The point was, we merely needed to lay siege and wait them out. The nuclear option may have the lesser Bad.
Or kick their ass and get it over with, which is exactly what happened.
Very poor choice because no matter how one tries to justify it, it was totally and completely illegal to attack whole cities of civilians.
There is no way to ever make that anything but a serious war crime, that sets an incredibly bad precedent.
You could almost justify attacking civilians in an democratic republic, where each individual is somewhat responsible for that the government does, but the civilians in imperial Japan were totally and completely innocent, since they had no part in starting the war.
You should try reading a history book if you believe that our use of atomic weapons was the first time a civilian population had been targeted during war time.
Of course it was not the first time civilians had been deliberately targeted, but it still is illegal each time it is done, like Dresden.
Plenty of Germans and Japanese were convicted and executed for their crimes against civilians, but so should a lot of Allied commanders, including Truman.
No one was charged or convicted for such.
How many cities were bombed with conventional weapons prior to our use of atomic weapons, from both sides, and no one was tried for that.
Deliberately bombing civilian populations with conventional weapons is clearly a war crime. The reason the Germans and Japanese were not charged with that is because they never did it. When London was bombed, it was the industrial centers that were targeted, not residential centers. And Hitler only stupidly attacked London at all because the British had first bombed Berlin, in June of 1940, and he reacted emotionally, as the British had hoped.
{...
When the Second World War began in 1939, the President of the
United States (then a neutral power),
Franklin D. Roosevelt, issued a request to the major belligerents to confine their air raids to military targets.
[4] The French and the British agreed to abide by the request, with the provision that this was "upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents".
[5]
The
United Kingdom had a policy of using aerial bombing only against military targets and against infrastructure such as ports and railways of direct military importance. While it was acknowledged that the aerial bombing of Germany would cause civilian casualties, the British government renounced the deliberate bombing of civilian property, outside combat zones, as a military tactic.
[6] This policy was abandoned on 15 May 1940, two days after the
German air attack on Rotterdam, when the RAF was given permission to attack targets in the
Ruhr, including oil plants and other civilian industrial targets that aided the German war effort, such as blast furnaces that at night were self illuminating. The first RAF raid on the interior of Germany took place on the night of 10 – 11 May (on
Dortmund).
[7] The
Jules Verne, a variant of the
Farman F.220 of the
French Naval Aviation, was the first Allied bomber to raid Berlin: on the night of 7 June 1940 it dropped eight bombs of 250 kg and 80 of 10 kg weight on the German capital.
...}
Bombing of Berlin in World War II - Wikipedia
There can be no doubt at all that the Allies were the first and only parties guilty of the war crimes of deliberately targeting civilian populations from the air. The fact those crimes were never prosecuted itself is just another crime.
