The Atom Bomb...

What justifies a final act of war that will ensure complete and utter destruction? How can one person decide whether or not to use a weapon that will not only ensure success but guarantee an apocalyptic ending to ones opponent.

I've been reading a book called To End All Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_End_All_Wars), which is the story of Ernest Gordon and his attempt to survive in a Japanese POW camp (more to follow on the book.). The book, though not specifically meant to describe the horrors of the Japanese treatment, chronicles inhuman treatment, outright torture and murder throughout the Japanese taking of prisoners. This book got me interested in something I really know little about, WWII in Asia. I was almost completely unaware of the sheer magnitude of the death and horror caused by the Japanese during the war. Just a few details from wikipedia:

R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, states that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered from nearly 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most likely 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. "This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture." According to Rummel, in China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations and 10.2 millions in the course of the war.
The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war, although the accepted figure is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. A similar crime was the Changjiao massacre. In Southeast Asia, the Manila massacre, resulted in the deaths of 100,000 civilians in the Philippines and in the Sook Ching massacre, between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore were taken to beaches and massacred. There were numerous other massacres of civilians e.g. the Kalagon massacre.A Japanese soldier with a "hunt trophy", taken presumably in 1942 during operation sankō, the "Three Alls Policy", as it was nicknamed by Chinese. Historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta reports that a "Three Alls Policy" (Sankō Sakusen) was implemented in China from 1942 to 1945 and was in itself responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians. This scorched earth strategy, sanctioned by Hirohito himself, directed Japanese forces to "Kill All, Burn All, and Loot All."
Additionally, captured allied service personnel were massacred in various incidents, including:

Laha massacre
Banka Island massacre
Parit Sulong
Palawan massacre
SS Tjisalak massacre perpetrated by Japanese submarine I-8
Wake Island massacre-see Battle of Wake Island
Note: this is not a complete list of massacres. There were many others.

The staggering facts drawn from this information is not the scale but, the fact that these were innocents, woman and children. The Japanese in WWII were not concerned with anything accept complete and total domination of Asia, and making sure that the rest of the people in the region knew the Japanese were in charge. They wanted people to suffer, they wanted people to die in order to bring about a Japanese Empire. This is a crazy idea that somehow had a mirror in Europe at the same time. The mentality of these two countries, at the exact same time is a shocking idea. The thought that these two cultures of hate developed simultaneously is very very strange (another point entirely).

Now to my point, I can put myself in the shoes of Truman and see that if I had the chance to stop the war in Japan with one foul swoop, would I choose to do it? Could I justify in my own mind killing 220,000 people in order to possibly save millions more? This is one of the hardest decisions that anyone could possibly make and in order to make that decision you would have to take into account both Just War Theory and thinking of the lives of ones own people. Within the idea of a War, countries have to think of their people first, and through just war theory it is the defense of their people.

When the Japanese first invaded China and put the first newborn on a bayonet their leaders sacrificed their right to a just war. When they starved, overworked and killing POWs they sacrificed their right to a just war. In my opinion those who refuse to adhere to an idea of a just war should not be afforded the protection that it exudes. Therefore the bomb and the use thereof comes into a grayer picture, possibly this may have been a necessary action...

This is going to be a growing discussion (I hope) of just war, the a-bomb and the like...please help me sort this out...