Genocide in the Old Testament

[Tonus]

They bombed Nagasaki when Japan failed to surrender the first time around to show they weren't joking they even had another one lined up for another city. While that behavior is horrifying to us we're in the comfortable position of not being in a state of total war.

I haven't read up on WW2 history in years, but I recall that there are two camps regarding this. The second atomic bomb was dropped two days after the first, giving the Japanese a pretty short window for accepting surrender terms that were very harsh. Some writers claim that the Japanese were very close to accepting the terms, while others claim that the military was preparing a coup to prevent this from happening. It's difficult to say how 'necessary' the second bomb was, but I think it accelerated the process.

And consider that at the time there was very little sympathy for the Japanese nation from US citizens. If the two plans (invasion by allied armies on Japanese soil vs dropping two "city killer" bombs) had been presented to the public, I suspect that the second option would have passed overwhelmingly and probably even enthusiastically. Dropping those bombs at the time was the "easy choice." Only the passing of time and our understanding of the full effects of nuclear weapons (along with the growth in both number and power of those weapons) has made it clearer just what we unleashed on the Japanese in August 1945.