I don’t think any answer I could drum up would satisfy. It’s a very different decision making process sitting at a keyboard in 2026 and shaking your fist at Harry Truman than it would be to be in the Oval Office in 1945 after several bloody years of war and a world eager for it all to end.

But - let’s try, because this is the internet, so why not. Let’s have a conversation, though I doubt you’ll be swayed. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are large urban centers in southern Japan. Which presumably would have been the invasion route that the Allies would take as they’d march up from Okinawa. And they of course had critical logistic and transportation network value to the Japanese. Most serious historians estimate that Allied casulaties for a ground campaign would be a least a million, and that Japanese casualties might be 20x that. To the level of absolute disintegration of the entire society. In short - they were legitimate military and economic targets, in the path that the Allies were moving anyways.

Attacking the cultural, economic and political centers like Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo would signal an intent to totally exterminate the nation. And it would probably not help negotiations by vaporizing the leadership you’re wanting to engage with. So - perhaps Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected to be demonstrations of power of the totality of destruction against key defensive targets in the south, while leaving a political system in place to actually negotiate a surrender with.

The U.S. only had a small handful of bombs at that point. Using any of them on a military outpost outside a city would have been easier for the fanatical military leadership to shrug off. Respectfully CANNOT agree with your assertion “why not bomb an un- or at least less inhabited area? if they did it near a city, over the ocean, it would have made a similar impression”. That’s completely not assured. In literally EVERY prior defensive battle, from Alaska to Okinawa, the Japanese leadership had been clear - no surrender, no retreat, fight to the last, and if you have nothing else you can do, kill yourself, and take some americans with you if you can. Saying that the Japanese military leadership would have been rational with a over-the-sea demonstration badly ignores literally everything that Japan had done up to that point.

And as stated earlier - the Allies deseperately wanted to end the war as fast as possible, and turn their attention to saving Europe from the Soviets - who VERY much wanted to keep rolling West. And the russians absolutely did try to keep moving forward - this is not abstract. They launched the Greek civil war in 1946. Blockaded Berlin in 1948. When they couldn’t move any further in Europe, then they prompted North Korea to invade the South in 1950 and were the primary benefactor for the Viet Minh starting in 1955. Then they invaded Hungary (56), Czechoslovakia directly (48 & 68), helped sustain the Vietnam war when it pivoted from the French to the Americans . The point being - if you’re prioritizing threats, assessing that Russia was the single biggest threat was absolutely correct, and therefore ending the Japanese portion of WW2 was an approach that cost less lives compared to the alternatives. Ending the war in Japan was horrific, but also urgent. And strategically defensible. Moral? What does morality have to do with a war at the scale of WW2?

Of course war is a vulgar and disgusting thing. But it DID end the war. Period. The allies DID stop after Nagasaki, when the military fanatics could no longer keep demanding total national sacrifice in the face of such unprecedented destruction.

Pretty stupid of them tbh, considering America had already firebombed every other city into ashes.

Tbf America would have had to wait for a little bit after vaporizing a third so they weren’t completely wrong that the bombs were limited.

And demilitarized and occupied them. Crazy, like those were the most important goals or something.