the means." bombs in general should seldom be used especially those of this magnitude. the largest number of people killed in a single b-29 raid was not at Hiroshima, but at Tokyo, with conventional firebombs. Some 80,000-100,00 people killed. The problem was that even with the savage firebombing, the pathetic idiot military elite that was in charge of Japan didn't care! They didn't care how much suffering their people had to endure. Surrender was not going to happen! Real men, real samurai never surrender! The voices of reason calling for surrender, for beginning negotiations with America were shouted down. Thus, more than anything else, the atomic bomb gave emperor Hirohito the "face-savin?" Boost that he needed to tell these idiots that the time had come for Japan to surrender. It was one thing to surrender in the face of battle against an enemy with conventional bombs and weapons. It was another thing to face the seemingly supernatural force of atomic weapons. No matter that the atomic bombs actually killed fewer Japanese per city and were thus less effective than conventional firebombs. No, atomic weapons were a supernatural force that the Americans now controlled and so this was a good reason to stop fighting finally. when you compare with simple math, the dropping of the bombs took less lives than if we had tried to invade Japan. That's true for Japanese lives as well as American lives. Japanese lives were saved as a direct result of those bombs. the Japanese casualties