"Saving Lives"?

The following is an excerpt about the dropping of the nuclear bombs by the US at the close of WWII on two Japanese cities:

Still other respected writers, such as Rufus Miles Jr. and Stanford University's Barton Bernstein, have effectively refuted Truman's oft-repeated argument about the number of American lives saved by the bomb. Citing the most recently de-classified materials, Bernstein could not find a worst-case prediction of lives lost higher than 46,000-even if an invasion had been mounted, which, as noted, was deemed highly unlikely by July 1945. Most estimates went no higher than 20,000 combat deaths. "The myth of the 500,000 American lives saved", Bernstein concludes, "thus seems to have no bases in fact."
The Nation, May 10, 1993, pg. 641

It has been a strange thing for me, as a man who grew up in the US during a period when US involvement in WWII was universally praised in American culture, to realize that I sense something deeply wrong with the decision of the US war leadership, including the US president, to completely destroy two Japanese cities and all their inhabitants as a means to end the war. If the point, as I have always understood it to be, was to demonstrate the power we now wielded, why not drop the bomb in a uninhabited, but visible location. Of course the reason is we only had 2 bombs. Why not drop one in such a fashion and then warn them to surrender or else the next one would drop on a strategic site? Why, after largely waging a war largely focused on military and industrial targets, did we all the sudden think that destroying massive amounts of civilian property was a just way to wage war?

I wonder if the answer lies in the fact that the human heart has an almost unstoppable desire to use power when it knows it can get away with it. Boys who find a gun in a secluded location will be overwhelmingly tempted to want to fire it. Girls who know they have the beauty to gain a guys attention will often succumb to the  temptation to do so. Nations with unchallenged power will rarely not exercise it.

I wonder how much the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is such an example. The US “had” to respond to 911 in such a manner because it could and it knew it would not be significantly challenged in doing so, at least in term so of military firepower. The possession of such unchallenged power is perhaps a curse as much as a blessing. It seems to make use of it inevitable, whether or not such a policy is reasonable or wise.