A Reality Check for Those Who Deplore the Nuking of Japan

"In the decades immediately following World War II, American public opinion generally supported President Truman's historic decision to unleash nuclear weapons on Japan.  Everyone accepted that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an unfortunate necessity brought on by the unwillingness of Japan to surrender.  Those two bombs, which killed over 140,000 civilians, were viewed as a way to avoid the obscene costs in men and materiel associated with invading the Japanese homeland.

 

Nowadays, many question whether those bombs were necessary.  Given that they killed almost exclusively civilians and that the second of the two was dropped only two days after the first, many people have concluded that the attack was immoral.  Today, the typical American is likely to react to the words "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki" with a vague sense that our country did something wrong."

[American Thinker}