You seem to blame USA for the "Ground Zero" Idea.

Japan was a deadly war machine in the days that caused the bombs to drop on them.

Japan was responsible for the killing of women, children and unarmed men in the millions, in China.

Japan also wanted to drop atomic bombs on California. Just a few more months and the US would have been ground zero, west cost.

@Gregcyber,

The USA has to take responsibility, for better or worse, for the "ground zero idea." We dropped the only atomic bombs with the sole intention of killing people.

1) We did not pick Nagasaki or Hiroshima because of their military significance. The Japanese military production was far dispersed for that. We chose the two cities because they had escaped thus far with relatively little damage, giving us a better opportunity to asses damage, especially to civilian populations.

2) The dropping of the atomic bombs was either necessary or important in ending the war. Curtis LeMay had taken fire-bombing by B-29's to such a level of perfection that every city, town, and village in Japan was pretty much doomed to being burned to the ground. The fire bombings caused much more damage and were far more effective than the atomic bombs.

3) The people in Japan were under a brutal and repressive military dictatorship. They were as much, if not more in some ways, a victim of the war. To say that a child killed in Hiroshima was somehow responsible for the death of women and children in China is simply faulty logic. While the Japanese are seriously racist, that it about it. Most of their actions resulted from a serious cultural paranoia for which there was no real cure.

4) When the a-bombs were dropped, very very little was known about the effects of radiation. The Japanese were fed a constant stream of bad information while being used by American scientists as guinea pigs to map and measure radiation effects. We wouldn't do that today. But it has left the Japanese people not only terrified of radiation, but extremely distrustful of government's involvement with such.

5) There was NO Japanese nuclear program. The Japanese long considered it technically impossible and spend virtually no effort toward it. The Germans, towards the end of the war, did try to forward to the Japanese some plans, equipment, and materials to be used for experiments with a-bombs, but the sub never made it. The Germans considered getting jet engine technology to the Japanese as very much more important since they also rated it as a minute chance of success within the next 100 years. They had no plans to even experiment with nuclear energy, let alone build bombs and certainly none to drop the non-existent weapons on California. There is no way to estimate how long it would have taken them because they had yet to take even the first step by the time the war was over.

6) The Japanese government and military was a large, arrogant, racist group who had absolutely no chance of prevailing in WWII. They were not so much a "deadly war machine" as a bunch of incompetents. They went to war without even having a decent infantry rifle or sidearm. They were so arrogant that they believed that these things were not necessary since any enemy would realize that they were fighting Japanese soldiers and just surrender immediately. That worked pretty well with Chinese peasants, and generals (such as MacArthur and Smiley) who were even more arrogant and incompetent, but failed immediately when the American GI entered the scene and kicked butt to the tune of a 7200:1 kill ratio.

In 1964 I was a young intelligence analyst assigned to the 544th ARTW. Our deputy commander was LtCol Kermit Behan, the bombardier on Bock"s Car. One night I pulled CQ with him and he discussed his involvement with the second atomic bomb. Some of what he said to me personally differed a great deal from what is written:

1) He felt no guilt about dropping the bomb. He dropped bombs on Japan all the time. This was only a matter of scale and a different type of bomb and nothing more. For a bombardier, it is a great deal more impersonal than you would thin. He is trying to make all sorts of calculations and fly the airplane while searching for his IP's and other landmarks. Not a lot of time for reflection, but rather training is what kicks in, not philosophical meditation as he thought that most people seemed to think.

2) Behan was very resentful, but understanding, that the atomic bomb had ruined his military career. He was an excellent bombardier/navigator but psychologists after the war determined that he was subject to an immense burden of guilt and so reported. His career languished while his colleagues waited for him to crack up. He was shufffled from flying (which he loved) to intelligence (which he didn't particularly like.)

3) Behan thought that the a-bomb had little, if anything at all, to do with the surrender of Japan. He was a B-29 guy and had been right in the middle of watching Curtis LeMay whip the cranky and difficult B-29 into reasonable shape and had watched as LeMay's fire-bombing of Tokyo and other cities proved incredible effective and devastating. In fact, many times more devastating that the atomic bombs.

4) Behan and most military planners of the day realized that an invasion of Japan was never going to happen BEFORE the atomic bombs were dropped. It was totally necessary. a) Much of the remaining Japanese Army was trapped in China, b) we had complete air superiority over Japan and had completely blockaded the seas around Japan, c) the fire-bombing would eventually have destroyed every city, town and village, forest, and most Japanese people in them. It would have been much less expensive than trying to inflict the same damage with a-bombs. d) Behan and other B-29 crews quickly figured out that there was no third atomic bomb waiting to be dropped. In fact, they quickly and correctly figured out that bomb #3 was likely more than six months away.