Wow, it just keeps on coming.

Ok, Caio, you REALLY need to stop misquoting others or reading what you want to hear into their statements. It’s sloppy and childish, and from your statements, you don’t strike me as either, so quit being lazy.
Atrocities had nothing to do whether a country deserved to be bombed. The Japanese attacked the US and knew damn well what the consequences of that could be. The intelligence services of the Allies and Axis powers were all well aware that their respective scientists were working on atomic weapons. It was a case of who would finish them first. Recently released documents show Japan was working on atomic weaponry as well. Atomic bombs aside, all sides in that war knew it would be a bloody affair in which civilian casualties were a matter of course whether they “deserved” it or not. You pick a fight, you’d better damn well be prepared to get a bloody nose. Japan happened to be unlucky enough to be a remote island nation that was perfect for the atomic bomb with little chance of allied casualties. Something Germany was most definitely not. (Plus by that point Germany was in such a shambles it would have been a tactical waste of firepower.)
As for mitigating circumstances. Nothing is black and white, especially during war. It’s easy to sit back and critique 60 years later or from the safety of your living room watching a situation on the news. Try actually living/working/fighting in those events and I think you’d have a much different opinion than you do now. That being said, I do believe the people of a nation should take responsibility for their nation’s actions. That goes for the US as much as anyone else. Something a majority of modern Japanese tend not to do in the case of WWII.
Finally, the intelligence and military (tho in WWII those were pretty much one and the same, OSS, SAS, etc.)services of the Allies were aware of what was going on in both Korea and China during the war, due to their operatives and the reports they were receiving from the Russians. The general population and rank and file soldiers may not have known, but the military command and Allied governments sure as hell did. That, combined with the Pearl Harbor, Iwo jima, etc incidents, Japan’s resolve to fight to the bitter end despite repeated entreaties to call an end to the war and as stated above, their location, made the decision to use the A bomb on them a logical and expedient one, if not an morally easy one. The only revisionism going on here is your attempt to paint the US in the worst light possible, which, in light of the government’s behavior over the past few years, has become an simple and popular thing to do.
That being said, please do as I asked earlier. Do some serious, non Wiki based research on the events of that time, you might be surprised at what you find.

Reboot, at what point in my post did I allude that “what non-wiki scholarly works would you recommend that justify the use of atomic weapons?”
I don’t seem to recall “justifying” the use of them at all. I DID point out the military/government’s tactical/political reasons for using the Atom Bomb, however justified/unjustified it may have been. As I said, and am apparently going to have to reiterate, IT WAS WAR. In WAR you attempt to defeat your ENEMY with as few of your OWN casualties as possible. Something that would not have occurred had the Allies continued fighting the Japanese with conventional tactics/weaponry. The Japanese had rebuffed any attempts to end the war and made it very clear to all that they fully intended to drag out the conflict as long and as bloodily as possible. While the use of the A-bomb was a horrific and devastating thing, it DID force the Japanese to surrender almost immediately after their use. Explain to me please why you think the Allies should have continued to send more young men into the meat grinder instead of ending the war the way they did. (That would be interesting as I’m sure you think we should pull our young men and women out of the current slaughterhouse going on in the middle east. Or would you rather we stayed there until the bitter end and watch the death toll continue to rise month after month, year after year, the way you seem to think we should have in the Pacific Rim in the 1940’s.)

Finally, I suggested that people use non-Wiki sources to research THE HISTORICAL EVENTS OF THAT TIME, NOT the justification of atomic warfare. I don’t like Wikipedia as a primary research tool for several reasons, which I’m not even going to bother going into here. Your attempt to Strawman me was childish and sad. As I stated to Ciao earlier, your posts seem to indicate you have a brain, and cheap tactics like that should be beneath both of you.

How ironic that you chose quotes from articles written YEARS after the war had ended and the bombings had since been universally condemned. Think maybe all those people were trying to absolve and distance themselves from an horrific event they were themselves responsible for? Ya know, kind of how the Bush Administration is doing now regarding the problems in Iraq?

Plus the only person you quoted who offered an alternative to the dropping of the A bomb said this:
“[I] concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945.”

So in his OPINION, Japan would have surrendered in a “matter of months”. Months that would have meant thousands of more Allied casualties as they followed the slow and arduous battle plan he laid out, (not that that particular plan would have been guaranteed of being carried out OR of being successful).

The other quotes you gave OPINIONS on Japan’s state of surrender. NO factual evidence to back those statements up. Where were the reports of Japanese envoys offering surrender entreaties prior to the bombing? How about photo ops of officials meeting prior? Or declassified documents showing meetings between the Allies and Japan to discuss surrender prior to the bombing? None. Japan offered it’s OFFICIAL surrender AFTER the bombings. Period. All you have is a bunch of old men trying to absolve themselves of blame and guilt years after vaporizing two cities.

Let me guess: you entered “reasons that bombing hiro and naga was a bad idea” or something to that effect into the Wikipedia search engine, and this is what came up.

Jebus, if it was such a pointless and horrible thing, then why did the three men that held some of the highest positions of power during that war(though by the time of the bombing MacArthur was no longer trusted by the administration and had been removed from his frontline command because he was irrational and out of control, which is why he wasn’t consulted), do NOTHING to stop it when the order was sent out? Truman was batshit crazy and nobody could stop him? Yeaaaahh right.

“SQUAAACK, I DON’T DEBATE I JUST REPEAT MY ARGUMENT MINDLESSLY! SQUAAACK!”

Tell you what reboot, why don’t you go out into the world, see some of it, read some literature all the way through instead of quotes or sound bites, experience some other cultures, open your mind beyond what Wikipedia and the TV tell you to think and then come back here and try to have a rational adult debate about an issue. Until then, I have no time for you and your pedantic little views or the way you choose to express them. I say good day to you sir.

I say good day!

Hee hee. Black baby. You are a bad man Alec.

It’s funny that Mac got pulled from active duty for that when he claimed years later that he was against using atomic weapons.