How can we celebrate the 80 th anniversary of VJ Day, knowing that victory was bought by the dropping of atomic bombs ? For pacifists, the answer is clear: we can’t. Since any deliberate killing is wrong, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 was wrong two-hundred thousand times over.

But that clear answer raises further questions whose answers aren’t so obvious. If killing is always wrong, then the United States (and Britain) should never have gone to war against Imperial Japan and therefore its ally, Hitler’s Germany. What, then, would have stopped the triumph of brutally racist Japanese imperialism in Asia and massively murderous Nazism in Europe? The noble witness of innocent non-violence?

Unfortunately, the historical evidence is that the kind of people w

See Full Page