> "The Manhattan Project created the nuclear bomb that caused extreme devastation in Japan and ended the war. There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible."
That's one hell of a non-sequitur. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what she thinks it means. "The US ended the worst war in human history. Indefensible!"
The implication of the quoted sentence is that the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Japan was awful and indefensible. The author then transitions to “but I want to talk about part of the Manhattan project that isn’t really related to the bombings.” What other explanation would there be for inserting this comment about U.S. history?
My comment was addressing the defensibility of the bombings. They may have been awful, but they were fully defensible. Japan was the aggressor, and all indications were that both the U.S. and Japan were going to see millions of casualties as part of an invasion of the home islands.
I'm not sure how much it really matters but it is mildly annoying when people's brains just shut off when they hear atomic/nuclear.
It's perfectly reasonable to make an argument that they were "not needed" in terms of ending ww2, it's much, much more difficult to argue that fewer people would have died if they weren't used.