For the record, Fat Boy and Little Man killed far fewer people than our firebombings did.
The destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been vastly overstated, but that was kind of the point.
We bombed them for 2 reasons:
1) They didn't accept unconditional surrender.
2) We had to scare the Soviets some.
The second point became clear as they were doing things in Europe that could have led to a third world war. Japan basically became our sacrificial lamb to prove to the Soviets that we had a weapon that would annihilate them if they tried more "land acquisition" as the dust settled in Europe.
It was a pretty ballsy bluff, considering we didn't have any more nukes after these two bombings.
While it seems rather callous to nuke people to prove a point, it's worth considering some alternative actions.
1) If we really were interested in annihilating the Japanese, firebombs would have accomplished this fairly quickly. Their building materials were extremely flammable, and their air defense was pathetic by the end of the war.
2) We could have engaged in a land invasion of Japan, but that would have killed a lot more American soldiers, and the Japanese would have lost a lot more people than the nukes removed.
So, I don't think it's accurate at all to call the nukings "terror attacks." We were at war still, so really, the Japanese were at our mercy.
If the tables had been turned, there's no doubt that the Japanese would have nuked a West Coast city or two. The only reasons they didn't are because they didn't have the power to reach us at that point, and they didn't have nuke
s.
