My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem - you couldn't drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other.
...Germany surrendered in May 1945, the first successful atomic bomb test was July 16th, 1945, and Little Boy destroyed Hiroshima about three weeks after that test. If the Manhattan Project had gone faster, atomic bombs might have been dropped on both German and Japanese cities.
...Unknown to anybody else - I knew it, but nobody else knew - there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, "You got another one of those damn things?" I said, "Yessir." He said, "Where is it?" I said, "Over in Utah." He said, "Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it." I said, "Yessir." I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over. - General Paul Tibbets, Ret.

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was http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/article/0,2763,770583,00.html Aug 6 2002 Studs Terkel column
now http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,769634,00.html

Mr. Tibbests was an American hero. America survives as a nation because of the bravery and sacrifice of men and women who fought the most vile opponents the world has seen in that horrible epic known as World War II. Many forget the horror of World War II. It has been calculated that every single day of that horrific human catastrophe, 29,500 human beings died. Cities were bombed from the air and smashed to rubble on the ground by technologies and on a worldwide scale never before contemplated in human history. Racial and ethnic extermination were national priorities by the supposedly sophisticated and advanced nations of Germany and Japan and their allies. Both had capable scientists and engineers who designed and put into production terror weapons and human experimentation and extermination on enormous scales. Both Germany and Japan had nuclear programs that, fortunately, had not accelerated to the extent accomplished in the U.S. The decision by President Truman to use the nuclear option against Japan was calculated to bring the war to a close. U.S. military leaders realized that the U.S. invasion of the Japanese home islands would call for a force of men, ships and equipment many times that of D-Day and the fanatical resistance of a still largely intact and suicidal Japanese home force would result in horrific losses on both sides. The suicide attacks on our ships and men by the japanese resulted in serious American losses and those losses would be multiplied many times by an invasion of the home islands. Truman made the only rational decision.

An important question to think about:

In similar circumstances in the modern day, would America drop the bomb again?

If there were millions of people already dead after years of carnage, would we do it again? And how would it be viewed?

I'm a little at a loss as to have the answer.

Currently we are weighing torture vs. safety of thousands or hundreds of thousands and yet people are still saying no torture of any kind. If we don't torture and we don't get information and then people die as a result of not getting that information, would the media, government, and the people be behind torture of suspects?

In the case of WWII, it was weighed to be necessary to drop the bomb and kill thousands of people to save perhaps many many more people and end the war.

It leaves me very confused on the matter of weighing different levels of right and wrong.