I think the main reason we should NOT have dropped the bomb was that we had NO fucking idea how crazy it would be or what effects it would have on people, let alone for how many decades. Once we landed there and got to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you know what the U.S. soldiers had to do? They had to chase down half-dead Japanese with cameras and stop them from filming the devastation. We didn't want a wave of Japanese documentaries and news footage to show the rest of the world precisely how bad it was. In fact, we tried to destroy most of that footage as we censored their media for years.
Luckily... some of that footage was lost before it could be destroyed, and it was rediscovered after 30 or 40 years. So now we actually have access to on-the-ground footage just a few days after the explosions.
And then the radiation poisoning created a new untouchable class of citizens, the hibakusha. They're basically modern day lepers. Everybody's afraid of them because we know nothing about radiation poisoning, and most people assume it's contagious and shun these people.
There are even 165 people known as "nijuu hibakusha" because they got hit by both nukes.
And of course there are the 20,000 Koreans who were in Hiroshima at the time... about 14% of the total death toll there. Whoops!
