Despite preliminary testing in the New Mexican desert, I think it is fair to say that no one could possibly have fully understood the horror of an atomic blast -- especially a detonation over an urban area -- before it was actually done in August 1945. This undermines all anti-atomic bomb arguments that feature the barbarism and the absolute ethical horror of it.

In her Aug. 19 letter, "No amount of prudence," Yasuko Okayama wrote, "One thing is clear: Using atomic bombs is an absolute evil no matter how much prudence a country is said to exercise." I don't think it is "clear."

In hindsight it is too easy to call atomic/nuclear weapons the greatest evil and their use as the most immoral act imaginable. The easy social acceptance that this position currently enjoys in the world obscures what I think are two greater truths.

• Conventional warfare in fact is the greater evil because Hiroshima and Nagasaki pale in comparison to the destruction of Coventry, Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo by nonnuclear weapons.

• World War II in the Pacific was a war that Japan started, that Japan waged in a particularly heinous and criminal fashion, and that Japan stubbornly refused to give up long after its cause was lost. The fatal flaw of saying that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary because America could have forced a far more peaceful resolution to the conflict through blockade of the Japanese islands at that point is that it grossly under estimates the will of people to suffer for what they believe in. With little doubt, the Japanese would have fought on without the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Defeat by America is arguably the best thing to have happened to Japan in its history. Likewise, it is arguable that Japan deserved a lot more destruction than U.S. forces meted out. And let's not confuse the factual events of history by introducing innocent civilian casualties as a mitigating element. World War II was a total war and no one was "innocent." But I could be wrong.

grant piper