Hiroshima

My post from 2009 and, for Nagasaki, 2010.

My feeling is that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved far more lives than they cost. I hold that it is the height of revisionist history to claim that anything other than an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would have ended the war, which would have cost a million or so Allied lives (mostly American) and tenfold or more Japanese lives.

Beyond that, the reality of what even a single low-yield atomic weapon could do to a large city was enough to cool the hot blood of most national leaders, especially once both sides of the Cold War possessed them. Even so, the world has come awfully close to seeing another nuclear war at least once or a few times.

The fear of widespread destruction if the Cold War went nuclear was eventually overtaken by the computer simulations of nuclear winter and later ones that showed that a climatic catastrophe would follow even a limited nuclear war.