I'm not sure under the circumstance any other decision could be made.  What about London? Dresden? Tokyo?  

The good news is that once the full nature of the devastation became known, it has not happened again.

 I grew up under the shadow of the cold war. I wondered why we didn't have a bomb shelter in our basement.  I learned not to look at the flash of a nuclear bomb lest I go blind. (????) The first time I heard a sonic boom, I thought it was a bomb.  But nobody did it. Through all the wars and animosities since then, nobody used another atomic weapon.  That is a ray of hope for humanity.

Aug 6, 2012 -- 6:59PM, REteach wrote:

 

 I grew up under the shadow of the cold war. I wondered why we didn't have a bomb shelter in our basement.  I learned not to look at the flash of a nuclear bomb lest I go blind. (????) The first time I heard a sonic boom, I thought it was a bomb.  But nobody did it. Through all the wars and animosities since then, nobody used another atomic weapon.  That is a ray of hope for humanity.

All of which reminds me that we used to have a Civil Defense organization in this country, with considerable local, one might say,"grass roots" participation. Even us Boy Scouts had a role to play. as message runners, radio operators, first aid station orderlies, etc.

Now we don't, and in case of emergency we are apparently supposed to sit on our hands and wait for FEMA to do something.

Aug 6, 2012 -- 8:03PM, ted08721 wrote:

Teddy Rosevelt used the excuse that herding up several hundred unarmed Filipino men, women and children in a crator and killing them was no worst than what happened at Wounded Knee as it that was the moral standard that all actions should be held up to.

And now we have 90 thousand people cheer as a 20 million dollar death star  capable of killing thousands of people flies over a stadium as the National Anthem is sung.

It is enough to make one vomit.

Teddy Roosevelt was involved in the Phillipine genocide?(before Hitler, the worlds highest-body-count in attempted extermination, and i learned this from an underground comic; no way in hell was any organ of the Public Fool System teach that the USG is not to be trusted, eh?)

If you've got a source for that, i'd like to get hip.

And what "20-million dollar death star" are you referring to?  And "capable of killing thousands" is definitely way below what a single H-bomb would kill, if targeted on a densely-populated area.

With goodwill to all the People(save corporate-owned Oathbreaking scum)-

Hatman

As bad as the bombing of Hiroshima must have been I believe it saved more lives by ending the war than were lost during the bombing.

I have read quotes where many japanese felt the same way.

Firebombing of Dresden: Feb 13-15, 1945

Firebombing of Tokyo:   March - August, 1945

Hiroshima:                    August 6, 1945

Nagasaki:                      August 9, 1945

Totals a quarter-million people incinerated in a war that was already over.

Nice work, patriots.