Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

My wife did her (pharmacy) residency at a hospital in West Virginia, which is both incredibly poor, exploited heavily for coal mining (until the recent fracking boom surge in natural gas killed it), and very white. She definitely spent a lot of her time treating black lung and other mining diseases that didn't involve mining for uranium.

Mining exploits the land, it exploits the people who do it, and our civilization is built on it and absolutely requires enormous quantities of it. I don't have a larger point, just that I try to live with it.

The Manhattan Project was done to end a war killing tens of thousands of people a day, which I think can defend some grim tradeoffs.

I won't claim all workers were well treated, but many scientists were also killed and injured in this learning process.

I believe a parallel debate among historians is whether mass Japanese civilian suicides near battle zones were under Japanese military orders or were merely voluntary. You can be sure the Allied invasion of the home islands would have been desirable for such coerced self killing -- which the Allies tried to prevent -- if it had been the mission to kill as many Japanese people as possible.

What is AFAIK not debated is that Japanese who did surrender, instead of heading for the suicide cliffs in places like Okinawa (I don't know about Saipan), were often murdered from a distance by the Japanese soldiers who wanted everyone to head for the suicide cliffs. It possibly deterred other Japanese who were thinking of surrender. Unfortunately I think that your justified indignation actually overestimates human righteousness and justification, both theirs and ours and our own future descendants'. I think justification is needed and justice/hope is too but it won't come from the likes of us.

For most of the war, the primary concern of the Manhattan Project was to counter Nazi Germany's attempt to build something similar, which had started beforehand. I don't know whether the US handled the bomb responsibly, but I know that the Nazis definitely wouldn't have. Given that history, as a Jew I find it almost offensive to deny the virtue of a mission to keep Hitler from having nuclear weapons unchecked.

Even once Germany surrendered, the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did. There were various ways the US probably could have caused fewer civilian casualties; but they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day.