askchapo

(and then they fire bombed more civilians per day than they nuclear bomb civilians in civilian cities per day ... which is hard to comprehend how it's even possible).

The first two nukes were very low yield compared to later designs, and Japanese architecture heavily favored wood structures with paper walls because that was a) more earthquake-resistant and b) easier to clear and rebuild after an earthquake, making their cities even more vulnerable to uncontrolled fires from firebombing than German cities were (and firebombing campaigns on those were also extremely deadly).

The main distinction between nuclear and conventional bombs early on was how with nuclear weapons it meant one single plane getting through air defenses could do the work of a hundred conventionally armed planes against soft targets and could hit hardened targets harder than a thousand conventionally armed planes: they made effective defense impossible as they could be sent en masse at high altitude and their accuracy and attrition rate wouldn't matter as long as a few got their payloads onto a city or in the vicinity of a base. You could wipe out 99% of incoming planes and it would still leave you worse off than if you'd let WWII bomber flights operate completely unopposed (and we can see how deadly those were when they were opposed and prevented from operating at maximum effectiveness through AA fire and interceptors that inflicted extremely heavy losses on them).

And then of course higher-yield nuclear bombs and the development of long range missile systems made the problem exponentially worse.