Question:
Now I know that some people support the nukes because they believe that it was a lesser of two evils. It saved more lives. This question is NOT directed towards you.
This question is directed towards those who believe that nuking Japan was ok because the Japanese military was doing some pretty awful things at the time. I've never understood this argument because weren't both Hiroshima and Nagasaki primarily populated with civilians? The US military did some pretty awful stuff during Vietnam but does that mean that the Vietnamese should have nuked Washington DC or New York (if they had the nukes that is).
This is NOT a question about whether or not the nukes were justified. This is a question to people who use the "Japan deserved it" justification for the nukes, not the "it saved more lives" justification. I just don't see the justification if you see it like that
Answer:
Ah, the luxury of Monday-morning quarterbacking from the safety of one's own cozy and safe living room in peacetime, especially when one isn't fully appraised of the facts.
We did try to avoid civilian targets when we first began bombing the Japanese home islands, employing the same thinking that we had used on Germany. Unfortunately, Japan wasn't laid out in European fashion. You see, in Europe the industrial setup was the way we in the West take for granted, that factories are these big box buildings all clustered together and separate from residential areas, and relatively easy to target from the air. In Japan, the machine shops producing the weapons were literally thousands of home workshops, with few actual assembly plants. It was impossible NOT to bomb civilian areas.
In addition, we were tiring of the war that had been forced upon us. We tend to forget after all these years of peace that wars, REAL wars, are fights to the finish, and they don't end until the losing side says they do. The quickest way to make the losing side in any fight give up is to hurt them enough, or in this case, kill enough of them, that they are actually eager to surrender. We had already been killing massive numbers in firebombing raids in order to eliminate their ability to make war, and we had already had a taste of what it was like to attack them when they had their backs to the wall, as they did on Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Sending a single plane with a single bomb sent them a message they could not ignore, even though the damage and death count from the atomic attacks was a fraction of the destruction of even a single firebomb attack. It shocked them so that they crossed a cultural line that had been inbred into the Japanese since prehistoric times and surrendered.
And while we're on the subject, the two targets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were targets of convenience, and NOT the primaries. The primary targets, both chosen because of their high conventional industrial layout, were socked in, and in those days that meant that any bombing attack couldn't be made with sufficient precision to satisfy our Judeo-Christian moral sense of always avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties whenever possible, so the pilots diverted to the secondaries.
Also, please observe that it has been the FEAR of nuclear war that has stayed the hands of all concerned, and led to the development of such precision munitions-delivery systems that it's now likely that nuclear weapons may never need be employed, since we can take out as many home workshops as we like, while leaving the home intact.
