> I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.
You're not the only one, but most of the people who believe like you are Americans. Outside the US the prevalent view is pretty much against those atomic bombings; had the US lost the war, the people who ordered those bombings would have been found guilty of war crimes and hanged.
My own subjective opinion is that the US needs this narrative of "but we ended up saving lives", because anything else would run contrary to their own self image of "we are always the good guys".
Consequently, alternative considerations like that the bombings were a show of force with the Soviet Union as the target audience tend to get downplayed in the US, because it's harder to think of oneself as the good guy when you killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in one country in order to put fear into the leadership of another, unrelated country.
You're not the only one, but most of the people who believe like you are Americans. Outside the US the prevalent view is pretty much against those atomic bombings; had the US lost the war, the people who ordered those bombings would have been found guilty of war crimes and hanged.
My own subjective opinion is that the US needs this narrative of "but we ended up saving lives", because anything else would run contrary to their own self image of "we are always the good guys".
Consequently, alternative considerations like that the bombings were a show of force with the Soviet Union as the target audience tend to get downplayed in the US, because it's harder to think of oneself as the good guy when you killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in one country in order to put fear into the leadership of another, unrelated country.