that'd be a good gotcha if the atomic bomb were invented before the national socialists surrendered
shame on me for not caring about chronological order of a war 80 years ago. damn, looks like my point is completely invalidated.
If you care about numbers (of lives), in time, if the national socialists were not stopped then the number of deaths (caused by them in this case) would simply go up. If you would've nuked them before the number of deaths (caused by them) rose higher than the nuke would cause then you'd technically cause less deaths to happen. However that is using hindsight to judge because it's getting a death count from the future.
I have no explicitly stated about if we should or should not use nuclear weaponry but I do believe to stall will still just cause the deaths to rise continually regardless. I don't think to cause death is right in any case but self-defense is the least immoral form of causing death.
i think it's handicapped, inhumane, and downright cowardly to decide to massacre hundreds of millions of people, most of want nothing to do with CIA or whatever the terrorism catch of the day is. it's honestly repulsive that you think that bombing a whole region of the world, one the size of a small continent at that, for the sake of stopping terrorism
not to say that something to that caliber will never be the answer, but until the whole world of the middle east has become literal 1984 it's a horrible prospect and certainly not even close to a last resort
the fact that we talk about how many innocent people them god darned isil terrorists kill with such disgust, then continue to talk about how we should "just kill em" as the best answer to a problem is nationalism at its finest and complete hypocrisy