> War is simply horrible and there is no justification.

Let me start here, the first part of course. But there is a justification: self-defense. That is the primary reason any military force exists.

> the atomic bombings of Japan have no justifications.

They require no justification, it is war not a democratic or civil discourse. The only objective is to win not to be moral or just. That is why the military exists, to win wars not to appease the public. And this is precisely why afghanistan and vietnam were lost, because the US military tries to be moral and do right by civilians. It's their country, their problem period and it curs both ways. You and most others living ina democracy under the protection of a superpower are not grasping the concept of sovreignity and what it means to be at war. Sovreignity is not an idea on paper and it does not mean merely "independent". It means the safety, security and prosperity of all under a sovreign as well as the consequence of any action made by that sovreign are their own and no one else. You do not get to tell them what to do in their internal affairs and in return any action made by a sovreign good or bad are for all under the sovreign to bear. You can dislike the outcome as do I but you don't get to pretend sovreignity is nullified when it suits you.

> Japan was not a democracy. It had no free press. The average Japanese person did not have much choice or influence

This is what I mean! I don't care one bit about democracy in this context. We do not live in a golbal sovreign nation where countries are provinces. At the individual level it is very unfortunate what the outcome was, whether or not the people had power to resist is irrelevant, neither is their "brainwashing" (an arrogant dismissal of their beliefs by you) what matters is they are sovreign nation and their agression was as a nation not by rogue individuals. This means every man,woman and child bears the responsibility of the outcome. What if their own government bombed their own people? Stopping their government, refusing to fight in their military or support it with logistical needs is their own choice whether their government killed them directly or by attacking a foreign power and dooming them as a result, it ultimately bears reponsibility. Democracy works for the west and if they want it they will just have to figure it out on their own as a sovreign. Their ability to exist without interference from outsiders or having to answer to an outside power comes with the responsibility that acting in agression means the whole sovreign is responsible. There is no precedent or norm that a country must be democractic in order for it to be a sovreign or for the people to accept the consequence of whatever their government is (which is none of your business because sovreignity means self-determination among other things).

To your firsr paragraphs, I was not avoiding your points but adressing them.

Japan would not have surrendered:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

> Faced with the prospect of an invasion of the Home Islands, starting with Kyūshū, and the prospect of a Soviet invasion of Manchuria—Japan's last source of natural resources—the War Journal of the Imperial Headquarters concluded in 1944:

We can no longer direct the war with any hope of success. The only course left is for Japan's one hundred million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose the will to fight.[9]
As a final attempt to stop the Allied advances, the Japanese Imperial High Command planned an all-out defense of Kyūshū codenamed Operation Ketsugō.[10]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Operation...

> While Japan no longer had a realistic prospect of winning the war, Japan's leaders believed they could make the cost of invading and occupying the Home Islands too high for the Allies to accept, which would lead to some sort of armistice rather than total defeat. The Japanese plan for defeating the invasion was called Operation Ketsugō (決号作戦, ketsugō sakusen) ("Operation Codename Decisive"). The Japanese planned to commit the entire population of Japan to resisting the invasion, and from June 1945 onward, a propaganda campaign calling for "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" commenced.[48] The main message of "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" campaign was that it was "glorious to die for the holy emperor of Japan, and every Japanese man, woman, and child should die for the Emperor when the Allies arrived".[48] While this was not realistic, both American and Japanese officers at the time predicted a Japanese death toll in the millions

While of course they won't succeed in killing all of their own civilians they were comitted to killing a whole lot more than a few million people.

Military planners and intel on both sides concluded millions would die on both sides. If we can agree that you and I do not now know better than they did then, what is our disagreement here? Both outcomes would have been horrible. Less people died with nukes.