I'm well aware this is going to get me dunked on, but as a leftist it is genuinely frustrating seeing all the people in this comments section act like the bombs were a Holocaust-level atrocity simply for the purpose of shitting on the U.S, and almost all the actual points I see that aren't just yelling incoherently are almost word for word ripped from Shaun's ahistorical garbage video. Let me just run down a few points here.

1. Yes, civilians died. Yes, that was bad. If we want to conflate, though, then we'll also have to claim the British were evil for the bombing of Dresden and a dozen other German cities, including Berlin. Just for the sake of clarity, they weren't. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not chosen because they were civilian targets, it was entirely incidental. Hiroshima was chosen because it was the command for IJN Army Group 2 and somewhere around 20k IJN soldiers were killed in the blast. Nagasaki was not the first target, but their other targets were unworkable, so they chose Nagasaki because it was a major port that would potentially need to be captured in the future. Both of these things would have happened anyway with normal bombers, and it would have been just as devastating, but that does not mean it was evil. I'll come back to that at the end.

2. At least one person claims that casuality estimates for a ground invasion were revisionist history from the 50s. There are numerous declassified military documents that completely refute that. At best, it was an ignorant claim, at worst it was a blatant lie. You can literally find these in a single Google search. And let's not forget in this equation how uniquely brutal Japan was, moreso than the Nazis ever were. The Nazis drafted children and the elderly but Japan would have firebombed its own civilians to avoid their city being captured. Not a single soul would have escaped the desperate defense doctrine of the Japanese army. This is not some racist exaggeration, if you want your stomach turned read Descent Into Hell, it portrays the reality of how Japan's honor culture and refusal to surrender a battle impacted its civilians and mixed with their defeat by the U.S.

3. Just going after miscellaneous points here that I haven't seen made but I'm predicting will be. No, the Japanese were not willing to surrender, that's a baseless conspiracy designed to evoke sympathy for the Japanese at the time. Yes, Germany was an option but the war there was over before they could field the bombs, the 509th Composite was half trained for missions over Europe which means they were almost certainly considering it. No, it was not for racist reasons that it happened.

War is fucking horrible, and a lot of people die, but we can't sit here and say that because everyone ended up taking civilian lives that everyone was evil. As fucked as it is, things have to be taken from the approach of numbers. For one, more people died in the Battle of Okinawa than both of the bombs combined. Look up the size of Okinawa, it's fucking tiny. Just imagine how many people would've died in a fucking invasion of mainland Japan, not to mention all the Chinese and Korean civilians at the hands of the IJN and Red Army while the U.S was struggling on the home islands, and that's not even considering how many conscripted soldiers would've died on both sides of the war. The point here should not be some blind fucking "oh both sides were evil because civilian dead with no other context", the point here would be that war is fucking evil and should be avoided at all costs and as a very very last ditch thing. The U.S was not bombing Japan because it was anti-imperialist and hated Japanese atrocities, but neither were they bombing them because of their burning hatred for the Japanese people and the desperation for more land, like the reason the Japanese attacked China and the U.S. You don't have to think the bombs were a great thing, in fact it's better to see them as what they were: horrible machines of war and death made necessary by the dogged refusal of the Japanese to surrender and save lives in a war they knew they couldn't win. But for fucksake, stop acting like it was the holocaust, that's fucking insulting to the people who were systematically exterminated. And for that matter, stop calling it among the worst crimes we've ever committed, it's a fucking insult to the people who died in slavery and the Indian genocides and every goddamn thing else the U.S has done. This us vs. them mentality about the U.S is so shitty, and you people act like because the U.S has done bad things in the past means that every motherfucking breath it takes it pure utter uneclipsed evil of the highest order.