8/6-THANKS TO BARRY’S ADMIRATION OF HIM, THE VOICE OF DEPARTED AUTHOR LAURENS VAN DER POST, IS HEARD AGAIN IN THIS WORLD ARGUING, NOT THE MORAL ACCEPTABILITY, BUT THE MORAL NECESSITY OF USING THE A-BOMB ON JAPAN.

August 6 is the sixty-ninth anniversary of the first dropping of an atomic bombs on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  Almost every moral authority in the world has concluded it was a hideous immoral act.  Many Americans apologize and point out the Sunday sneak attack and well-known brutality of the wartime Japanese “made us do it.”  Those who do argue the moral acceptability of using the nuclear weapon against Japan usually cite the number of lives – American and Japanese military and civilian –  spared by the “quick knock-out” of Japan from the war they started.  Barry once interviewed South African author Laurence van der Post who spent the war in a Japanese concentration camp in Java.  Barry was totally captured by his reasoning and makes the case that using the nuclear bombs was not only morally acceptable, but morally necessary.  And that van der Post argument doesn’t invoke the life of one single American or Japanese soldier or one single Japanese civilian who would have been lost invading the Japanese homeland. Barry presents the van der Post argument this evening.

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