I understand the sentiment, but civilians die in every war and sometimes in large numbers - particularly when weapons of immense destructive power exist but precision targeting does not (which was the case in WW2).

Every combatant is/was in that same boat and it is not relevant at all to whether or not it was appropriate to apologize for two specific attacks. As I said in my first post, the fire raids were more deadly than the atomic strikes and yet nobody feels the need to ask for or give an apology for those events. The apology is/was for having the gall to invent a weapon superior than any that had ever existed and then use it on your enemy and I have a HUGE problem with that point of view.

Again, as I said earlier, those attacks saved untold Japanese lives. Look at what happened to the civilian population of Okinawa (which unlike the other Pacific islands we invaded, is actually part of Japan). The Japanese estimate is that 100,000 died. The US estimate is 142,000 killed or wounded. Depending on which estimate you accept, that's between 1/3 to 1/2 of the entire civilian population. Further, many of those were suicides to avoid capture by US forces. Kyushu - the target of the first landings - would have likely seen civilian deaths and injuries of close to a million and another million in US & Japanese military casualties.

There wasn't a realistic option C. You either drop the bombs and hope the shock value ends the war or you invade Japan. Thankfully, the bombs worked.

There was absolutely NO reason to apologize for choosing to employ a weapon that killed a lot of people in order to save a lot more.