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.

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