Barton J. Bernstein

Fifty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America should ask itself why Japanese civilians became targets during World War II. Recently declassified documents suggest that Tokyo probably would have surrendered without the bombings or an Allied invasion of Japan. In the moral climate of 1945, however, there were few dissenters. "When you have to deal with a beast," Truman wrote, "you have to treat him as a beast."