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I can agree that using those nukes was many questionable. Who can truly say if lives were saved from a land invasion. So much is classified and what ifs.
But it is far from the worse war crime.....
And developing their own nukes at the same time.
"But there was never any specific warning to the cities that had been chosen as targets for the atomic bomb prior to the weapon’s first use. The omission was deliberate: The United States feared that the Japanese, being forewarned, would shoot down the planes carrying the bombs. And since Japanese cities were already being destroyed by incendiary and high-explosive bombs on a regular basis — nearly 100,000 people were killed the previous March in the firebombing of Tokyo — there was no reason to believe that either the Potsdam Declaration or Truman’s speech would receive special notice" -[0]
[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the...
By the time the nukes dropped, Japan had already lost everything they needed to continue fighting: ships, raw materials, supply lines, trained soldiers. Same for Germany, except the nukes.
The Japanese almost coup could have been driven by other concerns than yet-another city turned to ashes, by nuclear or conventional fire. (To spell it out: "let's surrender to the Americans before we have to surrender to the Russians" vs "fight to the end and bring down as many enemies with us as we can".)
This isn't to justify civilian casualties, it's only and entirely that the people with the power to surrender were given the opportunity to do so and made aware of the reason to do so well before the nukes actually exploded, and decided they preferred to fight.
My opening line was "I don't like that they happened either", and the reason for that is civilian deaths are bad — I reject "total war" as a concept, and I see the Allies use of this in WW2 as having all the moral weight of a child in a playground saying "the other guys did it first" (and not just because I moved from the UK to Berlin about 5 years ago and get to see all the museums, archive footage of bombed-out apartments, and that the house building process still today includes "we have to check for unexploded munitions").
The point is that, even in with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that this much force was actually needed to make some very arrogant leaders stop their war.
Also, we can and should learn from hindsight, which suggests e.g. that Hitler's remilitarisation of the Rhineland could have resulted in a coup against him if the French had sent in (IIRC) "a dozen soldiers with bayonets". I presume there were also other missed opportunities in the Pacific theatre, though I don't know them.
>> The point is that, even in with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that this much force was actually needed to make some very arrogant leaders stop their war.
None of the leaders actually cared a single bit, the Nazis even wanted to burn down Germany for having lost the war. Industrial output was not really impacted, numbers and assessments from both sides show that, while moral of the bombed was actually stiffened. Including Axis POWs in Normandy being debriefed (understandable, if someone bombs my house and family I do not nexessarily like them much). All the strategic bombing of Germany did was satisfy hunger for revenge (especially in the case of Bomber Harris, whom seemed to be extremely butt hurt after the Blitz), despite knowing strategic bombing doesn't do much after the Blitz. That, and showing Stalin that the Western allies did something on the continent.
The only time strategic bombing had some impact in Europe, was the preparation of Overlord, when Eisenhower basically forced US and UK bomber commands to focus at logistical networks, hubs and oil installations above cities. And even then, civilian casualties, including in France and the Low Countries, were way to high for the results. Again, USAAF and RAF assessments show that. And yet the bombing of civilians continued unabetted. There is simply no defending this.
That's not the reason to drop the bombs, you need much more than that to reach such a conclusion.
18,000 rebels on one side tried pick a fight with 25,000 government soldiers to prevent a surrender even after the second city had been levelled, is a reason for thinking that Japan was still only borderline ready to surrender at that point, and therefore that it was unlikely to have been ready before this point.
I don't know which bit you're making that specific complaint about, but at this point I don't care.
If I was forced to choose I would have definitely chosen to be in Hiroshima or Nagasaki and endure the atomic bomb and the after effects than I o be in Nanking and endure days of sadistic torture (babies tossed in the air and bayoneted, brothers forced to rape sisters, gang rape, sexual mutilation, etc).
If you think it would be ok to drop a bomb on Moscow today to force Russia to surrender in the current war, or for Russians to do the same on Kyiv (just imagine how many lives will be saved by stopping the ground invasion, right!??), then you're just using the same rationale as the people defending the Americans' horrible crime. Tell us: do you support one of those?! If not, why not???
Or the Japanese military that experimented on people...and then got away with it and managed to find jobs that's to operation paperclip.