Welcome to the world of TOTAL WAR at its finest. I am also a military brat (USAF) and a veteran and I am wondering why people do not have similar outrage for the firebombing of Tokyo, where 200K people were killed by Curtis LeMay in a single night of firebombing? It may not have been the best way to deal with it, seeing as how the Japanese did NOT offer to unconditionally surrender after the Hiroshima blast, thereby inviting the second bomb at Nagasaki. There, by the way, were also plans for a 3rd shot (the last bomb we had). Do you really think it would have been any different if the Axis had the bomb? I do not relish the thought of all of those people dying and suffering, but I also didn't relish the deaths of the other 50M people who died in WWII. Total War is just that...TOTAL WAR! It is barbaric and cruel. May we never do it again, but also, may it also never be done to us.

Your points are valid and true and any kind of war is cruel and unfair. I fear that things will only get worse I just hope I and my family are not around to wittness it!!!

I am with you on that one. My last duty assignment (after I got back from SE Asia) was in SAC at Castle AFB. I worked in the Bomb Wing (I was a Military Intelligence Specialist...a triple contradiction...and drew up aircrew charts for our bombers going into the USSR if and when "the balloon goes up." I used to do something called "picking high terrain," which meant finding the high areas of each point on the bombers route. The B-52s would carry four weapons which I can neither affirm nor deny were evident in their bomb bays...and these were rather LARGE variants of same. The high terrain picking was crucial because the B-52s would be flying in at 500+ kts. at about 50' AGL. Yup, 50 feet above the ground. Wasn't a whole lot of margin there. Every now and then I would stop and consider just how insane what I was doing really was. It was too scary to ponder, until I realized that Ivan had somebody about my age doing the exact same thing for his big boomers. The funny thing was that WW-III was going to be fought by two groups of people blowing up the other guy's empty missile holes...empty because both sides had already emptied their silos using something called, "launch on warning." Total War is indeed insane, but Total Nuclear War is beyond insane, all the way to surreal.