President Truman and the big decision

Let’s hear it for Harry S (for nothing) Truman

and the Atom Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Many of Mr Truman’s outspoken critics should carefully examine their own, and their spouse’s, family histories to make sure they are not guilty of verbally committing a sort of backdated suicide. Dreaming up their own baffled existence. Wishing for their own premature euthanasia, in fact.

Because the expected massive Allied casualties that Mr Truman averted by using the A-Bomb would have meant very many fewer weddings a year or two later. This would have resulted in hundreds of thousands fewer offspring in the years that followed — children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren — to ever come into existence at all, let alone grow up to righteously debate the non-existent ethics of the issue.

Do you understand? It’s your very existence that was at stake.

Look, if your grandfather had been one of the thousands and thousands of Americans and Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen who would have been killed by a fanatic and frantic Japanese military (that actually believed their Emperor was a God) if President Harry S Truman had not ordered the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Pacific war, then you yourself would not have been born. And thus you would be unable today to prate stupid intonations of how wicked your forbears were.

And, of course, there would have been many more Japanese killed. Also there would be a lot fewer consumers around to spend millions of dollars and pounds on buying post-war Japanese cameras, televisions, videotape-recorders and automobiles.