#nuclear weapons are and remain an indefensible evil

[qqueenofhades]

Two genuine questions: was it REALLY necessary to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and were those two cities European ones (read: full of white people) do you think we still would've made the decision to bomb them?

People have been arguing from the moment it happened whether it was necessary, justifiable, or in any way required, when the war was almost over and Japan was going to lose anyway. My personal view is that it is and remains a completely indefensible action, especially since a) Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively unimportant civilian cities with only some military infrastructure, b) Japan was already under heavy conventional bombing that had devastated the mainland, and c) there was no way, ever, that the west was going to drop a nuclear bomb on mainland Europe. So yes, Japan's geographical distance and non-whiteness played pivotal roles in this, especially after American propaganda stereotyped Japanese people as wild yellow savages and, let us not forget, put Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps for the duration of the war. You can read the Wikipedia page about the post-1945 debate here.