It seems it’s time for the annual ‘Let’s Second Guess Harry Truman!’ game. On FB, there’s a post calling on us to acknowledge that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ‘terrorism’, and that dropping the bomb was done for a political, not a military purpose. That’s an artificial separation.

War is a political act. It is done for political purposes. Military purposes ARE political purposes.

Modern total war pits one NATION against another NATION. We send soldiers out to fight and die, but nobody should be under the impression that it’s just one nation’s MILITARY against another’s. Each nation continues fighting as long as it has the means and the will to. Reducing the will to fight is as valid as reducing the means.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible. So was Dresden. So was Leningrad. So was what Japan did in China and elsewhere. More civilians died, by far, than soldiers.

This is why we stopped doing that crazy shit of total war.