Hiroshima

On the 60th anniversary of the fateful explosion over Hiroshima, the insufferable Praful Bidwai calls America's decision The world's worst terrorist act.

We could not disagree more. Our views are more consonant with the Wall Street Journal:

.. when President Truman gave the go-ahead to deploy Fat Man and Little Boy, what those big bombs chiefly represented was salvation: salvation for young Lt. Fussell and all the GIs; salvation for the tens of thousands of Allied POWs the Japanese intended to execute in the event of an invasion; salvation for the grotesquely used Korean "comfort women"; salvation for millions of Asians enslaved by the Japanese.

Not least, and despite the terrible irony, the bombings were salvation for Japan, since they prompted Emperor Hirohito to intervene with his bitterly divided government to end the war, thus laying the groundwork for America's beneficent occupation and the country's subsequent prosperity. To understand the roots of modern Japan's pacifist mentality, so at variance with its old warrior culture, one need only visit Hiroshima's peace park.

And finally this balancing note:

In the hands of democracies, nuclear weapons safeguard liberty; in the hands of dictatorships, they safeguard despotism ... the threat nuclear weapons pose today is probably greater than ever before ... It's because nuclear know-how and technology have fallen into the hands of men such as A.Q. Khan and Kim Jong Il, and they, in turn, are but one degree of separation away from the jihadists who may someday detonate a bomb in Times or Trafalgar Square.