Hiroshima and Nagasaki

With the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. DIRECTLY targeted civilians.  They also directly targeted civilians with the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden.  The Japanese and German GOVERNMENTS committed many atrocities, but that in no way makes it moral or right for the U.S. to murder civilians in those countries.

You can make all the arguments you want about how murdering these civilians brought an early end to the war.  This does not change the fact that civilian men, women, and children were murdered.  When other people do this, we call them terrorists.  That label applies equally here.

So, instead of going in (with the Russians, btw) and killing nearly EVERYONE in Japan, we nuked two cities.  Seems like far fewer Japanese (and Americans/Russians, et. al.) died this way.   Seriously, NOT nuking those two Japanese cities would have led to far more people dying than did from the A-bombs.  The Japanese had to be shown that they had no choice but to surrender.  We did that by killing a couple hundred thousand people without losing any of our own (no honor in being nuked).

Also, the Japanese and German PEOPLE committed quite a few atrocities themselves - rape of Nanking anyone?  Bataan death march ring any bells?  Maybe you've heard of the holocost, or the blitz when the CIVILIANS of London were targeted?  To say it was the government, and not the people, commiting these atrocities is naive at best.  The armies are made up of people, not robots.

btw, it wasn't the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were targeted, it was the cities themselves - they were chosen because of the minimal pre-existing damage - so we could see what these bombs actually did.

Also, I find it hard to have sympathy for a culture as racist as Japan's was (and is).  If they'd had the bomb, they would have nuked us in a heartbeat, and thought nothing of exterminating the gaijin.