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I believe a parallel debate among historians is whether mass Japanese civilian suicides near battle zones were under Japanese military orders or were merely voluntary. You can be sure the Allied invasion of the home islands would have been desirable for such coerced self killing -- which the Allies tried to prevent -- if it had been the mission to kill as many Japanese people as possible.
What is AFAIK not debated is that Japanese who did surrender, instead of heading for the suicide cliffs in places like Okinawa (I don't know about Saipan), were often murdered from a distance by the Japanese soldiers who wanted everyone to head for the suicide cliffs. It possibly deterred other Japanese who were thinking of surrender. Unfortunately I think that your justified indignation actually overestimates human righteousness and justification, both theirs and ours and our own future descendants'. I think justification is needed and justice/hope is too but it won't come from the likes of us.
For most of the war, the primary concern of the Manhattan Project was to counter Nazi Germany's attempt to build something similar, which had started beforehand. I don't know whether the US handled the bomb responsibly, but I know that the Nazis definitely wouldn't have. Given that history, as a Jew I find it almost offensive to deny the virtue of a mission to keep Hitler from having nuclear weapons unchecked.
Even once Germany surrendered, the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did. There were various ways the US probably could have caused fewer civilian casualties; but they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day.
While this was the rationale that was published after the war by the US government, current historical scholarship indicates that it was a lot more complicated than that. To give just a few key points:
Actual casualty estimates made by the US military in the spring and summer of 1945 for a land invasion of Japan were much smaller than figures quoted (without any specific sourcing given) in rationales published after the war. The latter figures were in the range of a half million to a million casualties, but the former figures were more like tens of thousands.
While it was certainly a goal of the Truman Administration to end the war quickly, if at all possible before the Soviet Union attacked Japan, dropping the atomic bombs was far from the only feasible option for doing that. In particular, there were plenty of indications (including intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, since the US had broken the Japanese diplomatic code years before and was routinely reading all such traffic) that clarifying exactly what "unconditional surrender" meant, and in particular what the status of the Japanese Emperor would be, would have given the peace party within the Japanese government enough leverage to force a surrender sooner.
There is also plenty of evidence that at the very least Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, wanted to drop the atomic bombs in order to make the Soviet Union more tractable diplomatically and to reverse the much more conciliatory policy towards them that FDR had taken.
And finally, the internal deliberations of the Japanese government (which were not available to historians until some decades after the war) show that the impact of the Soviet Union invading Manchuria was much greater than the impact of the atomic bombs in pushing the issue for surrender. The Japanese weren't even sure at first what the atomic bombs were, and in any case the US had been firebombing Japanese cities for months so additional bombing was not a huge shock. The Soviets, however, had been stringing Japan along for more than a year at that point, holding out some hope that Japan might be able to get a negotiated peace brokered through the Soviet Union. In fact Stalin never had any such intention; he just wanted to make sure the Japanese didn't surrender until he had a chance to enter the war against them. But Japanese leaders didn't understand that until they were forced to realize it by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (the same morning that the Nagasaki bomb was dropped).
Two good detailed references are The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz and Racing the Enemy by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa.
> they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day
The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.
That said, I do want to dispute this:
> The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.
It's an exaggeration to say that they were "destroyed". Yes, ~100,000 died in the firebombings of Tokyo...but even by the end of the war the population was still well over 3 million, 10x the size of Hiroshima. Whatever the "true" motivation, the selection of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was entirely coherent with the claimed strategy that was focused on destroying the Japanese capability to make war, rather than to commit indiscriminate genocide as claimed.
You could say the same about Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you want to be sufficiently particular. But if you look at pictures of Tokyo, for example, after the firebombing raids, and pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs were dropped, they look pretty similar.
> even by the end of the war the population was still well over 3 million, 10x the size of Hiroshima
And before the war Tokyo's population was about 7 million, perhaps 20x the size of Hiroshima.
> the selection of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was entirely coherent with the claimed strategy that was focused on destroying the Japanese capability to make war, rather than to commit indiscriminate genocide as claimed
I agree that "indiscriminate genocide" was not a motivation (and no serious historian that I'm aware of claims that it was).
However, "destroying the Japanese capability to make war" is also something of a misstatement regarding the selection of atomic bomb targets. That is another aspect of the rationale given by the US government after the war that has been called into question by more recent historical scholarship. There were high officials in the Truman administration that advocated for using the bombs first on a purely military installation, like a naval base, or for a demonstration on some uninhabited island first (with Japanese observers invited). However, those officials had no real voice in the actual target selection. The main factors in the target selection were that it be a city with some military capability (and none of the cities chosen as potential targets had very much--because, as I have said, by that point in the war there wasn't much warmaking capability anywhere in Japan), such as a factory, but with significant civilian population surrounding it (such as factory workers' homes), and that the targeting point be chosen to maximize the effects of the bomb in order to make them clear to the Japanese.
Another factor that needs to be considered when talking about removing Japan's warmaking capability is that, by the end of 1944, the US Navy had Japan completely blockaded; no ships could get in or out. The Japanese Navy was destroyed and Japan had no prospect of getting any additional resources from anywhere (and Japan itself has very few natural resources at all--that's why the Japanese were so insistent upon expanding their control of Asia prior to WW II). That fact alone meant that erosion of the Japanese warmaking capability was only a matter of time. Factories are pointless without raw materials, and guns and tanks and planes are pointless without fuel and ammunition. Indeed, at least one internal US military study found that the blockade all by itself might have caused the Japanese to surrender eventually, without either any atomic bombs or any invasion.
According to this article, it was mostly First Nation workers in the ore mines. https://ejatlas.org/conflict/mining-and-transportation-of-ur...
Here's another article about the workers in the ore mines. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/natives-worked-unprotected-in...
Uranium ore in ton quantities, underground in a poorly ventilated mine? That’s a big health risk, due to radon, other daughter products, and the inherent heavy metal hazards of uranium.