This is more or less verbatim the justification given in US public messaging around the bombing of Japan’s cities, and it’s heavily reiterated by Rhodes. The problem is that even if you fully accept the bloody logic of this, it wasn’t what the Interim committee specified for the atomic bomb target list: “the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” This didn’t apply to Hiroshima. It did apply to the secondary target used in Nagasaki, but not to the primary target. The fact that more appropriate targets were passed over in favor of (largely unbombed) residential targets is not some unfortunate necessity of the war, it was a deliberate decision made to show the world how powerful the bomb was. That decision might - in the very long run - have saved more lives than it took. We should talk about that. But we can’t talk about it if we’re busy fooling ourselves.