This new warfare had psychological as well as purely physical aspects of battle. The will of the Japanese people themselves had to be annihilated by snuffing out the lives of sufficient hundreds of thousands of them. The old weapons were simply not sufficient anymore for the effect. Ironically, this most savage warfare is conceived and carried out by the most rational of scientists, senior military men and politicians who coat their various agendas in the belief that somehow they have been knighted by a "good war." The Japanese had started it after all, and by God, we were going to finish it. Vietnam was not the first place that the U.S. had to burn a village or a town to save its people from an "ism." It was instead in Hiroshima. This frightful paradigm of the "good war" candy coats our consciences when we recoil at the tens of thousands of deaths at Hiroshima.

The great value of the work that has been wrought by Hersey and Sloan lay in individualizing the reader experience. Like in the cases of the survivors of the death camps in Germany, the stories and horrible lessons of war are delivered most poignantly by relating the stories of normal people in abnormally...

By looking at the experiences of six normal people, we see the horror through their eyes as it developed and unfolded in the first of two (and only two thankfully) a-bomb drops. Only when we see the horror of the victims through the eyes of desperate medical professionals like doctors Fuji and Sasaki can we mourn for the fatally burned and irradiated victims. When we read the account written partly by a former pilot like Mr. Sloan, we can fully fathom the horror of the term "good war." We are almost inevitably left with the impression that it is without doubt history's biggest oxymoron.
Unfortunately, turning on the television news and seeing the U.S. military with its bases in some 100 countries overseas, it seems we have not learned the futility of empire. The Japanese learned this the hard way. It is only in an exercise of great faith (given the historical precedent of Hiroshima and the continuance of our pursuit of empire) that we will not have to learn it in such a horrifying fashion as well.

References

Hersey, John and Sam Sloan. Hiroshima. Bronx, NY: Ishi Press International, 2010.