if we had merely continued our already scheduled fire bombings of 140 Japanese cities—in which from 100,000 to 300,000 civilians were already being killed in each attack—that the continued conventional bombing of Japan would have cost more than 14 million Japanese civilian dead! It took months for this issue to fade from the public eye. Finally, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote a New York Times op-ed article in which he said the decision to drop the atomic bomb “was the most tragic decision in our history.” He then said that he had “problems in seeing how a responsible President
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