JustinSF comments

War really is hell. Japan showed little to no mercy towards her enemies and showed no signs of giving up. To the US leadership and to anybody confronted with the reality of possibly invading Japan the bomb would have appeared very attractive because it would mean fewer allied casualties. As to those who argued the question, "what would make the lives of Allied soldiers more valuable than the lives of the Japanese?" My response is as follows... the lives of the Japanese were in universal terms no less valuable than any other, but when at war each side disregarded the value of their enemies' lives. If Japan had possession of the bomb before the Americans I am sure that the Emperor would have been more than happy to use it against his enemies.

The most haunting legacy of the bomb for future generations of the world is not so much the loss of life in the ill-fated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but the ever-looming prospect of nuclear war and global proliferation. Once the first atomic bomb had been created and tested for the first time in the deserts of the American South-West there was no turning back. For Stalin it was not as important to him that he knew how the bomb could be made but that he simply knew that the bomb worked when news confirmed just how effective the bomb was at simply making entire cities disappear in mere seconds. The fact that it did work means that global nuclear proliferation can't be stopped but only curtailed.