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Using the bombs definitely cost lives immediately. Well over a hundred thousand people died because of them, and that wasn't a decision that Truman took lightly. It had nothing to do about him being a weak new President. It had everything to do with <b>saving lives</b>. I guarantee you that if you could go back and ask him, he would say that making the decision to drop the bombs was the hardest decision he ever made.
Fortunately, those who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not die in vain - we managed to avoid a full-scale invasion of Japan, which would have cost hundreds of thousands of US lives and probably upwards of one million Japanese.
The fact of the matter is, we <b>had</b> to go all the way with that war. There was no half-assing it. Japan, against their better judgement, attacked the United States and, with that one fateful attack, engaged us in a fight that could not be over until one side had very definitively won. We couldn't just fight them for a while and then go "okay, we give up, good games fellas. See you next war." That would should the world that we were weak and it would <b>invite more attacks</b>. That is not a risk that Roosevelt, nor Truman, nor the American public were ready to take. The war had to be decisively won.
Furthermore, the Japanese were warned, very explicitly, that we had a weapon of mass destruction (I forget the exact wording, but I'm sure you could locate it pretty easily) and we were going to use it if they didn't surrender. We <b>gave them a chance</b>, which is more than I can say about the folks who died at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese, in their arrogance and pride, discarded our warnings. They did not heed our very explicit warnings. And only then, when there really was <b>no other choice</b>, was the first bomb dropped. After that, they still refused to surrender and, three days later, the second was detonated. The Japanese emperor and his decision makers chose the fate of those civilians - not Truman.
As sad as it may be, <b>the bombs saved lives</b>.
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