SSG Miguel Ángel Rivas - They were warned that it would happen, and both cities were highly militarized. Those London sites were neither.

The V-2 had a 1 ton high explosive warhead that could take out a city block. The atomic bombs "Little Boy" (uranium gun weapon) and "Fat Man" (implosion weapon) had an explosive yield of about 21,000 tons of TNT and could destroy entire cities. The atomic bombs also released enormously deadly heat and radiation effects that the V-2's warhead did not. Japanese people were dying from radiation poisoning and the effects of massive burns for years after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I suggest that the scale of the effects and the unleashing of radiation weapons were the main issues with the atomic bombs, even more so with their more lethal cousins, thermonuclear weapons, i.e., the hydrogen bombs.

MAJ Hugh Blanchard - They also ended the war, so what is your point? Would you have preferred WWII to continue for several more years? Japan wasn't going to surrender, as long as they could keep fighting. The London strikes were random, because the V2 was crude. You are also forgetting the bombing raids from Germany on London.

Michael, I'm not criticizing the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. I mentioned those factors as probable reasons that the use of our atomic weapons was more controversial than was the German use of V-2 rockets against British and Dutch civilians. Please don't misinterpret my post, I have always agreed with the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. The last few island invasions concluding in the invasion of Okinawa clearly demonstrated that the Japanese military would not surrender, and that their civilians would choose suicide rather than capitulation. The costs of invading the home islands of Japan would have been unbearable; planners estimated that as many as seven U.S. divisions would have been lost within the first few days, and that the overall costs would be over a million U.S. dead, and several million Japanese, including women and children. Brutal as they were, the use of atomic weapons was a much more preferable option than Operation Coronet would have been.

Good info. Thanks for sharing.