General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: No Choice: Why Harry Truman Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan [View all]That's a bit harsh. Most folks at the time knew little about what the bomb was and would do. What they would have been told, and would have believed, was that it would advance the war. It had become habitual which is why events like Dresden could happen, the public had become rather numb to the effects of war on the enemy, even citizens of those countries. Remember, we bombed the heck out of France and we were trying to "rescue" them. The concept of Total War had pretty well been accepted by then. It isn't really clear how many of the people involved in the decision to drop the bomb, really understood what it was other than a "really big bomb". Dropping big bombs, or lots of bombs, had become relatively common by then. It would have been a fairly accepted point of view among the population that if we had such a thing, we should use such a thing.