Why in World War Two were Hiroshima and Nagasaki chosen to be nuked by the USA?

As I understand it, It’s because they hadn’t been previously bombed, so the aftermath would provide a “well controlled” (in the scientific method sense) assessment of the damage that these weapons could inflict on a city.

@gorillapaws is correct.

They were industrial centers.

Nagasaki was only bombed, because there were clouds over Kitakyushu and its shipyard.

Reasonable answers but I’ve always wondered why two bombs were dropped. Wouldn’t one have been enough?

^No. The justified declarared strategy, was that two would mean the US possessed many such weapons. (Although they didn’t.)
I haven’t seen it yet, but the movie “Oppenheimer,” appears to delve into the creation of nuclear weapons. It looks great…

@flutherother After the first bomb was dropped, Japan still refused to surrender. So the second bomb was dropped.

@gorillapaws I thought I had read somewhere that they purposely didn’t bomb those two cities because they knew they were going to use the nuclear bomb on them. But if not Nagasaki was bombed only because another city was cloud covered, that would kill that theory.

^I think I heard that too.
History, is written by the winners. So….

@LifeQuestioner The flight from Saipan was very long and it was required that two different targets could be considered if the first target was obscured.
Other cities could be targeted even if military functions in those cities were little or none. The effect was to convince the Japanese that they must end the war. At that late stage of hostilities, the military manufacturing in a targeted city was of little or no consequence.