Freda:

All the people you are choosing as authorities:

Had no idea what the atomic bomb was.
Were not directly involved in the decision making including the facts behind the decision making. In particular, Eisenhour was fighting the war in Europe and no way knew the whole story on the Pacific. MacArthur was later to recommend the use of the bomb to win the Korean War.

I find your references to these folk and the others in your repeated post to be suspicious, unless you can cite sources.

As for a lot of the other responses, equating violence with violence, let's back up to whether or not you think Hitler deserved to be defeated with violence, whether occupied France deserved to be invaded at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. It had a working government at the time, after all, (several of them!)

The original post confused its casualty figures by citing the ultimate death count with the immediate casualties of the blast. I was astonished to see that the original post was a quotation of a hysterical poster from Australia. The Japanese had as their stated objective the colonization of Australia, and they tried.

The damage of the atomic bombs to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was indeed terrible, but it was on the same scale as the damage to Tokyo from massive fire bombing raids wrought by an extremely 'advanced' and large bomber, the B-29, which was developed from a project almost as expensive as The Manhattan Project. These planes were pulverizing Japan and Japan had essentially no defenses. They had run out of the fuel supplies necessary to export their own violence. Their airforce was gone, their navy defeated, but their ability to assume defensive positions that could only be assailed at great cost was demonstrated all through the war, and there was no evidence that the home island would be any different.

As for the motivation of the US re: Russia, I refer you again to records of the decision making within the US that indicate the dropping of the bomb on Japan to end the war was gone into at many levels, and not everyone agreed. That's to be expected in a Democratic government.

There are a lot of good books on this subject. It's a worthwhile subject because it's one of the most important events of the Twentieth Century, if not the most important (the entire Nuclear story). It gave us the world we live in today.