to balance a potential horror against an actual horror, when the facts of the actual horror are so horrific. I believe this accounts for a lot of the guilt and criticism about the dropping of the bomb, although certainly not all. Some people, of course, are merely out to criticize anything the US does, and don't mind carnage as long as it's not the US who is doing the killing. But some are well-meaning but misguided idealists motivated by humanitarian concerns, and flinch at doing the "brutal calculus of war" because it would mean supporting a certain amount of brutality, and they find any brutality intolerable. Many of us have no moral objection whatsoever with Truman nuking Japan-- of course it ended the war quickly and saved untold thousands of US soldiers' lives, and (as the Weekly cites a historian arguing) of course it saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Asian civilians suffering under brutal Japanese occupation. The objection many of us have-- and I have yet to read an adequate explanation for this-- is why Truman selected two targets that were primarily civilian in nature. Why not nuke a Japanese military base? Why not nuke a Japanse naval seaport? Why incinerate tens of thousands of civilians instead? All these utilitarian arguments about lives saved by the bomb don't explain away those lives that still seem so unnecessarily taken. Without equipment and supplies, no army can sustain itself. Equipment and supplies are made in factories by workers and