"The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America too," Hermann Hagedorn, playwright and, famously, biographer of Teddy Roosevelt, wrote. "It fell on no city, no munition plants, no docks. It erased no church, vaporized no public buildings, reduced no man to his atomic elements. But it fell, it fell.”

It fell 64 years ago today, in fact.  And the shock waves still reverberate. 

The debate as to whether we should have dropped the bomb at all actually says a lot about us.  We hear echoes of it in the debate on torture in our own time.  Whether a line can be traced from one to the other is not merely an academic question. 

But the fact of debate should hearten us some.  The history textbooks most of us read in high school may have touched upon the question of the necessity of dropping the bomb, but left the common impression that the war would have dragged on, with more loss of life, had we not done it.  What else can we believe?

But it wasn't that cut and dry for Eisenhower, who had been Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and recalled in his 1963 memoir A Mandate for Change:

In [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude.

Ike was certainly not the only one who thought this was a bad ending to "the good war".  This anecdote suggests that at the very highest echelons of power there was dissent. 

But in a flash it was done.  And as Lady Macbeth laments, "what's done cannot be undone." 

64 years later, the yūrei still haunt us. And we still ask, "What, can the devil speak true?"