This week sees the 80th anniversaries of the only two uses of nuclear weapons in war against human targets. The Hiroshima bomb will be commemorated on Wednesday. The Nagasaki bomb will be marked on Saturday.
These actions, though generally believed to have brought the Second World War to an end, remain highly controversial, not least because of the large number of non-combatant civilians who died of appalling injuries.
American military authorities prevented the publication of some pictures of the aftermath for many years.
Some of the scientists involved in developing the bomb regretted it deeply. Albert Einstein, who had urged President Franklin Roosevelt to embark on the research which led to it, later said this was ‘the one great mistake in my life’.
But whatever we think now about President Harry Truman’s decision to drop two bombs on Japan, such discoveries cannot be undiscovered.
