This essay, on the morality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 9 August 2020, under the headline ‘Don’t let the victors define morality – Hiroshima was always indefensible’. ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945. LeMay was no bleeding-heart liberal. The US air force chief of staff who […]

Categories: International, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: a bomb, chester nimitz, curtis lemay, douglas macarthur, eisenhower, harry truman, hiroshima, japan, john dower, manhattan project, martin harwit, nagasaki, nuclear weapons, racism, robert mcnamara, second world war, war crimes, william leahy