We of quieter times lament the dropping of two atomic bombs. But those who lived though the nightmare of Okinawa — far more killed than on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined — were thankful that Okinawa was not to be soon repeated on a scale 20 times worse on the Japanese mainland.

Most Americans of that late summer 1945 did not censure their politicians for the use of such horrific bombs to stop the carnage of the Pacific War. More often they were perplexed that we went ahead with Okinawa when the weapons to prevent such a traditional bloodbath were on the immediate horizon.

I'd rather wipe out an entire nation of terrorists and those who support them directly or implicitly (by doing nothing) than lose one American soldier's life.

Btw, so-called nations led by despots have no right to existence and, in fact, should be wiped out within seconds of coming into being because they pose a potential threat to American citizens just as surely as a murderer on the loose in our own country does.

Meanwhile, China, North Korea, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Libya and others need to be on our immediate raze list -- nonobjectivist public opinion be fucking damned!

But using nukes against civilian populations there is both futile and immoral. Futile, because the leaders of these regimes don't give a damn about the lives of their citizens; the terrorists are too scattered to be destroyed by such attacks; and the repercussions would be to unravel all international support for fighting these bastards. Immoral, because it would amount to deliberately targeting the innocent rather than the state leaders and the terrorists.

ARI is thinking of war in the context of war, and that no longer applies.