As if military action justifies vaporizing civilians

It was either the west Nuke two cities or the soviet union would have gotten more land in Asia.

Wasn’t it either nukes or ground invasion?

I'm usually more of a "let things sort themselves out" sorta guy myself, but i completely believe the bombing was an ethical thing to do.

The ground invasion had a chance of failure and catastrophic casualties on both sides.

Military casualties

Yes but Japan would have surrendered a few months after if America did Nuke Japan even if Amercia didn't lead an invasion

There's always civilian casualties in war

That doesn't mean you can deliberately target them

It did.

If America didn't then how much more land would the Soviet Union have gotten?

Doesn't now, of course. our LOAC and ROE are vastly different.

The Soviet Union collapsed by itself anyway

More then 50 years latter.

60 years later

And I wouldn't just consider Japan as Russian territory if that happened. China, too.

More than it is, by communism's control

How does that translate to "leveling cities is ethical"?

I mean if Japan wasn't nuked the war wold have continued for a few more months giving the Soviet Union more time to take more land From Japan. What if they had enough time to take all of Korea?

Then Korea would've been part of the Soviet Union for 60 years, I guess?

So?

Depends on what you think is ethical. Are things better in the Pacific and Asia without Japan or Soviet rule, or would they be better off?

Yes and that would mean the Communist world would have been bigger which is a bad thing for the non-communist world.

I support the nukes. At the least, it ended the war for Japan

A prolonged war would have been bad for everyone involved

It was necessary to prevent the Soviets gaining more land.

I bet Tim supports the nukes. Koreans hate the Japanese.

I see. A situational ally of ours might take more land, so we need to kill a ton of noncombatants in a completely different country

Pretty much.

I refer to the meme that started this topic.

Don't get me wrong, Pearl Harbor was *also* unethical
Unprovoked attacks tend to be

the japanese population was trained to die trying to protect their land from invasion, we saw that behavure from the invasion of okinawa. the major japanese islands would have been even more martyristic than that. the nukes were used to express to the japanese government the full extent at which the united states would take to end the war by unleashing a weapon like the world had never seen before. if the nukes hadent actually had that effect we wouldent have used any more afterwords and infact the nukes didint actually contribute to as much death per square mile as our firebombing did

I don't think the firebombing from all sides of the war was all that great either

its war

the world wars are seen as terrible for reasons