Tony Benn (alias the Right Honourable Anthony Wedgewood Benn, P.C.), a former British Cabinet Minister of the time, said on the BBC Radio Four service on the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima, that the attack on Hiroshima was unnecessary, that the Japanese had already agreed to surrender, and that the use of the atomic bomb was part of an American conspiracy to terrorise the rest of the world with this manifestation of its power.

Scottish poet Tom McGowran wrote the following poem on the 50th anniversary:   

Remembering Hiroshima
lines on the fiftieth anniversary
O, fortunate man:
Wrists bound, knees bent, head bowed,
Staring into the shadowed trench;
The blade is swift, the slice is sure.

Sightless, he sees what might have been.
Crushed into a basket, the wicker constrains
The drowning man's despairing, hopeful struggle,
While the clear salt water scalds his lungs.
. . . Or,
Trailed behind the boat as sharkbait,
Leaking blood to attract the sport
And excite the laughter.
Perhaps, at dusk,
Strung by his thumbs to a branch,
(His toes, even with the rocks attached,
Yet still failing to reach the ground)
He awaits the morning's bayonet drill.
His friends had had it worse. Old Joe,
Trussed with barbèd wire, mouth stopped,
Pumped through his nose with water,
Died beneath the boots that jumped and split
His distended stomach open
To their wearers' laughter.

But the destruction of the body is nothing.
The ritual is spiritual. They do it for the pain;
And, yet, better, for the agony
And for the ecstasy the agony gives them.

O, how they love their cruelty,
These little yellow men.

Thank God: he hadn't been a woman,
A pleasured nurse, gang-raped through the long night hours,
Tortured near to death,
Taken to the beach to wash
Irremediable stains
From broken body,
And machine-gunned standing in the surf.

Or, disembowelled to win a bet:
The soldier won (it was a boy);
The woman lost (the child, her life)
As God's blood dripped into the gutter.

And now, in the last few seconds of a lifetime,
Deep inside that shadowed trench
He sees his children playing in the sand,
Their mother, mourning, watching.
The blessèd blade sings its dirge:
The blood spurts, mushrooms,
Driven by the final heartbeat.

The trench is black. His head
Falls into the abyss.

The author of this poem reported that he wrote it for two reasons. First was the memory of a photograph, seen in a book published by the British Government during the war (a book of which all copies to be found were withdrawn from circulation in 1951), featuring a row of Australian prisoners in the process of decapitation. He reflected at the time that perhaps they were the lucky ones, and in later years, as reports of officially sanctioned sadism entered the public domain, he learned they had indeed suffered a much less painful death than many thousands of others who were tortured by the Japanese cruelly, and who referred to this cruelty as Bushido.