Sir – As more and more of your paper seems to be devoted to advertising, it is good to see three pages devoted to readers’ letters.
Inevitably, they are mainly concerned with local issues and day-to-day problems. But in amongst them, there is one from John Tanner that broadens the horizon.
Though in the report on page two he tackled the problem of a “zero-emission zone” in the city centre, his letter on page 84 referred to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, asking whether the horrors of the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war justified the hideous suffering and death inflicted on the civilians in those two towns.
Surely nothing can ever justify mass murder. So even the horror of the Nazi concentration camps does not justify the fire-bombing of German cities, culminating in Dresden. And so long as we have nuclear weapons we are guilty of mass murder – being willing to perpetrate it. The only way to rid ourselves of that guilt is disarmament.
Irene Gill
Oxford
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