Madam, - Michael Keary (August 26th) asks why should "a single American soldier lose his life to protect those of the Japanese citizens who so maliciously and aggressively began the war in the first place?", and answers his own question saying, "Is not the American president's first duty to protect the lives of each and every one of his people?".
Yes, president Truman had a duty to protect his people.
He also had a duty to the hundreds of thousands of innocents he slaughtered and who still pay the price today for America's use of Japan as an atomic bomb test-site.
If Mr Keary's reasoning is accepted, then all those innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan who have lost their lives to American and British action since the beginning of the "War on Terror" were asking for it by not deposing Saddam Hussein themselves.
But we know this cannot be correct since the Americans notoriously did not support the uprising they had encouraged, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and Kurds in the wake of that failed attempt.
We cannot continue to make the same mistakes over and over, refusing to see the pattern. - Yours, etc,
LIDIA MATASSA, Dublin 8.
Madam, - I'm pleased that Desmond Fitzgerald (August 25th) has graciously acknowledged the right of free speech for everyone; however, it shouldn't be to the use of the atomic bomb in the second World War that we owe our gratitude for this. The dropping of the bombs was the proximate event that lead to the Japanese surrender.
However, the war had already been militarily won at that stage and this was fully realised by the Japanese high command at the time. While we may never know Truman's personal motives for using the bombs, we do know that there was never a "hard decision" taken to use them.
Once they were completed, the act of deploying the bombs was always taken for granted and there was never a debate within the US government as to the strategic merits of their use.
The gargantuan Manhattan project had consumed such vast resources that to not deploy the bombs, whatever the prevailing state of the conflict, was simply seen as illogical.
There was therefore an inherent aversion to exploring other options for ending the war, with the peace feelers put out by the Japanese in July 1945 being disregarded.
The dropping of the bombs should be seen as a tragic act, whatever the context of their use.
Nobody will argue that the United States did not fight on the side of justice in the war. However this should not exempt them from condemnation for acts of cruelty in war.
Gen Curtis LeMay, the head of the US bombing offensive against Japan, himself said once that were he on the losing side, he would be rightly tried as a war criminal for what he had done.
We should not dismiss the deaths of half a million people as "semantics", as Mr Fitzgerald calls it, nor should we indulge in his kind of diabolical calculus where it's argued that these deaths or more would probably have only occurred elsewhere otherwise.
To excuse the dropping of the atomic bombs is to excuse the use of their kind again, and surely that cannot be allowed. - Yours, etc,
PAUL DIX, Blackrock, Co Dublin