Kevin Rudd visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on his first prime ministerial visit to Japan this month, the first serving Western leader to do so.
His critics were outraged. Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt subscribed to the theory that 'to visit is to encourage the offensive notion that the Japanese were victims of a western crime, and not of their own insane militarism'.
The time has come to admit the Japanese were the victims of both. The US response to Japan's insane militarism was, to quote the Second Vatican Council, 'a crime against God and man himself'.
The US objective in dropping the bomb was to end the war without needing to stage a bloody invasion of a nation whose leadership was implacably opposed to unconditional surrender. Without the bomb, war was expected to last another year. One million Allied troops were being moved into place for the invasion of Japan.
President Truman's military advice was that a land invasion of Japan 'would cost at a minimum a quarter of a million American casualties'. After the war, he observed that 'a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are'.
While some scientists urged that the bomb not be used until the enemy be first warned of its existence and prospective use, other scientists asked, 'Are not the men of the fighting forces ... who are risking their lives for the nation, entitled to the weapons which have been designed?'
They further asked, 'Are we to go on shedding American blood when we have available means to a steady victory? No! If we can save even a handful of American lives, then let us use this weapon — now!'
On the day he authorised the military to go ahead with preparations to use the bomb, Truman wrote in his diary: 'I have told the Sec of War, Mr Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children ... The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives.'
After the dropping of the second bomb, the Emperor decided to 'bear the unbearable' and surrender.
Three years later, at a meeting of the National Security Council to discuss the custody of the atomic bomb, Truman insisted that it remain under civilian control.
'I don't think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to,' he said. 'It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had ... [T]his isn't a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.'
I daresay most Australians still think President Truman did right in authorising the dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities, regardless of whether such bombs are classed as military weapons, and regardless of whether dropping them entailed an immoral attack on the rights of the innocent with a direct intent to do them injury.
They thought, and still do, that the obliteration of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally excused because this, and only this, helped to end the war, without the need for hundreds of thousands of Allied Forces having to face annihilation invading Japan with its citizenry blindingly committed to the Emperor's honour.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church declared: 'Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.' There is no other church moral teaching which has been so solemnly declared.
Many democratic leaders, if placed in Truman's shoes, would, in good conscience and with a heavy heart, invoke an exception and do exactly the same again, no matter what any church leader said.
The American philosopher Michael Walzer has been a long time critic of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Just and Unjust Wars he states 'Our purpose, then, was not to avert a 'butchery' that someone else was threatening, but one that we were threatening, and had already begun to carry out.'
He rightly distinguishes Japan from Germany and argues that there was no need to demand unconditional surrender. '[A]ll that was morally required was that they be defeated, not that they be conquered and totally overthrown.' Walzer claims, 'In the summer of 1945, the victorious Americans owed the Japanese people an experiment in negotiation.'
In the essay 'Terrorism and Just War', from his recent book of essays Thinking Politically, he says 'the American use of nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945 ... was surely an act of terrorism; innocent men and women were killed in order to spread fear across a nation and force the surrender of its government.
'And this action went along with a demand for unconditional surrender, which is one of the forms that tyranny takes in wartime ... There can't be any doubt that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki implied ... a radical devaluation of Japanese lives and a generalised threat to the Japanese people.'
Walzer is not one of those thinkers who yields to popular sentiment in recasting the balance between principle and pragmatism. Rudd's visit to Hiroshima is an uncomfortable call for the nation to examine its conscience on war and obliteration bombing.
This is an edited extract from Frank Brennan's Annual Cardinal Newman Address.
Frank Brennan SJ AO is a professor of law in the Institute of Legal Studies at the Australian Catholic University and Professorial Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Law, University of NSW.