not to butt into the conversation since i currently haven't read the discourse between you two, but i am interested: whats your take on this, strategically? do you see it as justified or no? im of the mindset it was a necessary evil and was softened by Americas immediate relief efforts to build back Japan. i can understand that being seen as either a good or bad thing, since the reasoning could be debated that it was because even America was surprised by their own destruction, or because they saw it as an opportunity to shoe horn in their western hegemony, it still seems like it was a wildly successful effort as Japan was flourishing by the 80s per my understanding. they definitely had Americas youth by the balls with their own cultural influence. IDK, just kinda interested on your thoughts there.
nuclear weapons are universally destructive and therefore there's never a good place or time to use them. nobody can evacuate an entire city and all its surrounding wildlife and world heritage sites quick enough to ensure a safe non-casualty nuclear strike. the cleanup of contaminated soil and wildlife ends up costing billions of dollars more than the bombs themselves.
i would like to say that fat man and little boy had more application on the front lines, where they would've killed significantly less civilians and been more effective against enemy military. however, every country during that phase of WW2 was war-weary and prolonged conflict was no longer on the table. the US government manufactured the first weapon of mass destruction, and during that time, use it or lose it was the MO. they invested years of resources into the manhattan project and they were not prepared to stick the bombs in a bunker somewhere to gather dust. it had to be used, either in hiroshima, nagasaki, or somewhere else.
well it didn't 'have' to be used. i just think that if you were to step into the shoes of the people who authorized the strike, the options were limited. the entire project was designed with the sole purpose of ending the war, the question on their plate was where they would drop the bomb in order to best end the war. they chose two cities of majority civilian targets and completed their objective. in an ideal world, they could've picked better, less heinous targets and still achieved their objective.
you ask a great question. i think the victims of the first two bombings would be the only people on the planet with answers worth listening to. sadly, most were vaporized instantly. so in light of that, i do have some deep gratitude towards the super lethal hellfire ninja missile, which instead of vaporizing an entire gene line, only kills one person in their vehicle. surgical strikes have their application, and in a modern war with so many people on the ground doing different things, it is applied well. hopefully, nuclear weapons are never used on human targets again
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