Hiroshima and Nagasaki are only the most visible, most memorable, and therefore most culturally significant of the bomb attacks on civilian targets that characterised the Second World War. (Zac Alstin, Eureka Street)

Both Axis and Allied powers took part in these almost unprecedented assaults on civilian targets. Both sides in that conflict defied the ethics and customs of warfare: that any use of force must distinguish between enemy combatants and the civilian/non-combatant population.

It is a weakness of human nature that we forgive in our friends what we despise in our enemies. How else could anyone offer in-principle support for the indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants?

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If not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we could excuse the crimes committed by the Allied powers as ‘necessary’. But the atomic bombs can not be hidden, and we are forced into strenuous moral contortions in order to deny the undeniable. If Germany or Japan had achieved a nuclear weapon and launched it on an Allied city, our condemnation would be unrelenting.

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Myths of wartime good and evil (Eureka Street)

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