I get that people have this fascination for what happened at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but was it really worse than the incendiary bombing of other cities?
These were all horrific events only meant to harm civilians. The whole bombing campaign was and I feel that focusing on these two cities makes us underestimate the dimension of the tragedy.
Example: the firebombing of Toyama on Aug 1, 1945. 99.5% of the city was destroyed, a record perhaps unequaled in the history of warfare (vs. about 1/3rd of Nagasaki).
And the conventional bombing of Japan was just getting started. It would have escalated massively had Japan not surrendered.
These were all horrific events only meant to harm civilians. The whole bombing campaign was and I feel that focusing on these two cities makes us underestimate the dimension of the tragedy.