In August 1945, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire was stationed on the Pacific island of Tinian as an official British observer of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two decades later, he wrote for The Spectator about his experience. For him, the attack on the two cities represented ‘the ‘destruction of the impotent by the invincible’. Nevertheless, he argued that the Allies had been ‘undeniably’ right to carry out the bombings since the attack ended ‘the most terrible war’ and prevented an extremely bloody invasion of Japan.

By 1965, the emphasis in public discussion had shifted from ‘the suffering that the world was spared’ to the dead – the 120,000 estimated to have been killed instantly by the blasts, and the many more who died later from burns, radiation sickn

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