Clippings

[Secretary of War] Stimson was well aware of the enormous quantitative difference in destructive potential between nuclear and conventional bombs, but it was difficult for him to feel that there was a difference in the quality of evil between the killing of 130,000 people by old-fashioned fire bombs in Tokyo and the killing of about the same number by a nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. … The ground on which Stimson might have been able to make a moral stand was already surrendered when the fire bombing started in March. Long before that, in England and in America independently, the moral issues had been effectively prejudged when the decisions were made to build strategic bomber forces and to wage war with them against civilian populations. Hiroshima was only an afterthought.