The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "a terrible thing, but it had to be done" (Holmes 2). Why did it have to be done? What could possibly make killing 200,000 Japanese citizens alright? It seems like a terrible thing, but it was necessary in order to bring back peace to the world at the smallest cost possible. Many events and reasons are behind the United States' decision to use atomic force, and once read about, they will begin to stack up. The Japanese forced the United States to use atomic force because they were willing to fight to the very last man and would continually deny surrender. The dropping of the bomb came from a complex abundance of military, domestic and diplomatic issues and outcomes. Although dropping the atomic bombs on Japan killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, the act was necessary because it saved countless lives (American and Japanese), justified the brutality of the Japanese during Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March, and the bombs also ended the most destructive war in the history of humanity. .
By dropping atomic bombs on the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States ultimately preserved American and Japanese lives by avoiding a land invasion and ending the naval blockade. Some critics believe that "Japanese lives were sacrificed simply for power politics between the U.S. and the Soviet Union" (Dietrich 2), which tied to the Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Another idea that historians possess relates to the fact that the United States should have demonstrated the atomic bomb over Tokyo Harbor, which would have "convinced Japan's leaders to quit without killing many people" (Dietrich 1). These ideas are somewhat plausible, but they are too minor and too far-fetched for the United State's actual reason to drop the bombs. Critics against the bomb are mainly looking for reasons to blame the United States for the deaths of innocent civilians but fail to recognize that the two countries were at war with each other.