> or something like what happened against the Japanese. By the time the nukes were dropped, the 60 or so largest cities in Japan had been decimated by bombing

> or something like what happened against the Japanese. By the time the nukes were dropped, the 60 or so largest cities in Japan had been decimated by bombing (Kyoto was famously spared largely because of the sympathies of a single officer). When Tokyo was firebombed over 100k civilians were burned alive in a single night, the overwhelming majority of them women, children, and old men. Justified as it may have been, we shouldn't promote a mythology that WW2 was a clean and narrowly targeted campaign by the allies. There's an excellent documentary by Errol Morris named The Fog of War that has McNamara's very frank commentary on these issues. You also can find some letters Churchill wrote where he was engaging with these questions, such as asking himself if the fire bombing was morally much different from the use of chemical agents during WW1. Any sort of pre-emptive strike by the US vs the USSR would have been similarly ugly, with very real human cost to ordinary people with no agency in the situation.