[jammies]

I don't see how the question of dropping atomic bombs on civilians is any different from dropping conventional bombs on civilians; once you've made the decision to kill non-combatants as part of your war, the exact method by which it is done doesn't matter much. In the context of the times, dropping the a-bombs was absolutely the right decision, whether or not it actually shortened the war; the whole point of developing nuclear weapons had always been to use them and demonstrate the futility of further resistance.

If they had been ready by the summer of 1944, there is no question in my mind that they would have been dropped on German cities, and that the Nazis would have surrendered as well - there is a qualitative and psychological difference between dropping thousands of bombs to destroy a city, and dropping just one.

This is not to say that using nuclear weapons is morally defensible - it isn't. However, total war is not about morality, it is about survival; you cannot practice a superior morality if a more pragmatic enemy simply conquers you and imposes their worldview upon you. Ever since WWI demonstrated that any nation unwilling to mobilize its entire population to war would be defeated, there has been only a choice between accepting defeat or accepting that the entire nation becomes an extension of the military and that "civilian" is as legitimate, albeit unwilling, a target as "conscript".

That the ultimate outcome of total war, when nations are armed with nuclear weapons, becomes annihilation of everything, is a problem to which there is no solution, moral or otherwise. If your nation can only survive by having nuclear weapons and being willing to use them, yet the use of them also means the nation does not survive, there is no way out of the logic box.