Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the Guardian (8-5-05):

[Geoffrey Wheatcroft's most recent book is The Strange Death of Tory England.]

... Some American admirals believed then and ever after that surrender was a matter of time, and not much of it, and a strong suspicion persists of an ulterior motive by Washington, wanting to end the war with Japan quickly before Soviet Russia joined in.

In any case, that argument begs the profoundest questions of ends and means. In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, few people addressed them, or grasped the enormity of what had been done. Two who did were very remarkable men writing from entirely disparate perspectives: Dwight Macdonald, an American radical atheist, and Monsignor Ronald Knox, a conservative English Catholic.

Once an active Trotskyist, Macdonald was evolving from revolutionary socialism to pacifist anarchism, as reflected in Politics, the brilliant magazine he published from 1944 to 1949. His response to the news from Hiroshima was unequivocal. "This atrocious action places 'us', the defenders of civilisation, on a moral level with 'them', the beasts of Maidanek. And 'we', the American people, are just as much and as little responsible for this horror as 'they', the German people."

After the two cities were destroyed, Knox was about to propose a public declaration that the weapon would not be used again, when he heard the news of the Japanese surrender. Instead he sat down and wrote God and the Atom, an astonishing book, neglected at the time and since, but as important for sceptics as for Christians.

An outrage had been committed in human and divine terms, Knox thought. Hiroshima was an assault on faith, because the splitting of the atom itself meant "an indeterminate element in the heart of things"; on hope, because "the possibilities of evil are increased by an increase in the possibilities of destruction"; and on charity, because - this answers those who still defend the bombing of Hiroshima - "men fighting for a good case have taken, at one particular moment of decision, the easier, not the nobler path".

That was finely put, by both writers, but there was more to it: should Hiroshima really be seen as uniquely wicked or cataclysmic? However horrific, it may be that it was not so very different in degree, or even in kind, from what had gone before.

In 1939 the British government had entered the war with high protestations of virtue. Neville Chamberlain told parliament: "Whatever be the lengths to which others may go, His Majesty's government will never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children, and on other civilians for the purposes of mere terrorism." By the end of the war, the British had resorted to enough "mere terrorism" to destroy most of the cities of Germany and many of their inhabitants, 100,000 of them children.

This grew out of the exigencies of war and was one of those changes that take place without anyone's really reflecting, or even noticing. And yet it was an immense development. If you had told any Englishman a hundred years ago -not only a pacifist but an army officer - that before the century was out warfare would largely consist of killing civilians, he would have thought you were insane.

But that was what happened. ...