Apologising for past events

I'm vehemently anti nuclear weapons but I'm pretty sure that when they dropped those two bombs in 1945 the USA had no real idea what the impact on a civilian population would be. It was a mix between an experiment using two different types of atomic bombs against cities and a means to more quickly end the war.

The Americans by 1945 were bombing and strafing at will over Japan. They had established forward air bases and could have carpet bombed any Japanese city at almost any time. They could have slowly destroyed cities one by one over the course of years and killed millions of Japanese civilians in the process. Even after that they could have invaded and still faced millions of fanatical Japanese defenders. I hate that the weapons were ever used but it is easy to see why the Americans determined that using them was the best way to end the war.

The full horror of the atomic attacks was only brought home to the American public by John Hersey's journalism in 1946. If anybody ever needs to understand what happens when a city is attacked with an atomic weapon then they need to read Hersey's work on Hiroshima. It is powerfully written and it really brings to life the pain and terror of being caught in an atomic attack. It's all free to read and it's available here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

Individuals shouldn't apologise for past actions by other individuals.

A representative of an organisation (such as the state or, for example, a police authority) should apologise on behalf of that organisation for its past actions, but only if those actions were wrong at the time they were committed. We should not use a modern viewpoint when deciding whether past actions were wrong.

Whilst I totally see where you're coming from, I do think that deliberately bombing civilians no matter on what scale is wrong. There's nothing wrong in nations apologising for their part, even though their former adversaries haven't. What Obama has done is truly a wonderful thing, but I do wish he would have apologised.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, watch Lesson#5 from the Oscar winning documentary "The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. McNamara"

It's the one about the firebombing of Japanese cities during WW2 which Robert S. McNamara was involved in, but it's really about proportionality in warfare.

It's only 3 minutes long, but very powerful stuff -