[quote=@Cerberov]
We had crushed Japan militarily, and the only ones that truly supported further war were the military brass angry over their toys being broken. The Japanese government reached out diplomatically, and we refused repeatedly. We didn't want the Russians sharing Japan with us, so we decided to nuke them. We dropped pamphlets about evacuating cities due to atomic bombs after we nuked two cities, not as a warning, but as a threat. It was a senseless action done as a way of flexing our muscles, it saved no one, killed tens of thousands and irradiated two cities.
[/quote]

Uh, wat? I am on the fence about the bombings, and I totally see how it can be argued they were premature, but this is all just a stary-eyed attempt to make the morality of the situation seem straight forward. Yes, there are legitimate questions as to whether or not the bombing was necessary to end the war, but that doesn't make this a cut and dry situation. 

The Russia question is questionable to begin with because Stalin was invited to get involved in the Pacific War during Yalta. Hell, once the Russians took Korea, they offered to split it with the west. There was a lot of distrust between the Soviets and the western powers, but total breakdown hadn't happened yet. 

As for the government reaching out diplomatically... they weren't accepting unconditional surrender, and you have to consider that the entire philosophy of that war was to completely deconstruct the governments that had directly caused it. Politicians in the 1940's couldn't have predicted how the end of World War 2, the Cold War, and eventually Globalization would effect the way major nations behave with each other. From their perspective, being lenient would mean another inevitable world war somewhere down the line.

It is always very tempting to try and repaint shit like that as having fit a very comfortable and very easy place on the moral spectrum, but it isn't and shouldn't be that simple. Making it look like 'Evil America was just eviling and doing evil for evil reasons because evil seemed good and evil.', that is just a weak way to look at things. Hell, you can make the same argument about ISIS. Saying they are evil just to be evil is useless. They seem to see themselves as part of some major struggle, and many of them have legitimate reasons to be mad at the west, while others are just in a fucked up situation. They aren't cartoonishly evil, they are humanly evil. What differentiates them from other people is that they chose to give in to violent impulses caused by their disaffection and answer their problems by lashing out at people who, to them, merely symbolize whatever the fuck it is that drove them to hoist an RPG on their shoulders. And with them, that is the tricky part. They've went too far down that dark path to be handled diplomatically, but trying to nation build with bombs creates too many disaffected people and breeds more terrorists. That's the tight-rope we have to walk when dealing with them - we can kill them, that is self defense at this point, but we can't do so in such a way that negatively effects the people around them. How do you do that? The only other thing we can hope for is eventual stability in the region. But when the fuck is that going to happen? We could always fund their enemies, but we've seen what that does in the past as well...

So that is the problem, OP. This isn't an easy question. I'm not sure if we can answer it.