I read your recent piece on the Hiroshima bombing and must say, that while your peaceful sentiments are laudable, you have the luxury of looking at it from the perspective of someone whose existence is not threatened by war. A more rounded view might be gained by more research on the actual fighting and nature of the war, and of the Japanese culture at the time. Every day that fighting continued, 10-12,000 people per day were being slaughtered by the Japanese in China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines. The credo of the Japanese Army at the time was "Loot all, burn all, kill all." Japan today is not the same country, nor has it the same cultural values that it did at the before the war ended.

A few books that might give a more rounded view of the war are Goodbye Darkness, A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester, The Flyboys, A True Story of Courage by James Bradley, My Helmet for a Pillow by Robert Lecke. I’m sure you have read Hiroshima by John Hersey.

The point of this is, it is easy to judge history retrospectively, with the certainty of the outcome, but it is an entirely different proposition to be facing your imminent demise or ask others to do so when you have the means to bring a horrific bloodbath to a quick conclusion. To judge the use of atomic weapons while ignoring the historical circumstances and prevailing cultural attitudes in Japan AND the US at the time is historically myopic. It would be more helpful to understand what drove the decision to unleash these weapons if one were to account for the unbridled barbarism unprovoked, unleashed by the Japanese throughout the Pacific, on all of its neighbors. I’m sure that if you were a woman living in Nanking during the Japanese occupation your view of the Japanese would be different from yours today. If you were lucky to survive, which would be less than certain.

Despite assertions to the contrary, Japan was not close to military collapse at the end of summer of ’45. Our experience during the Pacific campaign was that the Japanese became more determined to sacrifice for their emperor as the war came closer to their homeland.

My perspective is from someone who was stationed in Okinawa, love the Japanese people, and am profoundly grateful that I was not born 40 years earlier.