The use of atomic weaponry against Japan in World War II was unjustified.

With the accusation of a strawman I haven’t committed a straw man yet by saying, "My opponent believes that the compensation of numbers for tenacity justifies state terrorism. " This sentence was required to clarify your response, which I slightly disagree with. I also thank Pro for using evidence 1 and 2 to establish that the Imperial Japanese Military was still politically savvy and pressing its own terms like I said in the previous round. Counter rebuttals 1. Common Defense By putting a warmongering nation like the Empire of Japan (EoJ) between a rock and a hard place, the US shouldered a direct risk of an attack. The use of the common defense doesn’t apply in a scenario where the US purposefully baits a warmongering regime. 2. "I fail to see how Japan seeking any kind of conditional surrender (which FDR would not allow) in any way refutes the using of the Atomic Bomb. If anything it deepened the need to use the bomb as the Japanese will was not about to break. " While the creation of the atom bomb was during FDR's administration, ultimately the decision to drop the Atom bomb rested with the Truman administration, and it was the Truman administration that would not allow an armistice or conditional surrender. If FDR was still alive when the EoJ was suing for peace he would have accepted the "One Condition" as he would have read Leo Szilard's memorandum arguing against the use of the Atom bomb. The memorandum by Mr. Szilard warned that the use of the bomb against the cities of the EoJ would start an atomic-arms race with Russia, and raised the question of whether avoiding such an arms race might not be more important than the short-term goal of knocking the EoJ out of the war. (. http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu...) The fact that the EoJ was suing for peace shows that the Atom bomb was unnecessary as a political tool. The US could've ended the war earlier had it shown a willingness to negotiate. Instead it issued the Potsdam Ultimatum which failed to clarify the position of the Emperor and did not alleviate the concerns of the EoJ. 3. "The Atomic bombings were state sanctioned acts of terrorism" To refute Pro's counter contention let us refer to Richard A. Falk, who has written in detail about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as instances of state terrorism. He writes, "Undoubtedly the most extreme and permanently traumatizing instance of state terrorism, perhaps in the history of warfare, involved the use of atomic bombs against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in military settings in which the explicit function of the attacks was to terrorize the population through mass slaughter and to confront its leaders with the prospect of national annihilation. .. .the public justification for the attacks given by the U. S. government then and now was mainly to save lives that might otherwise might have been lost in a military campaign to conquer and occupy the Japanese home islands which was alleged as necessary to attain the war time goal of unconditional surrender. .. . But even accepting the rationale for the atomic attacks at face value, which means discounting both the geopolitical motivations and the pressures to show that the immense investment of the Manhattan Project had struck pay dirt, and disregarding the Japanese efforts to arrange their surrender prior to the attacks, the idea that massive death can be deliberately inflicted on a helpless civilian population as a tactic of war certainly qualifies as state terror of unprecedented magnitude, particularly as the United States stood on the edge of victory, which might well have been consummated by diplomacy. As Michael Walzer puts it, the United States owed the Japanese people 'an experiment in negotiation,' but even if such an initiative had failed there was no foundation in law or morality for atomic attacks on civilian targets. " ("State Terror versus Humanitarian Law",in Selden,, Mark, editor (November 28, 2003). War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. . ISBN 978-0742523913. ,45) 4. Militarily Unnecessary Pro still has not refuted the contention that it was militarily unnecessary. General MacArthur also stated that the bombs were unnecessary from a military perspective. General MacArthur seemed to understand what the Empire of Japan was trying to accomplish through attempts at conditional surrender when Norman Cousins, author of the Pathology of Power, wrote, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor. " 5. The Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both War Crimes and Immoral "During November 1944 American B-29's began their first incendiary bomb raids on Tokyo, and on 9 March 1945, wave upon wave dropped masses of small incendiaries containing an early version of napalm on the city's population—for they directed this assault against civilians. Soon small fires spread, connected, grew into a vast firestorm that sucked the oxygen out of the lower atmosphere. The bomb raid was a 'success' for the Americans; they killed 125,000 Japanese in one attack. The Allies bombed Hamburg and Dresden in the same manner, and Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and Tokyo again on May 24. The basic moral decision that the Americans had to make during the war was whether or not they would violate international law by indiscriminately attacking and destroying civilians, and they resolved that dilemma within the context of conventional weapons. Neither fanfare nor hesitation accompanied their choice, and in fact the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima was less lethal than massive fire bombing. The war had so brutalized the American leaders that burning vast numbers of civilians no longer posed a real predicament by the spring of 1945. Given the anticipated power of the atomic bomb, which was far less than that of fire bombing, no one expected small quantities of it to end the war. Only its technique was novel—nothing more. By June 1945 the mass destruction of civilians via strategic bombing did impress Stimson as something of a moral problem, but the thought no sooner arose than he forgot it, and in no appreciable manner did it shape American use of conventional or atomic bombs. 'I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities,' he noted telling the President on June 6. There was another difficulty posed by mass conventional bombing, and that was its very success, a success that made the two modes of human destruction qualitatively identical in fact and in the minds of the American military. 'I was a little fearful,' Stimson told Truman, 'that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength. ' To this the President 'laughed and said he understood. (Kolko, Gabriel (1990) [1968]. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945. pp. 539–40. ) Warcrimes The ruling of the Japanese court case Ryuichi Shimoda v. The State, which declined to rule on the legality of nuclear weapons in general, found that the, "the attacks upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused such severe and indiscriminate suffering that they did violate the most basic legal principles governing the conduct of war". (. http://www.icrc.org...)