No war has ever been free of atrocities. Since the greeks battled persians to our days, civilian population always suffer. One way or another. Romans were able to keep the "pax romana" in their conquered territories because everybody knew that any attempt to revolt would be crushed in the most ruthless way. Not just fighters would be killed, but their families slaughtered or slaved, or at best be let alive but with all their housing burned to the ground and the fields poisoned with salt. That was deterrence.
WWII was different from wars fought centuries ago on the sense that a new tactic was used. Deprive the enemy of their industrial resources and bring them to their knees. Any company owner will confirm you that a worker is the most valued asset of an industrial company. And today, unclassified documents from the 8th air force or the RAF, clearly show that some of the bombings in germany, were adressed to deprive the german industry of their workers (even if by the expeditive method of reducing their housing and the core of their basic needs to rubble, which by the way, proved to be partly efective only).
From a win-loose logical point of view, the use of strategic bombing made sense for all parties involved. But bombing only did not bring victory. It took the ruskies to conquer Berlin and get Adolf to blow his head and on Japan it took the most devastating weapon ever to bring the country to its knees.
Japanese fighter pilots did not wear the parachute because they could not conceive being made prissoners. The staggering percentage of japanese casualties in the battles for the pacific islands was due because death was preferable to surrender. This mentality impregnated the country. Japan knew they could not win, but they knew that if they caused enough casualties to the enemy - at whatever cost- sooner or later, the allies would have to sit at the negotiation table with them, and the biggest bid of them all was the invasion of Japan. After Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the US new what to expect and they also understood quickly that they could not sustain the same percentage of losses experienced on Iwo Jima on a bigger scale as was demanded by the invasion of Japan.
True, strategic bombing had ruined the country, but the Japanese were far from defeated. They could have no homes, no industrial resources but they would still train the civilian population with sharpened bamboo sticks to use them as bayonets when the invasion eventually arrived. Nobody knows how much people would have died with an invasion, but certainly the numbers would have been terrible for both sides.
Futhermore, the finantial cost of a war is staggering and all the countries involved had had enough of it. Nobody did contemplate at the prospects of an endless attrition war with a sieged beligerant Japan.
Japanese needed to be shown that they were facing extinction in a literal sense if they did not surrended.
In this scenario, the use of the A bomb was the less of evils.
I think that the use of the A-bomb opened a pandora box and I wish it could be de-invented, but on the other side, The A-bomb also was the opening of an era where the main civilized countries in the world have lived (a part of minor local conflicts) in inequalled peace and prosperity. Deterrence has also been key for it, so I would assume that we are no longer living the "pax romana" but the "Pax Atomica".
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