just for your use

The project was coordinated from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers North Atlantic Division headquarters on the 18th floor of 270 Broadway near New York City Hall in Manhattan.
-- wikipedia.

Odd thing strikes me. After dropping the first one there was no immediate reaction so there was the excuse to drop the second. Now, were there only two bombs available but by then both used? If there was no reaction to the second, what then? Back to conventional killing?

So what would be the point of wiping out two cities? If it was all for demonstration purposes, why not on a low population area, or else the high number of dead civilians was a factor in the US choice of target. Odd don't you think? Very odd!

Is it only after Iraq that my mind reassesses America's whole attitude to how it fights war and uses civilians as legitimate targets?!

yea usa gave japan 1 week to think out but they didn't surender

and if they didn't after the second...

Surely some of the smart heads in Washington knew that death before the dishonour of defeat when they had no concept of defeat, was a very real probability but still they dropped the bomb. Hitler toyed with the notion of the wipe out of the German people as being deserved if they lost WW2. If the US had enough bombs would it have wiped out the Japanese people. Or how many bombs before stopping.

Once you start dropping them it becomes easier to drop more. We nearly had more in the Korea War, but at least desperation might have mitigated as against WW2 when the real reason was to impress the Russians!!!

Yea true weird thing is that if Japan would not surrender, one thing they didn't know is that we didn't have a third, we played the card by saying we did!

Sorry for not getting back. I was out of circulation for a while.

So if they didn't surrender after the first, why believe there was any reason to believe they would after the second? When there wasn't a third then dropping the second doesn't make any sense to me - particularly on a high population city. Unless I'm missing something, I'm inclined to put the dropping of the second into the war crimes category. There may have been intelligence that indicated that a second would work. Failing that, genocide of civilians wasn't justified.