Moses's Reviews > Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath

How do you write an objective book about the nuclear bomb? It’s impossible. Paul Ham doesn’t even try, but that is not a disadvantage. Ham presents a quiet but ultimately insuperable argument for the moral outrage of the bomb. Merely by providing the actual history of the bomb, he deals with the most common arguments in favor of dropping it, namely that it saved American and Japanese lives who would have died in the imminent invasion. (There was no approved or imminent invasion. The bomb was Plan A.)

There are certainly theoretical scenarios in which the bomb could have “saved” lives, but Ham points to the moral impossibility of justifying mindless slaughter with mindless slaughter of smaller magnitude.

Americans have not come to grips with our sins in wartime, as the Germans and Japanese have been forced by defeat to do. Ham’s book is a welcome,e corrective.