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Today is the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Estimate of those killed by the attack range from 90,000 to 140,000 persons. The bombing was followed up three days later with another atomic attack on the city of Nagasaki. Despite an attempt to remove the Emperor from the throne and continue the war the militarists the twin attacks empower a faction of the government to unconditionally surrender to the Allied Powers effectively ending the Second World War.

The loss of life in the bombings is horrific and, in many minds, looms large as a terrible act that defined the ending of the Second World War. The Hiroshima mushroom cloud is often used as a visual shorthand for technological terror.

While the idea of being subjected to atomic or nuclear bombing is indeed terrifying, I find it hard to consider these attacks to the Platonic Ideal of technological murder.

Millions were killed in the holocaust. Unlike the distant impersonal slaughter that comes from dropping a bomb at enormous altitudes, whether those bombs are conventional or atomic, the murder in the camp was done close up, looking those victims in their eyes, hearing their cries and screams and was no less a product of technology than the enormous energies released by nuclear fission.

With mass production, without the industrial revolution, the ability to murder on the scale of millions simply could not exist. Without the scientific revolution and method, the Japanese barbarous experiments on helpless civilian populations with biological warfare could not exist.

The atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities cost a lot of live, but in all likelihood saved more than they killed. Japan knew the war was lost and that continuing it would only result in more and more of their people, military and civilian, being killed. They could have accepted the unconditional surrender when it was offered and avoided both atomic attacks.