re: #19 celticdragon

I dunno. Incinerating tens of thousands of civilians is not my favorite way to win a war. Japan was licked and they (mostly) knew it. We had sunk their fleet as well as their entire merchant marine. AC Grayling gets into the weeds of strategic bombing and the racisl differences in how we dealt with Germany and Japan in terms of targeting, as well as the effectivnes of deliberate terror bombing of civilian populations vs pin point bombing of munitions factorys, railway yards and the like. He concludes that the latter was far more effective (and morally defensible) than the former.

Hiroshima; headquarters for the entire southern defense district which was where we would have had to invade.

Nagasaki; Major rail center and munitions stockpiles which would have been used as a hub to transfer troops and materials in the event of invasion.

They weren’t chosen at random and they weren’t picked because they were civilian targets.