You don't end a war by being absolutely disgusting either. I mean this is WORSE then complete disgust. You don't attack defenseless people. Not only that, you don't attack their future generations, that is just ridiculously disgusting.
All is not fair in anything. There is limits everywhere.
Sun Tzu isn't the ideal human being.
I'm glad you feel this way, and I respect the peaceful outlook. But peace is given a chance once in a generation. That happened in the Age of Enlightenment, only a few decades before the Great Wars, and it happened in the Sixties as a backlash to the bomb. The atomic age came about because it was a time of extremes. Look at Hitler; he was elected by popular vote. And Stalin had just overthrown one of the largest land empires in history, ending the age when Russia could be depended upon to act a certain way. We can't fathom world war on that level. World output was split between many sources, and the possibilities for new technology were extremely volatile. Nowadays war is always a political and military superpower against a political and military dwarf. Or dwarfs fighting amongst themselves. The scale of conflict is different, and much more humane. World War II happened before the conveniences and niceties of the final Geneva Conventions. There weren't laws of warfare.
Besides, if the war had dragged on, maybe Japan would have got the bomb and used it on us. Or some other devastating weapon of mass destruction. You can never know to what lengths and extremes an opponent will go to in order to win. Better to end the dispute swiftly than to give a chance to improbable feats.
It was WW2. Attacking civilians wasn't exactly uncommon...
Exactly. The Battle of Britain. Coventry, Dresden. Pearl Harbor. Nanking. Not to mention racial profiling and discrimination on every side. Reference Geneva Conventions once again.