“my grandfather was one of those saved by our use of the bomb as he was drafted near the end of the war.”
You cannot know this although it is certainly has powerful meaning for you.

“How were you going to scare people that had already proven time and again that they were willing to participate in human wave attacks against dug in positions and be slaughtered wholesale for little if no gain?”
You do not have to scare all the Japanese people, you have to convince the governing elite who have nothing to do with human wave attacks. More correctly, you would say who do you dissuade a military elite with such disdain for the lives of their own troops. Given that this indoctrination was primarily super nationalism combined with state Shinto, really have to convince Hirohito who was considered a direct descendent of Amaterasu the sun goddess. Hirohito was already asking his ministers to draft a surrender plan in June of 1945. We have no idea how that would have played out.

“That was considered and if you had read anything about the decision to use the bomb, you would know why it was rejected. First b/c the test could have very well failed which would have been a propaganda coup for the Japs and second, if we had made a test bomb we would have consumed very scarce fissile material that would have taken months to replace. Not to mention that the use of the bomb on Hiroshima didn’t get them to surrender so what makes you think a test would have?”
I know the reasons that the US military chose to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I just disagree this was the only decision and I wonder whether it was the right decision. Your casual dismissal of alternates and unquestioned acceptance of the sound reasoning from that time ignores the fact that it is not 1945. The article you posted showed an array of options that were considered and rejected. The US military decided to use the bombs on military targets, but this was not the preferred option of the scientists involved with the project. There was a dissent of opinions about this most of which are not considered important because of what actually happened. On your last point, the bombing of Nagasaki happened three days after Hiroshima. I have always thought they should have let the Japanese stew a bit more. Russia declared war on Japan on August 9, 1945. We will never know whether this alone would have convinced the Japanese to surrender, but the threat of Soviet invasion was certainly a reason for the surrender.

“Sorry I don’t keep a bibliography of all of the books I’ve read to provide references to folks like you that don’t seem to have a basic grasp of the subject. It is always much easy to second guess folks and say well they should have done this or that. I’ve been able to find the link below which should allow you to learn something, though I usually am loath to trust internet sources. Please don’t forget to post that I was correct.”
You have regurgitated the considered opinion of the US military. Your intellectual mistake is to assume that correctly relating their thoughts ends the argument. You are certainly correct in transcribing the reasons, just as you aggressively push away any attempt to question whether it was the best possible thing to do.
“I don’t think at the time the decision to bomb was morally ambiguous as it clearly was meant to and did in fact save American lives. Of course it is easy to wring your hands after the fact and say it wasn’t necessary or that the decision was morally ambiguous after all the facts were in. Clearly, the US would have gone on fire-bombing Japan and killing scores that way which I can hardly say is any more or less moral than nuking them.”
It is morally ambiguous in that there were other options which did not involve destroying a city on the table and everyone involved in the decision struggled with it. The decision makers at the time did wring their hands, read the article at the end of the link you provided (by the way Louis Morton is a respected scholar). Also considering Russia’s involvement in the decision to surrender you cannot jump to saying the atomic bombs avoided fire bombings.
Let me make something totally clear. There is a branch of historiography on the decision to use the bomb which argues that it was primarily for management of post-war Russian relations. I reject this line of scholarship, which has simply not stood the test of time. I have not argued here that the decision to use the bomb was anything other than an attempt to end the war with Japan.

http://www.history.army.mil/books/70-7_23.htm

I’m not going to say the issue is morally unambiguous. One can make arguments versus counterfactuals that the atom bombs were on the whole a net positive. But that sure as hell doesn’t mean you go around telling people (much less your allies) to “shut up and stop whining” or that it was “deserved” or whatever other jingoistic bullshit you guys are trying to peddle.

What would the American response be if say a serving head of state (Oh I dunno Sarkozy) came to Pearl Harbor and said “Good thing you guys got bombed here in ‘41, imagine all the other lives that would’ve been lost if you hadn’t entered the war!”

…yeah, that’s what I thought.