Zé Tahir said:
Why the hell does it matter whether we speak German or Japanese. Frankly, Japan could have been defeated without the use of the atomic bomb. Yes, it did speed up the process, but also devestated an area for centuries to come.
The atomic bomb was really just the "Shock and Awe" campaign of its day.
The US did far, far worse damage, death, and destruction with their firebombing campaigns of all major Japanese cities leading up to the drop of the atomic bomb. On one night in March 1945 alone, US firebombs leveled Tokyo and killed some 100,000 civilians -- though it only seems that the atomic bomb gets all the notoriety.
Not that we need to put "weights of merit" on man's atrocities against himself, but the whole firebombing thing gets glossed over for the A-bomb. And the A-bomb gets all the protests for some reason -- and this despite the fact that the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were puny by today's standards (they would be classified as tactical, not strategic, weapons).
The irony being that, just as in Iraq, the A-bomb's shock and awe campaign was mostly a failure. The ranking officials in the Japanese military were not impressed and felt that they had endured far worse damage -- such as the firebombing campaigns months before. It was really only the initiative of the Emperor a little while after the second bomb was dropped that things came to an end.
Whether or not those A-bombs were necessary at that stage is still debatable. What isn't debatable is that those A-bombs get an immensely disproportionate amount of credit -- both positive and negative.