[vidarh]

> But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians.

They were extraordinary weapons, but as the article points out: The bombing campaigns were not, other than in doing the damage with much fewer bombs. Japan had seen similar levels of destruction in dozens of cities that summer, and was running out of larger undamaged cities.

With that context, they should require extraordinary justification to use, but no more so than the previous months of firebombing, and the focusing on the use of a nuclear bomb vs. "just" the fire bombing is detracting from the issue of how much of that overall bombing should have been acceptable and how much of it was necessary or served much purpose.

I don't want to excuse the A-bombs, but the article does make a compelling argument that they were not qualitatively different in the suffering caused.