First, I wonder just how old you are.

Were you alive during the years of 1939-45?

Have you ever served in uniform in combat?

If not, then your entire thesis is nothing but a feelings based opinion not rooted in reality?

Ask any soldier, sailor or airman during the titanic struggle if they had any other thought besides doing their job ( which was destroying the enemy and its will to continue ) and getting home in alive and in one piece.

War is hard!

War is brutal !

Total war means that civilains will die.

Such is the reality of human struggle and WWII was the definitive example of such.

As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki- I suggest you put aside your post-mortum emotionalism and try looking at what happened from the lens of 1945.

In the first place we had no assurance that the first uranium bomb to be dropped would even work. It had never been tried before in an airburst situation.

Moreover, the Japanese were responsible for the actions of their militaristic government ( as were the Germans and Italians ) which had rejected the Potsdam Declaration issued a few weeks before the automic missions.

Are you aware of the casualties we and the Japanese endured at Iwo Jima or Okinawa?

I suggest you find any US Marine still alive and ask him how finatical the Japanese soldier was and see if they buy into your worldview of how imoral we were to have dropped the bombs.

Check out Operation Coronet and Olympic and see what the projected casualties would have been for a Novemember 1945 invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Japan was not in a position to dictate any terms but complete unconditional surrender.

They started the war in China and later by attacking the US at Pearl Harbor and the UK and Dutch through their aggressive aims.

Failure in war has terrible consequences.

Never start a war that you cannot win and even Admiral Yamamoto knew that Japan had no chance of ultimate victory when faced with the enormous resources and industrial capabilities of the USA.

You try to draw a moral equivalnce to the actions of the USA against Japan and the goals of modern terrorists like OBL and have failed completely.

If not for the benevolence of our occupation in Japan after the war, Japan would have resembled Poland or Hungary both poltically and socially.

If you cannot see the difference- nothing will change your view.

I’ve been working on a paper on emotion in political science education, because lately I’ve felt like there’s almost no academic space to talk about what you’re describing here, even though I think it profoundly shapes our work and the scholars and people we become through it.

I can’t thank you enough for this, Richard. It’s incisive and crucial. I needed it; I think we all do.