If the effects of nuclear attack had not been demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is overwhelmingly likely that in the Cold War era, an American or Russian leader would have convinced himself that the use of atomic weapons could be justified. Korea in 1950 offers an obvious example, when some U.S. generals, above all MacArthur, favoured exploiting against China the advantages supposedly conferred by America’s nuclear arsenal. Such a point is irrelevant to the debate about whether the original decision in 1945 was valid, but is surely worthy of consideration more than six decades later.
