What is your take on the A-bomb droppings on Japan?

[al Roumi]

That depends on how you determine responsibility. The mass-mobilization required for modern warfare often results in a total war economy. In many major wars, a very large number of civilians are employed in making weapons and otherwise supplying the military with resources. This makes them legitimate targets as far as most nations are concerned.

Before assigning blame, it would be only fair to at least examine how much choice the average inhabitant of Nagasaki, Hiroshima or Tokyo (as you rightly go on to say) had in their contribution to the war effort.

An interesting modern reflection of your logic is Al-Qaida's assertion that US and allied civilians deserve 9/11 and other atrocities as they have voted in their governments and supposedly have more say in the decisions made by them!

One of the things that has always bothered me about Hiroshima/Nagasaki is that they are treated as special circumstances that are somehow worse than conventional bombings. The March '45 conventional bombing of Tokyo killed more people than the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, yet there is far more outrage directed against the Nagasaki event than the Tokyo event. It doesn't make sense to me.

I agree with this, but I guess it's the ghastly novelty and scale of what the 2 bombs did, compared to the tons of (conventional) munitions dropped on e.g. Dresden and Tokyo.