Excellent posts Kalinka!
It is nice to hear from people who know what they are talking about.
As far as I know, the A bombs were the first time(after London and Berlin and Dresden) that civilians were seen as a military target in modern times. We are not talking here collateral damage, but a well planned military and political operation.
Pearl Harbor was also a well planned operation, and the targets were military installations only!
A lot has been said about the validity or the morality of the A bombings during the past 60 years. I will not add to this debate, but raise another point.
If you have no mercy for you opponents, which is a fact of war, you should then be thankful to your allies. I have never in my life seen any serious reference to the Allies thanking the Russians for sacrificing 27 million of their own people, which is more than all the other countries' combined losses, during WW2. And from I have learned, this was not the quick deaths of the A bombings. St-Petresburg alone lost more than 800,000 civilians through starvation, illness and cold. The sadest part about this is in my view the complete ignorance or indifference of the west towards this significant fistorical fact. We all hear about, the extermination of the jewish diaspora, but why do we ignore the Russian massacres and heavy losses?
The reason I mention this is that everything is relative must be put in perspective.
Have a good day.
Bob