Should we have used the bomb?

I am certainly not suggesting that thousands of Japanese civilians deserved to die, but I believe that in the long run the use of the atomic bomb was not a mistake. I think the use of the bomb was justified—it ended the war. It has been criticized because the bomb was dropped on civilians without warning. Some argue that the bomb should have been shown to the Japanese, that they simply needed to understand the power of the bomb, and they would surrender. These people are wrong. The Japanese hung in, even when being firebombed by the US (which killed more Japanese than the two bombs combined), and attacked by Britain, and China, there is no way that the Japanese would have surrendered after a simple demonstration—they didn’t surrender after it was used! We mention the firebombing today, but it doesn’t have nearly the same weight as the nukes. This is of course because a nuke is one bomb, as opposed to many. Either way though, the end is the same, people become obliterated on a large scale—if those attacks are justifiable, in my opinion, so was the use of the bomb.