Kamm defends terrorism?

LENIN'S TOMB: Horrorism on a grander scale.

Lenin responds to Oliver Kamm's defence of the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - 'Terrible, but not a crime':

This is an argument for terrorism. It isn't only that, of course. I only point out that it is because terrorism is one of the few inexcusable crimes in bourgeois ideology. Suicide attacks in Israeli and American cities, recall, are said to communicate a genocidal intent, and are without extenuation unforgiveable assaults on civil society. Well, any argument that suggests that it is reasonable to use nuclear strikes and dispose of over 200,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to intimidate a government into surrendering is an argument for terrorism at the very least. To that, I will add that it is despicable and outrageous and implicitly racist, since it applies a standard to an Asiatic society that I submit would not be applied to a largely Anglo-Saxon apartheid society...

Whatever the historiographical arguments, the conclusion that it was necessary and right to use nuclear weapons against civilian population centres requires such a conspicuous contraction of historical possibility that it can only be apologetic. It cannot be the result of a rational engagement with the evidence. I would only add to that the author is an advocate of continued nuclear armament on the grounds that Western states are civilised (while Iran is not): chew on that for a while.