoken veteran was IJNAF’s surviving ace Sakai Saburo.)
We can argue about the military necessity of dropping both bombs, but even then, Truman did the right thing. The fascists were destroyed. Good riddance. Yes, a lot of innocent people died, but when you listen to the hibakusha, for some this was when they realized that they’ve been nodding along to a brutal regime for years. Let’s not forget: after the first big raid on Tokyo Hirohito’s only worries were 1) a possible Communist uprising against him (which was unlikely, because his secret police units had already “dealt” with those) and 2) the three imperial treasures. He didn’t care about the people. He saw the fires, smelled the burning wood and flesh and didn’t care. He continued to wage his war. Sure, some apologists, and some of them aren’t even Japanese fringe extremists (for example the assistant professor who teaches Japanese history here at university, who’s a white woman), claim that Hirohito had no real power, etc. That is irrelevant. He was the supreme commander, the responsibility was with him. That’s how a military hierarchy works. But he, and prince Asaka (the man practically ordering the Rape of Nanking -there was a colonel who later claimed he had forged Asaka’s order, but I’ve been dismissing this as BS, cause it leads to some questions: 1) why was the order never changed, 2) why was that colonel never punished; he simply took blame for his superior, which is a very specific thing in Japanese culture) walked away. If there was a crime in this whole affair, then it was how the US and her allies let Hirohito, Asaka and many other murderers (most famously Unit 731 command staff) walk away.
Ok, I’m done.
I had no idea of the scope of Unit 731 until now. Wow.
No reasonable person can contend that nukes killed more innocent people than invading Japan would have. You could argue that Fat Man and Little Body have caused more premature deaths in the ensuing decades, due to radiophobia and unnecessary hydrocarbon combustion.