A few minutes after their skin was melted down, and their body parts started to degrade, an intense fire, over 1000 degrees Celsius, consumed almost the entire city for hours on end. The final results of this apocalypse are terrifying. Roughly 140,000 people died. The radiation released by the bomb infected thousands more, which slowly killed them over the years. The radiation that was left on Hiroshima still haunts its citizens today, and scientists speculate that it will only fully disappear in a few decades (Lifton).
This terrifying account remained in the memory of the world, not as an act of inhumanity, but perhaps, as a life-saving fact. The U.S.'s justifications for dropping the nuclear bombs on Japan were to avoid a more costly invasion by land, so Japan would surrender. But when the U.S. took this into account, they were only looking at it from their side, not from the Japanese's side. If the U.S. did drop the bomb to avoid a more deadly land invasion, what do they call the total 170,000 people that died in Japan (Lifton)? Unlucky bystanders? Not quite. The U.S. had no right to condemn hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese citizens just so a few hundred U.S. soldiers could come back home calling themselves "brave, victorious soldiers". And this is not mention all of the suffering that the nuclear bomb causing the following decades, after the bomb was dropped. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were isolated from contact with humans, because of the risks that radiation posed to the people. And for the people that didn't die because of the blast itself, they were slowly being killed because of exposure to high doses of radioactivity. Japan realized all of this, and this is why the emperor was indisputably forced to surrender his country, consequently ending the war.
Although the bombing did end the war, the means did not justify the end. First of all, the United States had several other options to use in order to stop the war; which shows that they could have stopped the war without dropping the bomb in the first place.
