Much better anti-nuke op-ed:

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/japan-was-already-defeated-the-case-against-the-nuclear-bomb-and-for-basic-morality/

Eisenhower told his biographer that he expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson his “grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

Adm. William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief military adviser, agreed with Eisenhower. “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” Leahy wrote. “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”

I'm just gonna be blunt here. A lot of midwits ITT are doing that obnoxious midwit thing where they assert their own armchair analysis as if it's established fact, when it's simply not. My guess is that when guys like Gen. Eisenhower and Adm. Leahy believed that dropping the nukes was unnecessary, the matter isn't nearly as settled as everyone is making it out to be.

And while the sanctimony of people (including the anti-war right, btw) who oppose the nukes may be grating, this tough guy posturing about how we totally for sure had no other choice is downright repugnant. Make the case that it was a necessary evil if that's what you think, but fuck all the way off with this smug, arrogant presumption that anyone who opposes the nukes is just morally simplistic or ignorant of history.