If our understanding of Hell is separation from God, this God of Peace, then war most assuredly IS Hell. Moral concerns have abounded with every conflict, but once the atomic bombs began to explode, the concerns took on a new urgency. In Switzerland, the Zurich newspaper Die Tat criticized the use of the bomb and urged the Swiss government to protest the weapon. Its potentialities for destruction were tragically illustrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever may be the extenuating circumstances, the inescapable fact is that we, a professedly Christian nation, must bear the moral responsibility for the first use of the atomic bomb.
Christians know that war is evil.
The use of the atomic bomb means that war reaches a degree of destruction which multiplies this evil beyond human concept. Those moral arguments have been with us for 55 years. There are those who look back through time and try to convince us that those two bombs were the most evil acts ever launched against humanity. They point to the pain and suffering of innocent Japanese civilians. Over against this perspective are those who look back and defend the action based on the projections that many more deaths would have occurred without the use of these powerful weapons.