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It is easy to sit here, 60 years after the fact, and say that dropping the bombs was unnecessary. Without our temporal vantage, however, the issue becomes much more complex. Truman had the weight of well over 200,000 dead Americans on his conscience when he made the decision to end a war that had consumed lives at a horrific rate for 3 1/2 years. It is hardly reasonable to expect a man in those circumstances to avoid using the most effective weapon in his arsenal because there might possibly be fewer total people killed if he didn't drop the bombs. I would imagine he was thinking mostly of American lives that would be saved. Surely, none of us would say that the bombs didn't save the lives of Allied soldiers? Killing the enemy isn't seen as a drawback when your nation is fighting a world war.
I have never understood the villification of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They weren't the deadliest bombings of civilians in WWII. I can only conclude that the nuclear critics have never heard of Dresden. The only special thing about Hiroshima was that we dropped one bomb instead of thousands. You're just arguing against technological efficiency, not against death tolls because, as I alluded to, Dresden was the site of the largest number of civilian casualties from a bombing campaign, not Hiroshima.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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