The term “Weapons of Mass Destruction” goes back at least as far as 1937, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Around that time, fire bombing runs in Hamburg and Tokyo killed tens of thousands of civilians in a single night.
But American Ingenuity took it further. With the bombing of Hiroshima, we annihilated 66,000 people instantly. Another 75,000 would die from radiation injury by the end of the year. Three days later, at Nagasaki, we killed 40,000 more people instantly, and again, many others died more slowly.
Perhaps it was all about saving American lives, as (Democratic) President Harry Truman always claimed. Or perhaps, as Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet, claimed in 1946, the first atomic bomb was “an unnecessary experiment…[the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.”