In a radio interview after his final term in office Truman would claim he had been misled about where they were going to drop the atomic bombs. He said he was told they would be dropped on Japanese naval bases, rather than on the residential areas almost entirely filled with sleeping women and children. I think this indicates that he did in fact experience remorse for what he and many other men were responsible for doing.

Even the most cursory reading of modern military history will show that there was no good reason at all to murder all these hundred of thousands of civilians when we did. And that’s not some liberal revisionist history. It’s the assessment of scholars at places like the army war college in Carlisle. It was a repugnant and unnecessary act.