Anthony Leone comments

Nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nothing short of field tests of combat nuclear devices. Plain and simple

technosphere, if you have any proof of this I would love to see it.

But you have to realize that in war it is an us vs them. As LFRAgain rightly pointed out, the Japanese did try to attack American cities and that they and Germany were trying to developed the bomb first. If you think they wouldn't have used it you are sadly mistaken.

@technosphere

History doesn't know words such as "could", "would", "should".

No, but our military leaders had a pretty good idea of what would happen based on experience and knowledge of the Japanese people. Many on here are right when saying the death toll of the Americans and the Japanese would have been far worst than what happened with those two A-bombs.

That said, I'm not willing to jeopardize the existence of my wife and children either.

Whenever this comes up, a lot of people say how evil this was. And perhaps they are right, but it was a necessary evil. The other option was to drop more napalm and watch Tokyo burn to the ground, killing a lot more people. The other option was a complete invasion, which would have resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1 million Americans and unknown numbers of Japanese, according to some historical accounts that I read.

But that being said, I have a completely biased reason as to why I am glad that we dropped the bombs on Japan. You see my wife is from Japan and her parents were very small children living in Tokyo during World War II. Had the Americans invaded Japan or continued their napalm drops, there is a very real possibility that her parents would have died or perhaps never met.

And if they died, I wouldn't' have met my wife and we wouldn't have two beautiful children together.

So while I hope that we would never use nuclear weapons on each other again, I will say that I would never change the outcome of what happened in Japan either.