The Second World War was the Good War from the Allied perspective, but no nation escaped the vicious conflict with its standards of moral conduct unaltered. The biggest change was probably the breakdown of the prewar consensus that cities and civilians are not legitimate military targets. Germany's destruction of Rotterdam and Japan's violation of Nanking were repaid by the Allied firebombings of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo. And after these eradications, it must have seemed a small step to President Harry Truman and his advisers to use atomic firestarters over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing some 200,000 Japanese civilians.

Many contemporary critics, however, blanched at the new level of horror the atomic bombs visited on noncombatants, including Time magazine founder Henry Luce, the Federal Council of Churches, Albert Einstein-even Dwight D. Eisenhower. Why, then, did the draft script for the 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, which presented the full historical debate over Truman's decision, provoke a firestorm of indignation hot enough to cause the original exhibit's cancellation?