Caution Long Post Ahead...
It helps to put the Dresden raid into context since it was the logical culmination of 25-years of airpower theories as applied to total war. Remember that the three greatest inter-war bomber theorists were all Allied in WW1, Britain's Hugh Trenchard, Italy's Guilo Douhet and America's William Mitchell. All advocated bombing civilian targets and the use of terror as a legitimate weapon.
As early as 1920 British Secretary of State for War, one Winston Churchill advocated the RAF dropping mustard gas bombs on Iraqi towns during the Iraqi Revolt 1920-22. The only reason why it didn't happen (see Ferguson The War of the World) was that the bombs were not available in quantity so high explosive was subtituted with great effect. Later the Italians would successfully use chemicals and high explosive bombs in Abyssinia both during the war and the resistance after.
Ironically only the Allies entered the war with effective bombers specifically designed to bomb urban targets, the B-17 first flew in 1936 and the RAF's Short Stirling in 1939. The Allies were already pumped to bomb Axis cities long before the Luftwaffe hit urban London for the first time. Bomber Command had exercised massed night bombing techniques starting as early as 1934 so the oft-repeated canard that they were "forced" into doing so by losses in 1940 is probably a bit of after the fact hyperbole.
Nevertheless, Dresden was a watershed event. As noted above the city did meet all the criteria of a legitimate military target as such things were understood in 1945. There was no reason to slack off even with the end in sight although undamaged urban areas in unoccupied Germany were at a premium by February 1945. Who on the Allied side could forget how Hitler manipulated the German public to achieve power with his "stab in the back" propaganda effectively hiding the defeat of the German armed forces in 1918? In 1945 and with vast urban areas in ruins, there could be no repeat of such lies, everybody in Germany, Nazi or not, knew that they were beaten; completely, decisively and totally at the mercy of the victors. In 1919 it was possible to spin defeat into some sort of victory but the bomber took that option off the table in post-war Germany, East or West.
For all of that it is possible that the bomber theorists were correct and the defeat of a nation by destruction of its infrastucture and terrorizing its citizens could be achieved by the bomber alone. Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated that the a solution had been developed to the biggest operational problem of strategic bombing, the need to revist the target time and again. So complete was the destruction caused by the atomic bomb that there was nothing to repair, huge swaths of cities could simply disappear in an instant.
Fortunately one of the lessons learned after Dresden was that destruction on this scale had a political cost and after Japan surrendered, paying that cost ceased to have relevance in the limited wars during and after the Cold War. When, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, USAF Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay told President Kennedy that the nuclear destruction of the Soviet Union would probably cost the lives of only 20-30 Million Americans, the latter very sensibly looked for another solution. The political and moral lessons of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been well learned.
In 1939-45, targeting of civilians and their infrastructure were reasonable responses on the rocky road to defeat Nazism and Japanese militarism. In the limited wars of today the opposite is true and Dresden was one of those seminal events that proved it to be so.
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