If war broke out tomorrow....

[A Black Falcon]

One misconception -- 500000 is all the deaths from American bombing. Hiroshima was about 100,000-150,000 immediate casualties (ie not counting the thousands of later deaths from radiation poisoning), and Nagasaki 30-40 thousand or so... the rest of those were from conventional bombings, including the Tokyo firebombing that was early in our bombing campaign and killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people.

World War II was probably the worst and least moral war ever fought. Tens of millions of innocent civilians died. And only a tiny fraction of the people who killed those civilians were punished... including of course virtually none of the Allied ones because we won so we wouldn't persecute ourselves!

And Weltall it's because of what we said. Killing enemy soldiers? Okay, they were directly threatening you so I can see why you'd do that. But civilians are not... and it's not like killing them will make the people you are killing want to give up it will just harden their resolve especially in a state like Japan at that time. The goal should be the fewest casualties, and of the casualties the fewest civilians (an invasion wouldn't have been a great alternative here either of course because huge numbers of civilians would have died in that too, by accident or in mass attacks against the Americans that the Japanse would do...). Just because those people hated America because they were told to doesn't make it okay to kill them! They have the right to life too, and it should be our responsibility to find the best way out. We didn't really do that here. We took the easy way, with no casualties for us but massive ones for them... that is more palpable to Americans but objectively not any more moral than having large casualties for both sides. I cannot believe that there was no way to avoid mass slaughter on a scale never before seen.