The atom bomb section is a mess. First of all, the number of people who immediately die as a direct result of an atomic blast has never been the sum total of why they are unforgivable (IMO) nor of why they are tragic (a viewpoint I would find minimizing but I can play fair with for the purposes of discussion). It would be better, I think, to emphasize that this trope deals more straightforwardly with the official thinking of the time, and is not in fact an arguable question with what we have come to know or acknowledge about nuclear war.
Secondly, "was necessary" are two very big words. The anticommunist views that animated such thinking at the time quickly became politically outdated and soon after were (in government) legally banned as discrimination on the basis of political differences. Keep in mind that all the excesses and offenses of the second world were in fact the subject of political differences within the communist movement and are today to an even greater extent, though the point is illustrated most vividly in Communist Vietnam invading Communist Cambodia and taking out Pol Pot. There is no legitimate reason to use violence to prevent communism itself from coming to being; violations and perfidies committed by the communist regime can be, and are, protested or attacked straightforwardly without imagining that something inherent in the writings of Marx or Kropotkin or Lenin (etc) could possibly justify intentional genocide and simultaneous intentional ecocide. Regardless, keep in mind that America was at the time nominally a democracy in which communism was a program with mass appeal domestically; what they would have been protecting against communism would presumably include segregation, discrimination and lynching. Sure, let's kill and poison entire regions to protect that!
Finally, the debate over whether it was unavoidable is greatly exaggerated. It should be enough to say that the values of the time allowed for this kind of thinking in the same country where horrific racism and sexism were legal and wildly popular, but it is today agreed that genocide cannot be justified by the threat of some other potential genocide. Even this is generous: Truman was so universally hated for his decision that he couldn't get a job after leaving office and became the first broke ex-president, which led to a presidential pension system that is still in place today.
The atom bomb section is a mess. First of all, the number of people who immediately die as a direct result of an atomic blast has never been the sum total of why they are unforgivable (IMO) nor of why they are tragic (a viewpoint I would find minimizing but I can play fair with for the purposes of discussion). It would be better, I think, to emphasize that this trope deals more straightforwardly with the official thinking of the time, and is not in fact an arguable question with what we have come to know or acknowledge about nuclear war.
Secondly, "was necessary" are two very big words. The anticommunist views that animated such thinking at the time quickly became politically outdated and soon after were (in government) legally banned as discrimination on the basis of political differences. Keep in mind that all the excesses and offenses of the second world were in fact the subject of political differences within the communist movement and are today to an even greater extent, though the point is illustrated most vividly in Communist Vietnam invading Communist Cambodia and taking out Pol Pot. There is no legitimate reason to use violence to prevent communism itself from coming to being; violations and perfidies committed by the communist regime can be, and are, protested or attacked straightforwardly without imagining that something inherent in the writings of Marx or Kropotkin or Lenin (etc) could possibly justify intentional genocide and simultaneous intentional ecocide. Regardless, keep in mind that America was at the time nominally a democracy in which communism was a program with mass appeal domestically; what they would have been protecting against communism would presumably include segregation, discrimination and lynching. Sure, let's kill and poison entire regions to protect that!
Finally, the debate over whether it was unavoidable is greatly exaggerated. It should be enough to say that the values of the time allowed for this kind of thinking in the same country where horrific racism and sexism were legal and wildly popular, but it is today agreed that genocide cannot be justified by the threat of some other potential genocide. Even this is generous: Truman was so universally hated for his decision that he couldn't get a job after leaving office and became the first broke ex-president, which led to a presidential pension system that is still in place today.