>100,000 civilians killed instantly and an additional 130,000 died from the exposure afterwards and till this day no official excuse from the US.
With all due respect to the enormous civilian suffering behind yours and the following numbers, why should there be an official excuse other than the obvious of winning the war against a barbaric enemy that had already ferociously invaded most of eastern Asia, the western Pacific and ruthlessly killed over 15 million people in the process?
The atomic bombings, by the perspective of the time and what had already been done, weren't even so terrible in terms of dead. The mass firebombing campaigns of the entire last couple years of the war against Japanese cities, using completely conventional weapons, had already killed possibly as many as 700,000 people with hardly any allied leader batting an eye, or the U.S. public for that matter. Given this mentality, and the subsequent lack of an apology for those conventional bombings, what would have made the atomic bombings deeply unique? (except for the nature of the bombs themselves).
Let's not also forget that Japan itself did everything possible to make the use of atomic bombs seem reasonable, having promised repeatedly that it would fight even in the face of horrendous casualties both for its own people and the forces of any invading army. Given the absolutist stance of Japanese forces in the field previous to those last weeks, fighting until every last man is dead and killing as many civilians as they could in the process, on directives and mentalities instilled directly from Tokyo, it's not hard to see why the Americans took seriously the idea of an unimaginable bloodbath in any potential invasion of the home islands.
Just look at the battles of Okinawa, in which the local forces encouraged their own local civilians to commit mass suicide as they lost the island, or the battle of Manilla, in which the knowingly losing Japanese just kept fighting, butchering, raping and burning the city solely for the sake of doing so.
Yes, but the people making those threats aren't the people who were killed. As you yourself say, they were civilians; and they certainly weren't in Manilla.
So were those in Tokyo and the other 72 cities levelled in bombing campaigns on Japanese homeland prior to the two additional cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But i'm not sure what your point is. If you're referring to the tragedy of those civilians killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's grotesque, but how is it different from the tragedy of million of civilians killed by the Empire during its conquests, or the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by the U.S. bombing raids with conventional weapons before the nuclear bombs were dropped, or most crucially, the possibly millions of civilians and soldiers who could have been killed if the American forces had directly invaded?
Under the lack of foresight at the time, and given the nature of Japanese belligerence, it's not hard to understand why the U.S decided to drop the two atom bombs, given what they'd already done while still facing Japanese intransigence. Maybe it wasn't the most moral of choices, but under the circumstances, it had an understandable logic of hardened pragmatism that it's too easy to sweep under a rug of condemnation today with foresight, which itself might be mistaken even now.
With all due respect to the enormous civilian suffering behind yours and the following numbers, why should there be an official excuse other than the obvious of winning the war against a barbaric enemy that had already ferociously invaded most of eastern Asia, the western Pacific and ruthlessly killed over 15 million people in the process?
The atomic bombings, by the perspective of the time and what had already been done, weren't even so terrible in terms of dead. The mass firebombing campaigns of the entire last couple years of the war against Japanese cities, using completely conventional weapons, had already killed possibly as many as 700,000 people with hardly any allied leader batting an eye, or the U.S. public for that matter. Given this mentality, and the subsequent lack of an apology for those conventional bombings, what would have made the atomic bombings deeply unique? (except for the nature of the bombs themselves).
Let's not also forget that Japan itself did everything possible to make the use of atomic bombs seem reasonable, having promised repeatedly that it would fight even in the face of horrendous casualties both for its own people and the forces of any invading army. Given the absolutist stance of Japanese forces in the field previous to those last weeks, fighting until every last man is dead and killing as many civilians as they could in the process, on directives and mentalities instilled directly from Tokyo, it's not hard to see why the Americans took seriously the idea of an unimaginable bloodbath in any potential invasion of the home islands.
Just look at the battles of Okinawa, in which the local forces encouraged their own local civilians to commit mass suicide as they lost the island, or the battle of Manilla, in which the knowingly losing Japanese just kept fighting, butchering, raping and burning the city solely for the sake of doing so.