Opinion of the atomic bombings of Japan

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Voted option 2.  Have made my reasons known many times on this forum, so there is no need to rehash them.

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Just for the record, on one night in March, 1945, the numbers of people killed in the Tokyo firebombings exceeded the number of those who died in the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And bombings of Tokyo had been ongoing since early 1942.  Tokyo civilians were not spared for any special reasons during the Pacific War.   

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Ok, since questions are being asked here, I am going to make my case again, in somewhat different terms than before.

Wars are waged to achieve political ends.  Japan was organizing an all-out defense of the mainland in 1945 not for the purposes of winning the war, since by that time such a goal was entirely out of reach, but for the purposes of making an all-out-allied invasion too costly and so giving themselves leverage for a slightly more favorable armistice deal.  The point is that what was at stake was not the outcome of the Pacific War, but the terms of Japan's surrender.  With the Potsdam Declaration leaving any overt hands off Hirohito and with the Soviets poised to join the war, the initiation of the latter, without the dropping of the bombs, at least increased the chances that Japan would capitulate, since Japan was counting on Soviet help to broker a peace deal for them.  This was even the view expressed by Eisenhower. So, in the end, between 150,000 and 250,000 people, mostly civilians, had to die because we couldn't wait for Stalin to move in Manchuria and take a few weeks to see what would happen?   And regarding estimations of casualties as a result of a Kyushu invasion, they were all over the place at the time, and the larger estimates all assumed massive civilian resistance, which was, and still is, a matter of sheer speculation and which, I think, there are good reasons to believe would not have been so massive.

One of the things that always troubles me a bit in these kinds of debates are throwaway assessments like: "oh, those civilian casualties were horrific, but..."  I know this reaction is prompted by concerns that far more civilians would have died in a land invasion, and so I do have some sympathy for those who make recourse to them for that reason.  But since, given the historical realities, what should follow the word "but..." in assessments like those above are what the terms of Japan's surrender were going to look like, I can't help but think still that civilian war casualties really don't matter much to Americans as long as they're not our own.  "If they get us better surrender terms, then, well, too bad but ok."  But when we kill hundreds of thousands of civilians with atomic bombs on purpose just to improve surrender treaty terms, it's fairly hard for us to jump up and down with self-righteous indignation when other military forces target civilians.  What my dad, who was on an aircraft carrier on the way to Japan when the bombs were dropped, believed was that it's the job of military men to risk their lives for their country; it's not their job to barter for their own lives at the cost of civilian lives, even when those civilians live in the country you're at war with.  He called it "a mortal sin" to mass-murder civilians...and it is.  

I think opebo is really on to something in what he says about the use of the bombs "setting a tone" for the next half-century and more.  But, for me, in a moral sense, sometimes it's a very short journey from nationalism to barbarism, and, at the end of WWII, we crossed that line.  There is no question that the Japanese military crossed that line long before we did, given what they did in China and other parts of East Asia, as well as with their tactics on the battlefield.  But that didn't mean we had to cross that line too.