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I was in town this morning for the commemoration ceremony. The address was given by a very old friend, with her mostly in tears - she visited Hiroshima last year. The bombing occurred 68 years ago. I really hope that humanity can say in 168, 268, 1068 years time that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only two cities ever to have that crime inflicted upon them. And yes it was a crime, just as all war is a crime and failure of humanity.
My mother-in-law was an infant in Duisburg when the allies were bombing the Ruhr night and day. She wasn't even born when Hitler came to power, none of her family supported Hitler or wanted war. Her grandfather risked the death penalty by listening to allied radio. Yet she sometimes spent days underground while the earth shook and when she was allowed out whole city blocks she once knew were rubble. The trauma of those events is still being felt today - it's being felt by people who were not even alive at the time. How is that not a crime?
My understanding is that after the Battle of the Phillipines, and especially after the Battle of the Sea of Japan (which was more turkey shoot than battle), Japan was a spent force. Its air force was destroyed and, as was seen in Europe, once that happens the war is over. My belief is that the bombs were not needed to make Japan surrender, nor were they dropped in vengeance. Those explosions were to show to the world in general and to the USSR in particular the might of the USA, and were the first act of the cold war. If I'm right some hundreds of thousands of people were killed to make a military/political statement.
EDIT: I hadn't seen Gary's very useful contribution when I wrote the last paragraph above. I'm still considering how that affects my position on the bombing. Perhaps it did affect Japan's surrender. However the fundamentals don't change: killing innocent people is still murder and I still think there was at least one eye on the USSR and the coming cold war.
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