Alex WellersteinVerified account

This teacher and his students were at the Noboricho Elementary School, located 0.7 mi / 1.1 km from ground zero. The smiles are so human, so genuine, so unpolitical. These are the main victims of war. (To acknowledge this is neither an anti-US, nor a pro-Japanese statement.)

This isn't meant to be a naive statement. "War is hell." I know the causes of WWII, and the reasons why the atomic bombs were seen as an expedient and necessary action by those who were involved in dropping them. I do not absolve the Japanese militarists for their role in this.

In principle, if you think the bombings were necessary, you should still be able to accommodate that belief without ignoring any of the above. In reality, I find most defenders want to look the other way when it comes to the consequences. To do so is to take an incomplete view.

Even Truman, the endless defender of the bombings, seemed to harbor deep unhappiness about their collateral damage. In Dec. 1945 he referred to the bomb as "the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings" — he didn't whitewash it.