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...thereby punctuating, with mushroom-shaped exclamation points, the end of a world conflict notable not only for its immense scale and destruc­tiveness but also for the extent to which the major com­batants had come to regard massive attacks on civilian populations as a permissible means of waging war. 
The nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although they were hardly the first instances of wholesale devastation of cities in World War 2, did demonstrate a terrible new level of technological ef­ficien­cy in the implemen­tation of the "strategic bombing" approach to warfare which that conflict had spawned.  The two nuclear bombings also provided the underpin­nings of a post-war U.S. security policy based on nuclear deterrence -- that is, on the idea that the United States might well be willing to use against others the same awesome capacity for nuclear destruc­tion that it had used against Japan in August of 1945.