It seems to me that people are pointing at one atrocity to justify another as if one cancelled out the other, when in fact it only goes to prove that they are no different - only one side won (or had bigger and better clubs) - seems important to some people.
The Japanese regime was a brutal militaristic one - no argument on that one.
Does that justify the incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians and condemning generations to possible deformities, genetic defects and slow, agonizing deaths? not in my book.
The inventor of the bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer described its use as "a tragic mistake on an already defeated enemy"
A pilot who took part in the raid, Claude Robert Eatherly, became consumed by guilt, first involving himself in speaking to pacifist groups and eventually attempted suicide.
Rather than learning from the use, necessary or otherwise, of these obscene weapons, the world entered into an arms race, placing my generation, and the generation that followed under a massive shadow - I remember it being declared that the nuclear clock had now reached one minute to midnight at one stage - I was still in my twenties.
By the mid-sixties there was talk of "nuking" Vietamese peasants "back to the Stone Age"
Weapons of mass destruction have moved on from being "defensive" and are now commodities to be sold by "those who value freedom" to those who suppress that freedom - Israel attempted to assist apartheid South Africa to become a nuclear threat.
It seems we have learned nothing in the intervening years.
I've just got back from a few days of watching films in Dublin - the first of those was a remarkable documentary on a West Cork doctor, Aiden McCarthy, who became a medical officer in the British army during the war.
Having served at Dunkirk and having earned the George Cross for saving lives, he volunteered to serve in Asia, was captured by the Japanese at Singapore and was a prisoner for four years as a P.O.W.
He ended up being shipped to Nagasaki, where he and some of his fellow prisoners narrowly escaped death when the bomb was dropped.
Despite his appalling experiences at the hands of the Japanese, and in spite of the fact that their captors had decided to execute them all, McCarthy and others survived the blast - thanks largely to the mass grave they had been forced to dig for themselves.
He found himself the senior officer in the camp and the camp commandant presented him with his military sword as a gesture of gratitude for having saved the lives of the surviving troops at the camp when the newly-released Australians attempted to tear them apart.
That, to me, seems a breathtaking example of humanity that is sadly lacking in discussions of war and "our enemies".
Jim Carroll