But Don, surely you're not trying to make the argument that the viciousness of the Japanese justified even more viciousness on our part. It isn't a competition, you do something very bad so I'll do something worse and to hell with the morals, is it?

I note also that those people in this thread who disagree with me that there is little evidence that the bombs saved lives are at least being measured. It's a very tough matter, is this. I don't know whether doing things differently, that is by using the bomb in a more threatening rather than destructive mode, or not at all, would have cost more lives. Likewise, the people who express certainty that the bomb saved lives in the long run are deluded. Maybe the bomb did, maybe it didn't. The bomb's legacy was the Cold War, lest we forget, decades of stand-off that were far from victim-free. The one person expressing certainty in this thread, Teribus, is also the prime mover in getting us to adhere strictly to his personal versions of historical fact. Odd, then, that he can say that in the one breath yet resort to unjustified extrapolation, speculation even, in the next.