80 years since Hiroshima, can the world's luck hold?

As was his wont on long flights, Col. Paul Tibbets, piloting a B-29, puff ed on his pipe as, 80 years ago Wednesday, he transported humanity from one geopolitical era to another. His radio operator was watching for an "abort" signal if Japan surrendered before the B-29 reached its target.

Historian Antony Beevor, writing in Foreign Affairs, noted that Hiroshima and Nagasaki effectively ended "the first modern conflict in which far more civilians were killed than combatants." Which suggests that technological virtuosity advanced as morality regressed.

But, Beevor wrote, Japan's military government was "prepared to sacrifice millions of Japanese civilians by forcing them to resist an Allied invasion with only bamboo spears and explosives strapped to their bodies. By 1944, some 400,000 civi