One can accept that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets while questioning whether the scale and nature of the attacks were morally justifiable, or ultimately necessary.
>The destruction of your enemy in war with the goal of ending the war and saving the lives of your countrymen and allies is always justified.
The ends can't always justify the means - that rationale can easily be twisted to allow anything.
The US wanted to use nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War as well. Had this happened, the use of nuclear weapons in combat would probably have been normalized, and the Cold War would probably not have remained cold for very long.
As far as the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are concerned, I'm not going to second guess what the American or Japanese forces considered to be in their best interests. In hindsight, we know more than they knew back then about the larger political picture and the effects of radioactive fallout.
Given the possibility of years of grueling island-hopping invasion against an enemy as ardently defiant as Japan, I can see the brutal calculus that simply breaking Japan's will and forcing its surrender quickly through a demonstration of overwhelming destructive power would save more lives in the long run.
But even that doesn't make it good that the US dropped the atomic bombs. It was possibly just an evil act which may have prevented a greater evil.
