Hiroshima and the Purple Hearts

It's the anniversary of the nuclear bomb dropping on Hiroshima, and there's plenty of after-the-fact speculation that dropping the nuke and its sibling on Nagasaki a couple days later was an unforgivable sin, possibly even a war crime. For what it's worth -- given the genuinely evil behavior of Imperial Japan and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, I always felt Truman made the right choice given the information he had at the time (nowadays, of course, it would be very bad to drop a nuke because we know about radioactive contamination and other aftereffects which Truman did not). 

Here's a semi-related trivia fact: almost every authentic US military Purple Heart medal currently in existence is an antique, at least 73 years old at minimum.

When Army generals ignorant of the nuclear bomb were planning the American invasion of mainland Japan, they estimated 500,000 initial US casualties, and pre-made a supply of medals sufficient to cover it. But then the two bombs dropped and the invasion never happened, so every Purple Heart awarded between 1945 and around 2000 (when the stockpile finally started running low) came from that original cache.

There's a very good argument to be made that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved far more lives than they cost, American and Japanese both.