From sticks and stone to the A-Bomb.
Whether it be one or thousands. War is war.
The decision to use The Bomb may have saved many more lives than it took. There will always be wars. We humans just can't seem to get along with each other.
No doubt it was shocking to see the power and devastation. I believe it gave us an awareness, how destructive we can be and how quickly we could destoy ourselves, not seen or understood prior to the dropping of The Bomb.

Lets hope that this does not happen on a world wide scale.

I don't think there's any doubt that this is the case. The best-case scenarios prepared at the time had the U.S. losing 50,000-60,000 men and the Japanese losing 200,000-300,000 in an invasion. The worst-case scenarios had the casualties at possibly as much as 5 to 6 times that. Realistically it probably would have been somewhere in between.

Between both Hiroshima and Nagasaki we killed less than the bottom end of the best-case scenarios.

Of course, there will always be Monday-morning quarterbacks who second-guess decisions after the war is over. If we knew then what we know now would we still drop the bomb? I don't know and I don't care, for the very simple reason that we DIDN'T know then what we know now.

I think the decision to drop was reasonable and acceptable under the circumstances. I do not fault Truman for making that decision.

I'm with donmillon you can't fault Truman for what he didn't know. Even though I think he made the right decsion.

As a former SAC warrior, I'd argue that the horrific effects seen at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a wakeup call. I shudder to think what might have happened if the weapons had been developed and the world went into the Cold War without seeing the horror they cause. Every weapon ever developed by man has been used in combat at some point -- better they were used in war in 1945 than 1975.

I think the use of the bomb was indeed needed and it also showed the world that finally we had come up and took the seat as the world leader. We gave Japan warnings and they didnt want to have any part in backing down, they basically said "drop it we dare ya, chicken" Also by dropping that bomb the entire world learned a valueble lesson on what man kind is capable of. I'm just glad it wasn't dropped on us!

I for one and sick and tired of hearing about how many innocent civilians died as a result of the USA dropping the two A-bombs in those cities. People should really be asking how many millions of civilians through out China, the far east, and pacific died and suffered needlessly as a result of Japanese occupation since the 1920's. Just talk to the few remaining survivors of those occupations. Too many suffered and died my friends, way too many!!!! Japan started their quest for domination in that part of the world. Then they attacked us and dragged us into the war and got their butts handed to them in August of 1945. Our country did what was needed and should have no regrets about it. We should also take no crap for it either.

I shudder to think what would have happened if the Germans had actually beat the allies in the nuclear weapons race. If the USA didn't use it somebody else would have.

I am not one bit apologetic that we dropped the bomb on Japan. It was unfortunate that it had to occur, but keep in mind who attacked who.

I only wish that we would deal similarly with our current enemies, but somehow we've decided we need to fight war with one hand tied behind our back. I must add, however, that I wish also that we would stop being the world's police and only engage in war when we really need to defend the US or the one or two true allies of this country.

Those were two big `booms', but the scale of war was then, at least as I see it, WAY BIGGER, than it is now. I don't think many of us can comprehend a world at war. Example: I read in the newspapers that the death toll in the Israeli-Hisb.-Lebanon situation is still in the hundreds. Isn't that still really `nothing' compared to the wars through human history? And while our KIA in Iraq are in the low thousands, isn't that still really almost neglible compared to WWI and WWII? Do most of us really comprehend what war is even about? ...

In some ways no and in others yes. Those that lived during WW II knew of the war, but they didn't see the graphic images of war that were on the evening news starting with the Viet Nam war. Today we see the effects of war, sometimes in real time, e.g., the attack on the World Trade Center.

I think because of the constant state of war and the exposure to it we have become desensitized to it. It is almost like watching a video game.

On a slightly different note, I think we should quit referring to the current war as the war against terrorism and refer to it the war against radical Islam.