This is an argument by equivocation. There’s still a “World Trade Center” in NYC but it’s not the one that fell in 2001. Nor does saying it’s so restore the dead to life.

> An invasion of Japan would have cost an order of magnitude more lives. It was the 4th year of an extremely bitter conflict that Japan started. There were no real good options on the table. Only "shit" and "extremely shit".

This is a legal defense strategy that was never heard before an international tribunal because, notably, one was never held.

I don’t have the energy to skim through the Nuremberg transcripts right now, but I also believe “it was the best of bad options” was a legal defense attempted there, with mixed results.

EDIT: I’m being rate limited, so I can’t answer any more questions today. But suffice it to say that in Truman’s place I would have extended the relative protection that Kyoto received to every large Japanese city and contained the air force to bombing primarily military and industrial targets, with the understanding that precision bombing was not as advanced in 1940s as it is today.

Here is a more in depth analysis of options other than nuclear bombardment (though it only discusses nukes, which is not the primary locus of my criticism). https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-altern...

Also I did not say they were “erased from the map,” that was a different commenter.