\u201cThe rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,\u201d Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, once said, \u201cbut I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki\u201d — which he labeled a war crime.<\/p>\n
In his 2011 book\u00a0Atomic Cover-Up<\/em>, Greg Mitchell says, \u201cIf Hiroshima suggests how cheap life had become in the atomic age, Nagasaki shows that it could be judged to have no value whatsoever.\u201d Mitchell notes that the US writer Dwight MacDonald cited in 1945 America\u2019s \u201cdecline to barbarism\u201d for dropping \u201chalf-understood poisons\u201d on a civilian population. The\u00a0New York Herald Tribune<\/em>\u00a0editorialized there was \u201cno satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had produced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind.\u201d<\/p>\n Mitchell reports that the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. — who experienced the firebombing of Dresden first hand and described it in\u00a0Slaughterhouse Five<\/em>\u00a0— said, \u201cThe most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.\u201d<\/p>\n On Aug. 17, 1945, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of\u00a0US News<\/em>, put it this way: \u201cLast week we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb. \u2026we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt. \u2026we\u2026did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. \u2026 Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.\u201d<\/p>\n