Nuclear Ethics

My girlfriend came to me fuming one day about a debate she'd had in her history class. The topic of discussion had been whether or not it was ethical to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost everyone in her class said that absolutely it was. "This was war," they told her, "It would never end if you were soft." Their thought was that American soldiers would have died in droves if we hadn't forced the Japanese into submission with the bombs. Her thought was that those soldiers joined the military knowing that they might die, while the Japanese civilians simply had the unfortunate distinction of being Japanese.
After September eleventh, I heard a few people say that we should just nuke the whole Middle East and be done with it. That always made me angry, but as a sixth grader unused to having opinions of my own, I couldn't articulate why. Now I think it's because I'm a civilian. My government it at war, some of my friends are in the military, but I don't have anything to do with it. In the fraction of a second before I was vaporized, I'd be rather offended that another country was taking out their anger on me when I haven't personally done anything to them.
I read somewhere that fighting people simply have no imagination; they can't stop and imagine what their fist is going to do to someone's face, and therefore they can't put themselves in that person's place and figure they probably wouldn't like that too much. Perhaps ethics is simply an excess of imagination. We don't do bad things to others because we imagine it wouldn't be fun if they did it to us. We need creative people to be in charge of nuclear weapons. Maybe then they wouldn't be used.