Was the bombing of Hiroshima necessary?

Is killing thousands of civilians, mostly women and children necessary? Is that what you are asking? If so, you're forgetting about the numbers lost to incendiary attacks from March 1945 to July 1945.....

While it's easy to focus on the two nuclear attacks, the majority of the other Japanese cities were oblitereted during the summer of 1945 with far more deaths than Hiroshima & Nagasaki combined.

Fewer people died from the nuclear attacks than who died in the incendiary attacks on Tokyo and other Japanese cities.... In a period of ten days starting March 9, a total of 1,595 sorties delivered 9,373 tons of bombs against Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe destroying 31 square miles of those cities most people think the most destuctive air raid in history was the Atomic Bomb. NOT SO. The Japanese empire was almost totally destroyed by summer 1945.

On March 9-10, 1945, an air raid on Tokyo killed an estimated 100,000 people in a single night of fire.

U.S. warplanes shower the sky with rivulets of fire, and thousands of corpses — many of them women and children — clot Tokyo's main river. Flaming victims plummet in agony from a burning bridge.

At this stage in the war, civilians on both sides were feeling the effect of total war...indiscriminate carpet bombing, V1/V2 attacks, and yes, the nuclear attacks.

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While it's nice to try and moralize war, those who do so are most likely to be defeated, that to me is the lesson of Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima....

Books on the Hiroshima Bombing