This was from the other thread but it has something to do with US foreign policy so I'll respond to it here:
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you know what I dont like about this? this "context of the general brutality of World War II". first of all, where exactly was the US target of this "general brutality" to give it a "right" to be like that as well? in Pearl Harbor? an offshore military base? this argument might - maybe - have some validity if it was the USSR to firebomb and nuke cities, since it had experienced immensely large civilian losses. but the US?...
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The problem is that total war has a way of getting out of control.
Nazi Germany was not the target of atomic bombs, but it suffered even more civilian deaths than Japan did. This is especially true when you consider the nature of total war, which involves
drafts - near the end of the war, Nazi Germany was drafting 12-year olds into the army. The line between civilians and soldiers has become so blurred by that point that it isn't even clear what constitutes legitimate warfare anymore.
Total war is when an entire society is mobilized to fight an enemy that is not just a government, but also the society that supports that government. Civilians are part of the war effort in total war, and therefore they become targets. That's not to say things like the Geneva Convention didn't matter, but it is to say that once some countries started hitting civilian populations in their war efforts, others followed. Warfare is frequently reciprocal - you can't expect one side to "play nice" when the other isn't, particularly when the two sides are evenly matched.
The stakes were high during World War II. This wasn't just a limited offensive to achieve specific strategic goals, in which you're trying to minimize casualties in order to save face on the political front. World War II was about total victory versus total defeat. The defeated populations were at the complete mercy of the victorious ones, and they were frequently enslaved or slaughtered.
In such a war, "human rights" means very little, and I'm not going to sugarcoat the Allies here by saying that they observed all the proper niceties. They didn't, and to tell you the truth, at the time such niceties have yet to really enter into the socio-political consciousness. World War II really changed a lot of things, and examining history before (and during) it is like looking into a different, much crueler world. That's what I mean by viewing history in context. I'm not justifying what the US did - I'm saying that what it did has to be evaluated relative to what other countries were doing at the time.
Would it have been possible to avoid the atomic bombing of Japan? Yes, but it would've required moral and political restraint beyond what most of the countries involved in World War II were exercising, at the time. Think about it - would the Germans or the Japanese have hesitated to use atomic bombs on the Allies, had they developed them first? None of this makes it right to nuke civilians, but it does give you perspective on what the rules of engagement were like during World War II.