Cub Driver wrote:

From a bit of persistent Googling, it appears that all four cities were
relatively untouched by previous bombing raids which would allow the true

I'd rather see a citation in a book, with sources I can check!

"Downfall," by Richard B. Frank, or "War’s End: An Eyewitness Account of
America’s Last Atomic Mission" by Maj Gen Charles W. Sweeney, USAF, Retired
(He flew the Great Artiste on the Hiroshima mission, as well as Bock's Car
against Kokura = Nagasaki), has details. One of the two, I forget which,
says that Niigata was always considered the least favorite target of the four,
as it was considerably further away from the Marianas than the others. The
cities were set aside from firebomb attacks so that damage would be easy to
assess afterwards, both from the air and later, on the ground.

Guy