Boots, before making judgements about the A-bombing, it would be wise to know what led to that decision.  The battle of Okinawa in 1945 was the first on a Japanese home island and one of the bloodiest of the war.  More than 12,000 Americans were killed and more than 50,000 wounded.  The Japanese lost more than 150,000, many of them civilians.   The fanatical defense of their home land was a prelude to what would happened when the U.S. and its allies invaded the heavily populated main Japanese island planned for early 1946.  Estimates of allied casualties ran into the millions; many more for the Japanese.  The A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in the belief it would force the Japanese to surrender and put an end to the blood shed on both sides.   It took a second A-bomb on Nagasaki to do that.  More than 100,000 people were killed in the two bombings, but it was a fraction of the number that would have been killed in the planned invasions of the main islands.