Yeah, despite all our bloviating about the risks of other nations having nuclear weapons, we are still the only country that used them.... twice.
But we can be trusted with nuclear weapons but no one else can be trusted. After all, they may use them.
I take issue with the USA being judged for using nuclear weapons in Japan, especially with 70+ years of hindsight.
Most historians agree that doing so shortened the war by two years. Additionally, in just the initial planned invasion of the mainland at Kyushu, it was estimated that 50K USA solders would have died plus several times that of Japanese solders and civilians. Beyond that initial invasion, there would have been many more casualties, of both solders and civilians, in the effort to take over Japan and destroy their spirit.
(I say destroy their spirit because they would have never surrendered since their religion prevented them from doing so.)
It would have been a long drawn out horrible battle if Hirohito had not decided to surrender, and the nuclear bombs are the only reason he did.
In comparison to the millions of people that would have died in a conquest, 80K and 45K people died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectfully. That adds up to 125K, which is the same amount of civilians that died in the bombing of Tokyo using conventual bombs. No one talks about this though.
Now one could argue that Japan was a beaten country by that point and we over estimated how many would have actually died in an invasion. With this same logic, one could also say Japan would have given up after our troops made it to the mainland, and our use of nuclear bombs was morally wrong. This logic does not hold though.
On the ground in Japan, most of the citizens still felt they were winning the war and would have continued to fight regardless of an invasion. On top of that, after conquering the island in the first two years, it could have take an additional 10 years of occupation to stamp out the last remnants of warriors in hiding and kill the spirit.
This is backed up by the fact that it took so long for Japan to formally surrender after saying they would. The reason for this was because a large group of citizens, backed by a small military force, tried to stage a coup and continue the fight. Whether or not the Japanese government could actually rely on the population to support a surrender was up in the air at first.
War is hell; no way around it. But these weapons were not used in a war of conquest, but to finish an aggressive advisory that invaded countries and committed atrocities worse then the Nazis, much worse.
This is much different then NK, who is using nuclear weapons as a way to get the USA to back out from supporting SK so they can, once again, invade and try to conquer the South.
PS., on an existentialist level, the use of nuclear bombs I consider to be immoral. It is just those that argue against our use of them on Japan do so by implying that there were other options that would have resulted in a lower lost of life. This is just not true and what annoys me about this topic.