Truman? War Criminal?

[sticknstringer]

Not at all, does the "Cold War" ring a bell? It was decided that the use of the nuclear bomb was necessary to expedite the end the war; however Japan wasn't the biggest threat at the time. They were contained, completely surrounded. Invasion would have been costly for the allied forces, though it was deemed at the time that the USSR was working to build a Communist Empire all over Asia, a much greater threat than Japan... Truman and Churchill could not allow Stalin to conquer Japan and spread its great communist influence throughout that entire region. So, they sped up the process...

Another interesting obscurity... On march 9-10 1945, 335 B-29s took off, with 279 of them dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs on Tokyo. Approximately 16 square miles of the city were destroyed and 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting firestorm, more than the immediate deaths of either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombs.

[sticknstringer]

to be fair, I hate the Idea that we did this but I don't think there was a better option...

[8uck5nort]

Ok my two cents… A passion of mine is history.
When people spout history they should always use in the particular time periods context, but alas to the victors goes the task of writing the history books and it will only be accurate if written in a honest hand.
John Stewart is an entertainer with little or no real human value. JMHO.
I'll second sticknstringers take. The Japs were beaten, an emerging Soviet Union with madman Stalin at the helm was a larger threat that could not be ignored. (Patton was right!)
It is also accurate that the Allies used incendiary bombing on both Germany (Dresden) and Japan to intentionally kill and demoralize the Axis civilian populations, these bombings in terms of civilian deaths and destruction were much more devastating than the A-bomb drops. However, the A-bomb left no doubt that we could and would level Japan with minimal loss of resources which ultimately convinced the Japanese military to finally and unconditionally capitulate.
WW2 was a total war and all sides were playing for keeps. It was hell on earth unlike humans have seen and pray to God that we never see again. Both sides had blood on their hands.
From a personal side my grandfather was drafted into the army in 1944. He was shipped out from Frisco in 1945. They knew that an invasion of Japan was going to happen, and with battles like Iwo Jima concluding and revealing the cost of taking a relatively small island as a poignant reminder of the sacrifice in American lives it would take to invade the Japanese homeland fresh in everyone's mind it was a no brainer to use the A-bomb to end the war quickly. To not use it would have been murder of our own troops on an unprecedented scale. As a side note my grandfather was deployed to Japan as one of the first American division to occupy their homeland. He didn't talk much about what he saw, but from what I gather he was close enough to one of the A-bomb sites to see the aftermath for himself.
To quote my own late grandfather, "I was awed by the bomb, we had never seen anything like it. I was also happy because I knew I was going to be killed if we invaded." -Not my words, his, from someone who lived the era, who knew a lot of kids (and yes they were 18, 19, 20… kids) who had already been killed or wounded from the previous 3-4 years of fighting and on a scale we have never seen before.
This is not the first time a revisionist has wanted to use the A-bomb drop on the Japanese as a way to show "how bad America is" with no regard to the facts and no concept or context to the time in which the event occurred. Idiots all and they are a disgrace to America, again JMHO.