Sure, Hiroshima was no worse than Dresden or Tokyo. I respectfully disagree that it was justified, I take the view all three are war crimes. I fully understand

Sure, Hiroshima was no worse than Dresden or Tokyo. I respectfully disagree that it was justified, I take the view all three are war crimes. I fully understand that a lot of people believe Hiroshima was necessary. And at the time I am sure a lot of the people involved believed it (not arguing this). But this was kind of my point. And you pretty much say as much. They were happy to sacrifice a hundred thousand innocents for the benefit of reducing the hard slog. We know now the Japanese forces were close to spent (relatively speaking). We know now they had offered conditional terms to the soviets. It is arguable that the US, in communications with the soviets, also knew the soviets were preparing to attack Japan, knew of Japans lack of offensive capability, but were concerned that the terms of surrender may end in a carve up of japan with the soviets. This was a careful and premeditated attack to further american interests for the post war, rather than a do or die fight for survival. Even with hindsight, (as in, if you knew then what you know now) people are loathe to admit it may not have been the correct course of action. Thing is, even when we know what we know now, and with the benefit of being someone without 'skin in the game', mentally, most people are with Thanos on these things. Somehow when faced with the scale of events people lose their shit, are unable to make morally defensible decisions. How about approaching it from an individual point of view and scaling up from there, what if a person burned someone alive because they believed it would deter some other person from invading their home? And the reason I brought it up, it is a well known story where the views of the designers, the victims, the proponents are all well known. Only one of them quit during the project, they all knew what they were doing. They knew it would kill children. Some of them cared, not enough to stop doing it. No idea who designed the cluster bombs. The only other well known weapons designer who has brought as much havoc I could think of is Kalashnikov, but that case is less certain. The cluster bombs, the atomic bomb, they were designed to kill indiscriminately. They knew it.