Help with history please? trying to prepare for final exam on friday?

At the time, it was believed that dropping the bombs would kill less people than the total number of soldiers that would die by the end of the war otherwise. The US should have avoided this measure because the atomic bomb was not well understood, and subsequently killed many more over time than originally projected. In cases such as these, one must consider a proportional response as well as one that will keep the event in question (in this case, Pearl Harbor and the war) from ever happening again.